A ‘new anti-Semitism’ rising in France

[DFW]

24. An interesting side note

A friend of ours, herself an immigrant from Poland who suffered as a child when she first came to Germany in the sixties, speaking no German, and having cruel, taunting classmates,* was visiting us yesterday.

My wife and I treated her to an informal guided tour of our town, which has been here in some form or other for a thousand years or so. It was conducted by a local woman whose family came here from Bavaria 200 years ago. One of the streets we passed through was "Synagogengasse," whose name is just what it sounds like. But this time, we noticed a plaque on the outside wall of a building that is usually hidden by shrubbery. The plaque commemorated the site of the local synagogue, which had been built in 1817, and destroyed by the Nazis in 1936. The building is now an Italian Pizzeria, but the plaque on the outside is in both German and Hebrew.

*She recently went to a 40th reunion of her high school class, and was surprised to be approached by many of her former classmates who wanted to apologize for their cruel behavior when they were children, begging her forgiveness, mentioning their ignorance about the world, and how awful it must have been for her. She said it provided her with some needed closure.