A surprise email:
“In a few hours I will board an El Al flight to Germany, a trip that should last no more than two days. Why am I telling you about this? Because you are part of this story.”
Twenty-three years ago, I wrote in these pages about the unusual Passover Seder night at the Jerusalem home of Bruria Adler and Natan Shmuel, whom everyone calls Sammy. In addition to a Haggadah, which tells the Passover story, each family member received a personalized facsimile of a German Reich passport.
The original passport belonged to Sammy’s father, Leo Adler, who fled Germany. It contains transit visas granted for Ansbach (Bavaria), Mir (then part of Poland), Vilna, Kobe (Japan), Shanghai (China), Aktyubinsk (part of Soviet Kazakhstan), Gorki, Karaganda (Soviet Kazakhstan), Odessa, Vienna, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Basel (Switzerland).
Leo Adler fled Germany to China with the Mir Yeshiva and was separated from his pregnant wife when their escape route suddenly closed. With the help of a distant relative in (my home state) Connecticut, seven years after they parted Leo Adler was reunited with his wife and met his son.
What a story! That was Part One.
SEVEN YEARS after that column appeared in the Magazine, a London-based researcher from the Commission for Looted Art in Europe contacted me.
She was working with a librarian in Nuremberg, who saw the name Natan Adler neatly inscribed in two volumes of Nazi-confiscated books in his library. Her Internet search for a descendant turned up my Magazine column. As she wrote: “After this, I got a bit lucky with a Google search and found Barbara Sofer’s article. I wrote to Ms. Sofer and asked if she could put me in touch with the Adlers.”
Thus, on the eve of Hanukkah 2009, two big books belonging to Grandfather Nathan, whom Sammy never met but whose name he bears, arrived at his Jerusalem home. One was a Torah commentary authored by Grandfather Nathan. The second was a book of German history, ironically something the Adlers know a lot about.
When the Nazis forced Natan and Mirjam Adler to leave their family home in Ansbach and move to a single room in Nuremberg, Nathan insisted on bringing his treasure: 10 crates of books. He was a devoted teacher of Jewish studies; and because he met all the state qualifications, he also was an active member of the Bavarian Teachers Union. Indeed, he continued teaching until two weeks before Hanukkah 1941, when he and Mirjam were sent to their deaths in the Riga-Jungferhof camp in Latvia. I wrote about the emotional arrival of the books on Hanukkah 2009.
That was Part Two.
Stolperstein Saga Part Three
PART THREE. On November 25, 2024, I received the email message cited above from Sammy Adler to say that the Magazine had helped solve another conundrum.
Jerusalemite Yaakov Ben-Ze’ev, a tour guide with a passion for history, was in the process of arranging for the placement of stolpersteine for his own grandparents Jacob and Bertha Weinschenk in Nuremberg.
A stolperstein (plural by adding an “e”) is translated as “stumbling stone” or “stumbling block.” Each is a 10-centimeter concrete cube covered by a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of a victim of Nazi persecution.
German artist Gunter Demnig initiated this project in 1992 to commemorate victims at the last place they resided, studied or worked, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. Most of the more than 100,000 stumbling blocks you see embedded in European sidewalks commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but there are also stones placed for Sinti and Romani people, the disabled Germans murdered by their brethren, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and gays, and others.
Ben-Ze’ev inquired if anyone else was coming from Israel to the ceremony of installing the stones and learned that there was one set of stones that would be dedicated for Nathan and Mirjam Adler without anyone from the family present. Usually the families ask for the stolpersteine; the Ben-Ze’evs, too, had requested the stolpersteine for their grandparents. But in the case of Nathan and Mirjam Adler, the stones would be dedicated by the Teachers Union of Bavaria, an organization that once included Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher on its membership list. That caught the attention of Ben-Ze’ev, who decided to try to find out if there were surviving Adler relatives.
In his search, Ben-Ze’ev stumbled upon my December 2009 column about the return of the Adler books. From there, it was easy to contact an initially skeptical Sammy Adler, a prominent gastroenterologist, who lives in the Jerusalem neighborhood abutting his own.
Said Adler, “I told him that my grandfather was indeed Nathan Adler, but quickly mentioned that neither Nathan nor Adler is an uncommon name. Yaakov Ben-Ze’ev told me he was planning to place stolpersteine in honor of his grandparents and was contacted by the Bavarian Teachers Union because they planned to place a stolperstein in honor of Nathan Adler.”
After more questioning, learning that the soon-to-be-honored Nathan Adler was born in Burgpreppach (Germany), Sammy was convinced that, in his words, “it was a perfect match.”
How was someone honoring his grandparents?
It turns out that a professor named Max Liedtke, now 93, has become the historian of the archives of the Bavarian Teacher Union.
Liedtke, who is Catholic and recalls his family’s fears that they would become the next target of the Nazis, was “appalled and ashamed” that the teachers’ union – which included educators of all religions and espoused egalitarian values – had done nothing while their colleagues were dragged away and murdered.
At Prof. Liedtke’s insistence, the Bavarian Teachers Union would place stolpersteine in Nathan Adler’s and Mirjam’s names at Essenweinstrasse 7, near the site of their destroyed synagogue.
Thanks to Ben-Ze’ev, Sammy Adler received an invitation to the ceremony for his grandparents.
Should he go?
He was uncertain.
“Underlying my ambivalence was my feeling that my grandfather would be angry with me,” Sammy told me. “I’d never met my grandfather, but everything I knew about him was that he was a man of great integrity. He could have left Germany by tweaking his personal history about owning property in Germany, but he refused to tell even a white lie. The society he had been such a part of was totally lacking in integrity, and here was his grandson going to a ceremony there.”
Nonetheless, Sammy was grateful for the efforts of Prof. Liedtke, who had even written a biography of his grandfather.
Despite his many personal and professional trips, Adler, 76, had never been to Nuremberg.
The ceremony was scheduled for November 27 – the exact date that the Nazis had broken into the Adler apartment and arrested them.
Sammy decided to go, to make this a two-day trip, and to travel alone.
AS HE landed in Germany, he thought back on his family’s German history.
His grandfather’s brother, Great-Uncle Joseph, fell fighting for the Fatherland in World War I. Great-Uncle David was a prisoner of war from 1917 to 1919. Later, the same uncle was arrested by the Gestapo for killing a Christian child to bake matzah. The baker near his grandparents’ home in Ansbach refused to sell bread to his grandparents. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents were murdered by the Nazis.
On the day of the ceremony, the temperature was 10 degrees Celsius but sunny. A hundred teachers and students who had studied the life of Nathan Adler were gathered near the site of the old synagogue. Afterward, Sammy would meet with them and answer their probing questions. His German was rusty from disuse but fluent.
The mayor was there. Neat holes had been dug in the German soil to place the stumbling stones.
Sammy held the two stones with his grandparents’ names. They were weightier than he expected. The polished brass plate covering them shone in the winter sunlight, Nathan Adler. Mirjam Adler.
Sammy’s heart was pounding. An artisan bent down to place the stones in the cold ground. But as he worked, Sammy motioned to the artisan to hand him the trowel. Sammy’s bum knee prevented him from kneeling on one leg, so he knelt down as he smoothed the dirt around his grandparents’ stolpersteine.
Then he, and Ben-Ze’ev, whose grandparents’ stones were coincidentally nearby, recited Kaddish, the Jewish memorial prayer, in unison.
“I felt as if I was burying my grandfather,” Sammy says as we drink lemon tea with his wife, Bruria, at their kitchen table in Jerusalem.
Bruria knows the details, of course, and they have had a chance to share the experience with his family. On the Shabbat after he returned, the whole family gathered to toast the latest of their 12 grandchildren to be inducted in the Israel Defense Forces. A modern Maccabee.
And this week, in the Adler living room, the family will have more time to reflect on their personal history. They will pour the olive oil and light the handcrafted Hanukkah menorah made by Uncle Josef Adler, named for Great-Uncle Joseph who fell in World War I and himself was murdered in Auschwitz.
They will sing the blessing, one over the light and one of miracles past and present. Then they will sing “Maoz Tzur,” a history of Jewish struggles, composed more than a millennium ago in Germany.
Like the stolpersteine, their hanukkiah is crafted in brass. The burning oil will illuminate the tooled inscription: the Hebrew words hanukkat hamizbe’ah, “the dedication of the holy altar in Jerusalem.”
That is where their generations thankfully now live.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.