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First Jewish Service in Germany Since the War Started


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Check out this interview and story. It is the recording of the first Jewish Service in Germany since the war started.

Here is a picture of the event.

 

 

and the article link is

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/nyregion/18cantor.html?hp

 

 

By PAUL VITELLO

Like many veterans, Max Fuchs did not talk much about what he did in the

war. His children knew he landed at Omaha Beach. Sometimes, they were

allowed to feel the shrapnel still lodged in his chest.

 

And once, he had told them, he sang as the cantor in a Jewish prayer service

on the battlefield.

 

On Oct. 29, 1944, at the edge of a fierce fight for control of the city of

Aachen, Germany, a correspondent for NBC radio introduced the modest Sabbath

service like this:

 

"We bring you now a special broadcast of historic significance: The first

Jewish religious service broadcast from Germany since the advent of Hitler."

 

Mr. Fuchs, now 87 and living on the Upper West Side, was 22 that day at

Aachen.

 

"I was just as much scared as anyone else," he said in an interview in his

Manhattan apartment. "But since I was the only one who could do it, I tried

my best."

 

Well-known in its time, the battlefield service became lost in obscurity,

where it might have remained except for an archivist's chance find and then,

fast forward, unlikely fame on YouTube - where the 1944 service has drawn

310,000 hits - for Mr. Fuchs.

 

His grandchildren have been beside themselves with pride, relatives say, and

the rabbi at Congregation Ramath Orah on West 110th Street, where Mr. Fuchs

and his wife worship, is insisting that he sing at services on Saturday,

which is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year - though Mr. Fuchs says his voice

is not what it used to be.

 

His performance on that 1944 broadcast, heard throughout the United States

and later in Germany, however, brought a special poignancy to the 10-minute

open-air service - partly because of his well-trained, stately voice, partly

because a few seconds before he began the traditional "Yigdal" hymn, and for

the three minutes it took to finish it, the crack of artillery shells

exploding nearby could be heard clearly in the background.

 

A private first class in the First Infantry Division, Mr. Fuchs volunteered

to sing that day because there was no cantor available. In fact, Mr. Fuchs

had been studying to become a cantor, when the war broke out. But he had

left his studies and was drafted, and never considered the chaplaincy.

 

His parents emigrated from Poland in 1934, when he was 12. Some of his

aunts, uncles and cousins who remained were killed after the German invasion

in 1939, he said in the interview. He wanted to fight the Nazis.

 

For 20 years afterward, Mr. Fuchs said, he suffered recurring nightmares

about the war. He tried not to think about it too much.

 

He married Naomi Groob, they had five children, he worked in the diamond

district and served as a cantor at the Bayside Jewish Center in Queens.

 

When his children were growing up, there was a photograph on the wall of

their living room in Bayside, showing him with a prayer shawl over his Army

uniform, singing while a radio reporter held a microphone in front of him.

 

Of the picture, "He would say, 'Yeah, that was when I did the service. They

recorded it. It was on the radio,' " recalled his daughter, Ester R. Fuchs,

now a professor of public affairs and political science at Columbia.

 

But that was all he said. And deferring to his reticence, his wife never

said more.

 

It was half a century before Mr. Fuchs's children, born after the war, would

know more than their father's incomplete and almost shrouded version of the

event.

 

In 2000, Professor Fuchs read a newspaper interview about the historic

"Aachen service" with a former NBC radio reporter, James Cassidy. She began

to put two and two together.

 

"Is that what you were talking about?" she asked her father.

 

"Yeah, like I said, it was on the radio," Mr. Fuchs relied.

 

If the stories he told were sketchy, his emotions unexposed, it was because

there was too much, he said, sitting at a table with his wife and daughter.

"On the beach, the corpses every couple of feet. Guys I knew, their feet

blown off. Their arms. It was not a pretty picture."

 

As a Jew, and as a man with a web of intimate childhood connections to

cousins and other relatives in Poland who were gassed and murdered, "there

was a lot of anger, too."

 

He remembered singing and looking over the assembled soldiers in that open

field and thinking there was not a single one of them at that service who

had not lost family to the Nazis.

 

Yet even then, while all of them understood and felt deeply the import of

the service they were holding, "There wasn't much talking going on. We were

in a war."

 

The American Jewish Committee had helped make the event possible, locating

Sidney Lefkowitz, a chaplain to several hundred Jewish soldiers in the First

Infantry Division, and arranging to have his service broadcast that day.

 

But even it had lost the institutional memory of the Aachen service.

 

Charlotte Bonelli, the organization's chief archivist, did not know anything

about it. She was researching the history of the organization's radio

division when she found a reference to it in 2004, and began to try to

recover it.

 

Neither the committee nor NBC had the recording. Eventually she found it at

the Library of Congress and commissioned a short documentary about it, which

was presented at the group's annual meeting in 2005.

 

As an afterthought, she posted it on YouTube.

 

David Harris, the American Jewish Committee's executive director, said its

Web master began noticing "some traffic" beginning in early 2006. "There

were 1,000 hits, then 3,000, then it was in a lull for a while and all of a

sudden it was hundreds of thousands."

 

Max Fuchs's name, however, was not mentioned on the original YouTube

recording. He never asked the photographers at the scene to take his name.

 

It was only recently, when another of Mr. Fuchs's daughters, Hana Fuchs, saw

the service on the Internet and contacted the American Jewish Committee,

that he received credit on the Web as the impressive voice behind the hymns.

 

In the interview the other day, Mr. Fuchs was asked how he selected the two

hymns he sang in that service, "Ein Keloheinu" and "Yigdal," both of which

affirm divine provenance and the anticipation of redemption in eternity.

 

They were familiar hymns, he said, and all the men would know the words.

 

But there was another criterion, he added: There was a war going on.

 

"They didn't take too long," he said.

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Cobrahistorian

Thanks very much for posting this. Great story. I'm wondering if my Grandfather got to participate in the service.

 

Beautiful Tallis too. I'd love to find an original.

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Beautiful Tallis too. I'd love to find an original.

 

Great observation.

Here is a WWII tallis worn by a Christian chaplain when he would assist with the Jewish Soldiers in his unit. He signed a card saying so.

He was Chaplain Dale Small. I have the rest of his items too.

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