The B'nai B'rith magazine · 1927-06-01 · 9 (6.1927) · p. Seite 376

B'NAI B'RITH MAGAZINE the big banking houses are Jewish names . . . the Main flows on and Jewish life flows on . . . many fathoms deep is the Jewish life ... it is a Frankfurter who writes "Power," the story of the Frankfurt Jew Suss . . . and the Main flows on . . . and the ghetto has gone . . . and there is anti- Semitism . . . and deep, deep runs Jewish life . . . and here is assimilation and there is Jewish culture and learning . . . the Main flows on. . . . Let us look at this Holy City a little more closely. Fifteenth century here, twentieth there. Here is the Breuer synagogue. Breuer is dead. And now there is no leader to take his place. Perhaps an anecdote may help to envisage Frankfurt Jewry—a Frankfurter in London told it to me. Dr. Breuer's son was taking his little boy for a walk on a Saturday. They passed the Liberal Temple. "What is that building, daddy?" "That is a Temple, sonny." "Why don't we pray there, daddy?" "Because they do not worship God, sonny." A little later they came to the semi- Orthodox Synagogue. "What is that building, daddy?" "That is a synagogue, sonny." "Why don't we pray there, daddy? Don't they worship God?" "Yes, sonny, they worship God, but they don't worship Grandpa." A little later they cam^i to the Breuer Synagogue. "Why don't we worship there, daddy?" "We do, sonny." "Do they worship God?" "No, sonny, but they worship Grandpa." The Breuer building is remarkable for its expressiveness. It seems to have envisaged in stone the Breuer creed. It is solid; not all the winds of heaven could shake it. It is a rich, fit home for kings and there is a romantic air about it, and the architect was a Christian. When I saw him last, Breuer was an old man and his patriarchal beard swept from his patriarchal face with a patriarchal majesty, and his congregants—multitudinous as the stars of heaven—envisage such a face as his when they picture to themselves the law-giver Moses. He was the embodiment of Jewish dogma and his was a scheme of life as complete, as watertight as that of the Roman Catholic Church. For him doubt did not exist. He seemed to say: "I know what is the true practice of Judaism; I know what are true Jews." Breuerism is not a religion; it is a life. Just as the Shulhan Aruch lays down rules for your well-being from the time before you are born to the time long after you are dead, so Breuerism marks out the lines of your Jewish life with certainty and efficiency. Therefore, although I have named the Breuer Synagogue first, that is not by any means the sole expression of ultra-Orthodoxy in Frankfurt. There is a school where education is combined with Judaism. The Frankfurtian air blows in through the windows the reverberating periods of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the dry-asdust definitions of old Euclid, the pagan history of Germany, the religious story of the Jews. Here, there is inculcated a Frankfurt Judaism, one and indivisible. You cannot say of a girl or a boy who has been to school that he is a Jew of Frankfurt nor that he is a Frankfurter of the Jewish persuasion. He is a Jewish Frankfurter with a Frankfurt Judaism. Were he not a Jew he would not be the Frankfurter he is. Were he not a Frankfurter, he would not be the Jew he is. . . . If these Jews have their own school which supplies Jewish food for the mind, what wonder if they have their own butchers who supply Jewish food for the body? It were a sin indeed if a Breuerite were to eat of the meat killed by an excellent shochet of the rival group of the not-so-Orthodox. Perish the thought. It takes a Breuerite to know all the minutiae of Kashruth; how can you trust another man even though he be a Jew and Frankfurter? These people form a closed corporation. They are what they are. No one can approach them in sanctity, no one is so likely to enter heaven as they. Politically, they are good Germans, good Frankfurters. They are not Jewish-nationalists. Heaven forfend that any one of them should leave his Holy City to go to the Holy Land. They are one with the Liberal wing in this. The Liberals will have nothing to do with Palestine—for Palestine has nothing to do with them. Judaism is simply and solely a religion. - The Breuerites will have nothing to do with Palestine because Palestine is God's business and not theirs. If He want, in His good time He will take whomsoever He will back to the land of the fathers. But it is understood that that time is somewhere in the dim distant future. I shall not easily forget the sight that greeted me the first time I went to their synagogue on a Saturday. The immense building was filled with a crowd the size of which I had never seen elsewhere save on the Day of Atonement. Nor was the congregation made up of foreigners or old men. All ages were present. Boys—shoals of them. Young men. Middle-aged men. Old men. Methuselahs. The men were well dressed. Everyone wore a top-hat, silkily shining. It is a law. of the Medes and Persians part of the halacha lemoshe misinai that no married man should enter the Breuerian portals without his highlypolished hat. (And there are some who leave their hats in synagogue in case it rains, for religious members of this Beth-El will not carry umbrellas on Saturdays.) The ladies—well, they are there in hundreds. But fraulein is not to be seen. She is hidden behind a cage upstairs. It is more fitting, more becoming, more Orthodox. . . . After service, when adon olam has been lustily sung by both the congregation and choir, you can see fraulein walking along the anlage. There is a regular church parade . . . except that it is a synagogue parade. And here I would offer my meed of praise to the young Breuerite ladies. Unlike their American, English or French sisters, they do not hide their faces 'neath, the efflorescence of a chalk-cliff, nor treat their eyes as did Queen Jezebel of infamous memory. Their faces are as nature made them. If Frankfurt Jewry is sui generis, the Breuer division of it is unique in a marked degree. Nowhere else in the world is it possible to find a community of Jews such as this. In Russia, certainly not. Even in Germany not. In England, emphatically not. In the United States decidedly not. It is an imperium in imperio. It is a medieval revival which has appealed to the modern business man, and won. It asks for no criticism, it brooks none. In the eyes of men, it has succeeded. In the eyes of God ...? The very tiniest minutiae are rigorously carried out by the Breuer church, and this differentiates it both from the Liberal wing and those I am pleased to call the "betwixt-and-be- (Continued on Page 382)