Forty years ago this week, Ronald Reagan, then just a few months into his second term, visited West Germany to take part in the G-7 Economic Summit. As the visit coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Allied victory over the Third Reich, President Reagan and the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl scheduled several events to mark the occasion. These included a wreath-laying ceremony at the Bitburg military cemetery, where, Reagan apparently learned only after agreeing to the visit, several members of the SS were buried. 

News of Reagan’s itinerary sparked widespread objections, most notably from Elie Wiesel. In response, Reagan adjusted his schedule to include a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Many American Jews remained outraged. Rabbi Avi Weiss arranged an in-person protest at Bergen-Belsen; this is his account of those events, excerpted from his forthcoming book, Defending Holocaust Memory.

What people most vividly remember today concerning the Bitburg debacle is Elie Wiesel’s dignified and powerful appeal to President Reagan not to visit the Nazi cemetery. Upon receiving the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement in April 1985, Wiesel urged the president to reconsider his trip to Bitburg. “That place, Mr. President,” Wiesel told him in front of those present for the ceremony, “is not your place. Your place is here with the victims of the SS.”

Wiesel went on: “The issue here is not politics but good and evil. And we must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have seen their victims.”

Other notable opponents of Reagan’s decision included the attorney Menachem Rosensaft, who was born in Bergen-Belsen’s displaced-persons camp. In 1985, he chaired the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Should Reagan go to Bitburg, he announced at an April 1985 protest in New York, “we must see to it that survivors, children of survivors, and American war veterans will be waiting for him at the gates of that cemetery.”

Still other figures among the opposition included the leadership of the Catholic War Veterans and the American Legion, as well as the civil-rights activist and 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. Both Houses of Congress passed resolutions urging the president not to go.

What is largely forgotten, however, is that while the protest from the Jewish community was strong, it was also tempered; Jewish leaders were wary of alienating the president. After all, just three years earlier, Reagan had pushed through a record-breaking arms deal with Saudi Arabia despite Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin expressing his “profound regret and unreserved opposition” to the proposal. And world Jewry continued to hope that Reagan would assist the benighted Jews of the Soviet Union.

It was therefore not surprising that, following Reagan’s trip to the Bitburg cemetery, Jewish community leaders stepped back, insisting that they harbored no animosity toward the president. Perhaps most vocal was Morris Abram, an outspoken supporter of Reagan who would soon be selected to serve as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. In a New York Times op-ed from May 10, 1985, he praised Reagan as a friend of the Jewish community.

In counseling caution and circumspection in the face of an unbearable insult, these Jewish leaders and organizations revealed something important. Despite their frequent assertions that the American Jewish community enjoyed the most secure, free, and prosperous Diaspora environment in history, they were fearful. Had they not suspected that the president might turn against them, they presumably would never have taken such a conciliatory tone. After all, Reagan’s visit to Bitburg was an affront not only to the Jewish community but to non-Jewish U.S. military veterans who had fought to preserve our nation’s freedom against the demonic evil of Nazism.

Notably, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) took a different tack, with its outspoken executive director Israel Singer accusing such groups as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) of a “whitewash” of the Reagan administration. Singer rightly castigated these groups as “the Neville Chamberlains of the Bitburg Affair,” arguing that while access to the Reagan administration was important, Jewish dignity, and basic integrity, ought to take precedence.

My Decision to Protest

My decision to travel to Germany to protest Reagan in person crystallized when I heard the president insist at a press conference that the German soldiers “were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” At that point, he was trying to defend his decision—and as Eli Wiesel noted, it appeared that Reagan had accepted the invitation to Bitburg without realizing that Nazi soldiers were interred there. But the moral equivalency was nonetheless obscene. In such moments, Reagan threw the door wide open to Holocaust revisionists, who could now cite the president of the United States in arguing that everyone who fought in the war, including SS shock troops, were unwitting and innocent victims of a few unscrupulous authority figures.

The White House announced, as a conciliatory gesture, that before going to Bitburg, Reagan would visit Bergen-Belsen—the site of an infamous Nazi death camp—to pay tribute to the victims of Nazi genocide. In a speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Menachem Rosensaft responded forcefully: “Today,” he stated, “let us say to President Reagan clearly and unambiguously that if he insists on going to Bitburg we do not need him and we do not want him in Bergen-Belsen.’”

I, too, was incensed: Reagan apparently thought he could make everything all right by briefly honoring the victims of the Holocaust before laying a wreath at the graves of their murderers. The White House’s decision to add Bergen-Belsen to the president’s itinerary did, however, cause me to switch the site of my own planned protest from Bitburg to the concentration camp.

For me, the president’s visit Bergen-Belsen before flying off to honor the SS meant that he would be desecrating the mass graves of the untold thousands of Jews buried there. I therefore felt compelled to travel to Bergen-Belsen, not only to protest Reagan and Kohl’s acts, but to re-consecrate the graves of the victims. I had hoped to protest at Bitburg as well, but the two sites lay several hundred miles apart, and the president and the chancellor would be flying directly from the former death camp to the Nazi cemetery. I would have to choose, and I chose to make my stand at a site suffused with the suffering of my people.

My group was not the only one to fly to Germany to demonstrate; others went to Bitburg and some to a Munich Jewish cemetery. The Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors announced their plan to stage a restrained and dignified protest at Bergen-Belsen. Our stance was different: we announced our intention to celebrate Shabbat in Bergen-Belsen and later to confront Reagan and Kohl, who would be visiting the next day. I believe that effective protests must create real tension while advocating the claims of conscience. Consequently, I was committed to engaging in non-violent civil disobedience at Bergen-Belsen.

I flew to Germany accompanied only by Rabbi Ronald Schwarzberg (known to me as Ronnie), then the associate rabbi at my synagogue. “For me, the very act of stepping foot on German soil was extremely difficult,” Ronnie recalls. “My father was a survivor of Auschwitz, the only member of his family who made it through the Holocaust alive. Still, as emotionally wrenching as going to Germany was for me, I was inspired by the idea of spending Shabbat at a former death camp, which seemed to me to be a terrific example of the triumph of the Jewish people since the Holocaust—to sing Shabbos songs in the very place where Hitler tried to exterminate us.”

In the days leading up to our departures, I brushed off appeals from establishment Jewish leaders to cancel the trip. Most vociferous was the ADL, which saw the initiative as a form of grandstanding. Other organizations pleaded with Jews to keep any protests they might hold as low-key as possible.

Harder for me to dismiss, however, was a similar plea from Avi Maoz, the principal assistant to Avital Sharansky—wife of Natan Sharansky, then in his eighth year of Soviet captivity. Avi and Avital were in New York as Avital was preparing to speak at a massive rally for Soviet Jewry to be held on May 5, the same day Reagan would be visiting Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg. Avi could not understand my justification for missing such a crucial demonstration. To Avi, the Holocaust, however horrific, was part of the past and could not be changed; the fate of Soviet Jews was very much a live issue, requiring urgent action.

As I explained to Avi, I felt an overwhelming personal responsibility to do what I could to defend the six million Jews who could no longer speak for themselves. And as it turned out, the dark cloud of Bitburg hovered over the Soviet Jewry demonstration. Elie Wiesel, speaking at the rally, tied the two together:

Why not admit it? Today we are wounded. Is there a connection between Bitburg and this rally? Yes, there is. What was attempted at Bitburg—a denial of the past; a disregard of Jewish agony—the same but on a larger scale has been attempted in Russia.

Flying through the night toward that bitter land that had initiated history’s most horrific genocide upon the Jewish people, I reflected not upon Germany or Nazism but rather on the more congenial figure of Ronald Reagan. I wanted badly to understand why such a goodhearted man had insisted upon keeping his appointment in Bitburg despite the overwhelming outcry. I did not think then, nor do I believe today, that Reagan wished to rehabilitate Nazis or hurt Jews, for whom, I believe, he had visceral positive feelings. I did not, however, have that same confidence about some of his advisors, like Pat Buchanan, who clearly had played a role in pushing Reagan to travel to Bitburg even after the moral and political costs had become obvious.

Reagan’s motivations were almost certainly more straightforward. Having responded positively to a request for a favor from his friend and ally Helmut Kohl to celebrate the friendship between Germany and the United States 40 years after the end of World War II, Reagan was determined at all costs to prove his constancy. Here I believe he made a colossal error, one of the biggest of his presidency. Once it became apparent how much he had hurt his own countrymen, the better response would have been to admit wrongdoing rather than toughing it out for the sake of standing by his earlier decision.

I felt then, as I do looking back from more than 40 years’ remove, that the greatest damage done by Reagan was a considerable, if unwitting, contribution to Holocaust revisionism. What will be remembered about Bitburg 100 years from now will not be Wiesel’s remarks or scattered protests by Jews on German soil, but the fact that the president of the United States placed a wreath at a Nazi cemetery. In the years ahead, I expect that twisted people trying to pretend that the Holocaust never happened or that, in any event, it wasn’t really so bad—the sort of people who seem to be getting more attention every day—will make use of Reagan’s Bitburg moment just as they will trumpet the embraces between Pope John Paul II and President Kurt Waldheim of Austria, an unrepentant Nazi, in 1987 and 1988.

Whatever his motivations, Reagan chose to go through with a trip that would forever stain his historical record, and which may continue to have profoundly negative consequences for world Jewry.

The Jews of Frankfurt

Ronnie and I flew to Frankfurt with only the embryo of a plan: to observe Shabbat at Bergen-Belsen in order to sanctify the camp and the mass graves. We felt compelled to enter the “lion’s den” and make our presence known in some small way; we hoped we would have the opportunity to confront Reagan and Kohl.

A neophyte when it came to organizing a protest in a foreign land, I had forgotten amid the last-minute preparations to take a careful look at a map of Germany. If I had done so, I would have noticed that Frankfurt was several hundred miles south of Bergen-Belsen. Flying into the international airport at Hamburg would have brought us much closer to our target. Nevertheless, it turned out to be providential that we flew to Frankfurt and became acquainted with the Jewish community there.

We availed ourselves of the warm hospitality of another Rabbi Avi Weiss, a deeply committed Jew who had once been the youth director at the small synagogue in Monsey, NY while I was the rabbi. At the time of our visit, he was serving as chaplain to the sprawling U.S. Army bases in the Frankfurt area. Given that neither Ronnie nor I had ever been to Germany, Avi’s kindness was invaluable. On the evening of our arrival, Ronnie and I made an appearance at the Frankfurt Jewish community center to discuss our plans with a few dozen local Jews. It was there that I was first exposed to the tremendous fear and insecurity of German Jewry. I had hoped to galvanize as many volunteers as possible to join us at the Bergen-Belsen protest. My appeal for solidarity and support was met with stony silence.

The Frankfurt Jews proudly informed us that the leaders of the German Jewish community had spurned an invitation from Kohl for a Jewish representative to join him and Reagan at the Bergen-Belsen commemorative event. That was a brave and defiant stand by European Jewish standards, especially so in a country like Germany. Yet, having refused to give its kosher stamp to Reagan and Kohl, the Frankfurt community leadership considered my plan of going one step further and staging a protest at Bergen-Belsen to be unnecessarily provocative, and fraught with considerable danger for German Jewry.

My spirits were further diminished later that evening, when, upon returning to Avi and his wife Elcya’s home, I received several calls from prominent Jews in New York urging me once again to reconsider my plans. Elie Wiesel had already eloquently expressed Jewish revulsion at Reagan’s trip to Bitburg during his face-to-face encounter with the president in the White House, they argued. Actions like the one I had planned added little to his message and could have decidedly negative consequences for Israel, Soviet Jewry, and other causes dear to the Jewish community.

Arrival at Bergen-Belsen

Early the next day—Friday, May 3—we prepared to leave Frankfurt. My spirits lifted when four local Jews appeared unannounced at Avi’s home and told us that they had decided to join our demonstration after all. The member of this group to whom I would become closest was twenty-seven-year-old Aryeh “Andy” Steiman, a warm and caring young man who had been born in the U.S. but had lived nearly his entire life in Germany.

As we arrived at Bergen-Belsen, a considerable number of reporters and television crews were waiting for us. We entered the camp through a small museum known as the Documentation Center, where we planned to sleep that night. As Ronnie and I walked into the sprawling grounds of the Bergen-Belsen camp itself, reporters and cameras followed us. Pointing to a sign near the entrance stipulating that visitors “are requested to observe the dignity of the memorial grounds and to refrain from disturbing the peace of the dead,” I told the reporters that Reagan and Kohl were violating that wish through their attempt to link symbolically the victims murdered here and the murderers buried at Bitburg.

Even as I sought to articulate compelling soundbites for the cameras, I found myself increasingly overwhelmed by a profound melancholy. Bergen-Belsen has a searing emotional impact despite—or perhaps because of—the absence of those ghastly features generally associated with Nazi death camps: barbed wire, barracks, crematoria. The Bergen-Belsen camp had been demolished in the early 1950s after serving for several years after the end of the war as a displaced-persons camp. Today, the overall impression of the place is one of silent desolation. It is a grassy, almost treeless plain, an immaculately maintained park-like landscape.

The only visible indication of the horrors is a series of grass-covered hillocks protruding gently from the North German flatlands, marked by signs with such inscriptions as “Here Lie 800 Dead” and “Here Lie 5,000 Dead.” These were the mass graves of the victims, most of whom were slaughtered in the last months of the war by the SS or starved to death or died in droves from diseases like typhus even after the camp’s liberation by the British. An estimated 50,000 Jews perished here, among them Anne Frank, who was brought to the camp in late 1944 after being apprehended in her family’s Amsterdam hideout.

After we conducted a series of press interviews standing by a towering obelisk in the center of the camp, which is the main victims’ memorial, we returned to the Documentation Center to prepare for Shabbat. Although the building was already closed for the evening, the German police officers on the scene did not try to prevent us from spending the night or from observing Shabbat. It was clear that they had been informed that there would likely be a protest on the site and were determined to behave as solicitously as possible.

Still, it was obvious that the crunch would come, for us and the German police alike, when they would have to secure the facility for the arrival of Kohl and Reagan on Sunday morning. I had already expressed to the group my determination that we should not leave the museum willingly but would try to remain on the scene when Reagan and Kohl arrived. The obvious question was whether the German police, who were being pressed by U.S. Secret Service men and FBI officials to remove any impediments to the presidential visit, were prepared to arrest Jewish demonstrators and drag them physically away from the site where, 40 years earlier, their counterparts had viciously massacred Jews.

The initial plan was for the group to lie on the floor and non-violently resist arrest when the inevitable police order came to remove us from the building. I felt passionately that we had an obligation to carry our protest as far as we could, to remind the world that the Reagan-Kohl visit desecrated the memory of the six million. It was inconceivable to me, especially in that setting, that we should give the impression of Jews submitting meekly to injustice.

I was surprised, however, when several of the German reporters covering our protest asked whether I was attempting, with premeditated malice, to create a tableau in which the police officers of the Federal Republic of Germany would be cast as brutal latter-day Nazis. In truth, I had not thought much about the role of the German police in this developing drama. I had no ax to grind with them. I have never believed in collective guilt, nor have I argued that Germans born after 1945 somehow inherited responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.

I did, however, hope that our protest would forcefully remind modern-day Germans of their obligation to keep vividly alive the memory of their nation’s unique mass slaughter—especially in light of their chancellor’s skillful effort to suggest, by enlisting Reagan to visit Bitburg, that the time had come to forget or at least equivocate. Had the German government been blameless in the Bitburg affair, it would have been unfair to force the police to remove us. But of course, it was Kohl who had precipitated the whole fiasco by insisting upon honoring the SS men buried in the Bitburg cemetery. That act in itself—in addition to the polls showing a large majority of Germans supporting Kohl’s approach—was reason enough to press Germans to confront painful memories of the past.

In the half-light of that approaching Shabbat, the Documentation Center had a stark and eerie quality. It was a squat, concrete, one-room building, its walls covered with a montage of gruesome black-and-white outsized photos of emaciated and agonized inmates staring from behind barbed wire, of sadistic-looking SS officers in their death-camp uniforms, of stocky blonde uniformed female guards with leering expressions. Most gut-wrenching were the grisly close-ups of hundreds of naked corpses, stacked like plywood in open pits. In the middle of the room was a Plexiglas model of the camp as it was in the Nazi period.

Shabbat in Bergen-Belsen

Amid that grim tableau, our small party sat around the card table we had set up in the middle of the museum and began to celebrate Shabbat, starting with the traditional prayers. I was profoundly aware that this may have been the first Jewish religious service held at Bergen-Belsen since its days as a displaced-persons camp. Every phrase that I recited from the prayerbook seemed to have heightened meaning in the eerie silence of that wretched dead place where I could feel hovering amongst us the presence of the souls of the thousands of blameless Jews murdered here. Especially haunting were the words “arise from the dust, wear the garments of your glorious people,” recited as Shabbat begins. I felt as if the souls of those murdered at Belsen were singing with us.

Our Shabbat service, amid unforgiving concrete walls with windows that gazed out over killing fields, was about responding to death with life. Against those who had sought to extinguish the flame of Shabbat forever, we kindled Shabbat lights. We prayed, sang, and ate, before preparing for a night in our sleeping bags on the chill, hard floor of the Documentation Center.

After the transcendent beauty of the service, each of us felt at once very much alone and overwhelmed by the presence of thousands of ghosts. Ronnie recalled thinking:

Even though I wasn’t sleeping in the soft bed I was used to, I was still lying in a warm sleeping bag. My stomach was filled with food and wine. I couldn’t help but compare my relative comfort with the horrific conditions endured by the prisoners who lived and died here. Suddenly, I felt like I could hear their screams and cries. It was as though the dead were actually talking to me, and it was horrible. I thought of my dad and the indescribable things he endured in Auschwitz. It felt as though the night would never end.

In the morning, heartened by the sunlight, we resumed our Shabbat observance. As we sang and prayed, tourists—most of them Germans—passed through the museum. Many appeared startled to find live Jews where they had expected to encounter only the remembrance of dead ones. Some seemed offended that we appeared to be celebrating in a place marking brutal destruction. When we explained that Jews are instructed to rejoice on the Sabbath, to affirm life no matter how tragic the circumstances, some appeared won over. I noticed more than a few wiping away tears as they observed us purposefully singing and dancing—defiantly proclaiming our continued existence—in front of that terrible photographic montage of Jewish devastation.

Righteous Among the Nations

I was stunned and exhilarated when three visitors approached to say they had felt spiritually uplifted while observing our prayer service, and wished to join our Shabbat experience. They were Professor Eberhard Fiebig and his wife Dorothy, and the sculptor Michael Dutching, who had traveled to Bergen-Belsen together from the city of Kassel after hearing of our protest. Would we allow them to join us, Eberhard asked with considerable emotion, even though they were Christians and Germans? Deeply moved, I embraced each of them in turn and said we would be honored. I sat with the three middle-aged friends, sharing with them the basics of our service.

What had moved those three beautiful souls to reach out to us across the barriers of history, I wondered. Michael explained to a journalist that afternoon that though he had had little prior contact with Jews,

I found something here I had never seen before. This small group of Jews are saying that this is a holy place, and they will not allow it to be used to political advantage—by Kohl, Reagan, or anyone else. I felt I wanted to take part in that statement.

In a letter he sent me several days after our encounter in Bergen-Belsen, Eberhard struggled to find the words to convey what we had experienced together:

We found you and your Jewish friends praying and realized that we must remain with you for many reasons, reasons that were only clear to me later. I don’t think it is necessary to name them, for the words I would have to use have been used and misused too much for them to amount to anything anymore. More important is what we learned in those two days, but that is also hard to say. . . . After all, it was not an experience accompanied by claps of thunder, and it was not anything particularly big that we accomplished. We celebrated the Sabbath and remembered the dead.

Eberhard was right concerning the ineffable quality of our Shabbat in Bergen-Belsen. Our Shabbat observance was not observably unique in itself: the enormity of our surroundings, combined with the knowledge of Reagan and Kohl’s imminent provocations, imbued it all with significance.

And something powerful was happening between Germans and Jews; it was evident that some of the German journalists on the scene were deeply affected. Ulrike Sudmeyer, a German reporter in her thirties covering Reagan’s visit, seemed especially sympathetic in her questioning, and appeared to be holding back something she badly wanted to share with us. Finally, she approached Ronnie and blurted out that her uncle had been an SS soldier who had frequently written letters home bragging about the number of Jews he had killed each day.

Sudmeyer sobbed as she recounted that story, and asked Ronnie if he could imagine what it was like to live with such a past. If she had been alive then, she imagined that she might well have done the same thing because everyone around was doing it. I couldn’t help being impressed by the intensity of the horror she felt over Germany’s slaughter of the Jews. Yet despite her anguish, she insisted that Ronnie and I ought to leave the compound voluntarily and not force the German police to arrest us. What right, she asked me, did I have to force the German police to look like the SS? Sudmeyer seemed to believe that, having expressed contrition for the guilt of Germany and admitted to her own moral fallibility, she had acquired the prerogative to instruct us on how to conduct our protest.

It was the kind of arrogance I had encountered previously in dealings with Germans. Yet Ulrike’s insensitivity at that moment contrasted sharply with the morally uplifting behavior of Eberhard and his wife and friend. Which, I asked myself, was more representative of the true Germany? The average modern German, I supposed, was a confused mélange of the stainless decency of Eberhard, the tortured ambivalence of Ulrike, and the smug self-satisfaction of Kohl.

That morning, we prayed together even though we did not have the required ten Jews to make a minyan (the quorum needed for public prayer). I read aloud from the Torah scroll the double Torah portion for that Shabbat, Aharei Mot (“After Death”) and K’doshim (“Holy Ones),” which felt apt under the circumstances. The young German Jews who had come with us were hardly Torah scholars, and Andy Steiman in particular, kept telling me how sorry he was that he didn’t know the prayers and was unable to participate fully. I told him that he need not feel any awkwardness or discomfort, that he was making a sacred statement just by standing with us.

“I Am Here to Tell You to Leave”

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, Walter Ruby, then a reporter for American Jewish publications, walked into the Documentation Center together with Jerzy Warman, a representative of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. My immediate reaction was to embrace Walter and to announce jubilantly that, with their arrival, we now had the requisite ten Jews to hold the Shabbat afternoon service with a minyan.

In fact, Warman, whose group was planning to hold a protest meeting at Bergen-Belsen the following day after Reagan and Kohl had left, had not come to the Documentation Center to connect with us spiritually but rather with the express intention of convincing me to call off our protest, which he considered needlessly provocative and “not in keeping with the sanctity of the mass graves.” I responded by giving him a tallit (prayer shawl) and thanking him for helping to make possible the first minyan at Bergen-Belsen in almost 40 years. His sour expression made it clear that joining a minyan was low on his list of priorities, but he accepted the tallit.

Walter had other concerns. As he wrote in a story on those incredible days in Bergen-Belsen that appeared in the Long Island Jewish World,

I accepted the invitation to step out of my journalistic observer role and participate in the minyan with a muddled feeling combining a sense of spiritual uplift with a countervailing feeling of embarrassment that with my minimal knowledge of Judaism I would make a fool of myself in the middle of this prayer service, which Weiss had elevated to a level of almost cosmic import. I felt like I had stepped out onto the stage at a highly significant moment of the 4,000-year-old Jewish drama—and grotesquely, I did not know my lines.

Then Weiss asked me if I would like to carry the Torah and I assented. As I firmly grasped the scrolls and gazed out the window of the museum across the bleak and empty fields where thousands of Jews had suffered and died, I felt my own concerns and neuroses quickly drop away to be replaced by a sense of peace and contentment. I felt for a timeless split-second a sense of oneness with the voiceless thousands who were sacrificed here. I lowered my eyes as kaddish was recited.

But as the afternoon wore on, it became progressively harder to focus on spirituality. The number of German police inside and around the museum swelled. The place was also crawling with U.S. Secret Service agents, unmistakable in their trench coats and dark glasses. Outside the museum, communications trailers sprang up like mushrooms as the Secret Service performed helicopter landing exercises in the parking lot in preparation for Reagan and Kohl’s arrival the following morning. More and more members of the press kept showing up, evidently drawn by the anticipation of German-Jewish confrontation. We could not help feeling apprehensive as we gazed out from our tight little circle at this mélange of security and media people, anticipating the moment when we would be taken out of there.

As evening shadows began to descend, a stiff and obviously nervous middle-aged man entered the museum. He identified himself as Michael Furst, the head of the Jewish community of Lower Saxony, the German state in which Bergen-Belsen is located. I went up to embrace him and offer him a prayerbook, but Furst raised his hand and cut me off in preemptory fashion. “I am not here to pray with you,” he informed me. “I am here to tell you to leave.”

As the reporters gathered around him and began furiously scribbling notes, Furst addressed me in an authoritative tone, like an old-school rector explaining the ways of the world to a dim, overenthusiastic student activist. “The Jewish community made clear its feelings about Reagan coming to both Belsen and Bitburg by refusing an invitation to take part in the ceremonies here with Reagan and Kohl,” he explained, adding, “This is a very strong step for the Jews of Germany. By staying here and being pictured by newspapers and television getting arrested, you will destroy everything we are doing here. What you are doing will cause much trouble for the Jews of Germany.”

Furst’s attitude toward me was clearly a reprise of the fear and disdain I had witnessed among the Jewish community in Frankfurt. My first impulse was to dismiss him as a craven and self-important ghetto Jew, yet I pushed myself to understand his viewpoint.

Was it so surprising, after all, that leaders of the tiny German Jewish community were urging a keep-your-heads-down-and-don’t-make-too-much-noise approach to Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, when some in the supposedly more secure American Jewish leadership had done the same? Furst, after all, represented what was then a small Jewish community trying to survive in a country that, only 40 years earlier, had committed one of history’s most horrific acts of mass murder.

The Germany of 1985 was not the Germany of 1935, but Furst obviously still sensed deep undercurrents of anti-Semitism. He feared the repercussions of Jewish boldness. I believed the very opposite, that in taking a strong stand against the Bitburg trip, we would help bring to the surface and delegitimize covert anti-Semitism rather than allowing it to fester. Still, while I believed that Furst’s outlook was a symptom of acute Holocaust-induced Jewish paranoia, it behooved me to answer him with sympathy and respect.

I responded by acknowledging his proud refusal to attend Reagan’s Bergen-Belsen ceremony, while insisting I needed to take a stand in my own way, and to sanctify the graves of Bergen-Belsen in the face of desecration.

My remarks appeared to have little effect on Furst, who responded coldly and dismissively that the German Jews’ action and our own could not be equated. He then said, in a tone at once pleading and preemptory, “I am asking you to leave for the sake of the Jews of Germany.” To my ears, it sounded more like an order than a request. With my compassion for the fears of German Jews mixing with disdain for Furst’s pretensions to authority over us, I simply said, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.” The battle lines had been drawn. Furst turned and walked out.

A Schism

I quickly realized that Furst’s intervention had had a considerable effect on several of my fellow protesters. Particularly upset was Andy Steiman, who approached me to say that, having reconsidered the matter, he agreed with Furst that our protest might endanger German Jews, who had a greater stake in the outcome. Andy argued that we should pack up and leave Bergen-Belsen as soon as Shabbat ended.

I was deeply chagrined by Andy’s change of heart, and told him sharply that retreat was out of the question. Andy’s response was to explain his position to the assembled company, including the journalists: the sight of a Jewish group refusing to obey the police could lead to a German backlash that would endanger local Jews. I could see another German Jew among our number, George Horny, nodding in agreement. Even Ronnie appeared somewhat swayed. Perhaps, he said to me in a low, nervous voice, it would be better if we eschewed needlessly provocative acts like forcing the police to drag us out of the museum.

Sadly but all too typically, it was the Jews who were becoming insecure and fearful, while the German Gentiles, the Fiebigs and Dutching, reaffirmed their willingness to stay with us until the end, even if that meant being arrested. I sensed that our group would rapidly fall apart if I did not take a strong stand, even if that entailed behaving in a manner that was personally painful to me. All too often during a protest, I find myself in a situation where the cause must take precedence over personal relationships. Turning to Andy and speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, I announced that I did not care to argue the issue further, but was, instead, breaking off all communication with him.

Andy appeared stunned. His voice breaking, he pleaded for more sense and communication among friends. This shook me deeply, yet I demonstratively turned my back to him. Addressing the entire group, I reiterated that we were going to stand by our prior commitment not to leave the museum voluntarily. Anyone who could not accept that was free to leave.

Andy walked to the exit but stood there uncertainly, arguing his case to the others and appealing to Ronnie to make me see reason. I continued to behave as though I would hold a hard line at all costs, but was realistic enough to see that some compromise would be necessary to hold the group together. I asked Ronnie to tell the others that while I remained determined to stay the course and passively resist arrest, I would no longer insist that we lie down on the floor and force the police to drag us out. Rather, I was ready to agree that, escorted by police, we would stand and walk peacefully out of the museum.

I was chagrined at having to accept that change in tactics; I believed that forcing the police to carry us out would have made a far more powerful statement. Still, my decision to compromise saved our group from disintegration. Relief rippled through the room, and finally Andy came over to me and asked if he could rejoin us. I gladly agreed; we had surmounted the crisis and were ready to press forward as a unit. All things considered, that compromise felt like a price well worth paying.

The Police Arrive

As the Sabbath drew to a close, Eberhard predicted that the police would move to arrest us the moment Sabbath was over. He was sure that the German government had consulted rabbinical authorities to ascertain the exact moment Shabbat ended.

Eberhard was right. At 9:03 pm, almost exactly to the minute that Jewish law recognizes as nightfall, the local police commander, Friedrich Wilhelm Thieke, entered the room in the company of about 30 policemen. Standing before us, he firmly said, “We have allowed you to celebrate the Sabbath. Now that it is over, we insist you leave.” I retorted that we needed to recite havdalah (the service which officially marks the end of Shabbat). The police had apparently not been aware of havdalah. Appearing nonplussed, Thieke approached Ronnie to ask him what the service was and how long the service was likely to last. Ronnie responded that the rabbi’s traditional havdalah service can last for quite a while and he would have to be patient.

It certainly felt surreal to be leading havdalah, whose text distinguishes between “the holy and profane,” surrounded by a battalion of uniformed German police, standing deferentially with arms folded, and a large group of reporters who seemed taken by the spirituality of the moment. As we celebrated our havdalah in the warm, informal, and exultant fashion in which we observe it back home in the Bayit in Riverdale, I felt a deep sense of oneness with the souls of those murdered at Bergen-Belsen.

We ended the service by locking arms and singing Am Yisrael Hai (“The People of Israel Live”), a song of enormous spiritual and emotional force in any setting yet magnified immensely in a place like Bergen-Belsen. Here we were, six Jews and three German Christians, joyously celebrating Jewish strength and survival—as well as our shared humanity—surrounded by German policemen in a setting heavily weighted with Jewish martyrdom. I felt a surge of ecstatic defiance and was seized with the conviction that whatever happened from here on, we had cast the first blow in the battle of Bitburg. By manifesting our renascent Jewishness in this terrible place and lifting our voices in joyful prayer, we had affirmed for all the world to see that we would never again allow ourselves to be cast back into fear and abasement.

The moment we had finished singing, Thieke stepped forward and stated solemnly in German, “We have come in peace and without weapons. This is a difficult moment for you, but it is more so for us. We have orders to take you from here.”

While I was pleasantly surprised by Thieke’s apparent solicitude, I also found it chilling to hear a German official—no matter how seemingly decent—justify an impending show of force by insisting he was just following orders. I found myself wondering if Thieke’s behavior was a genuine display of human decency, or a tactic to smother the political and spiritual power of our protest? Whatever the answer, I could not allow us to accede to the police, not at the very moment when Germany’s leader, Helmut Kohl, was committing the unforgivable act of paying respect to former Nazi soldiers.

It was then that Eberhard stepped forward. Turning to police, he said, “You would never force our Jewish brothers to desecrate the Sabbath. I hereby declare that the Sabbath be extended an additional twelve hours.” I was overwhelmed by Eberhard’s sincerity. Here was a Christian doing all he could to protect us and have our message resonate more powerfully. After a long moment of silence, Thieke repeated his demand.

I urged Thieke to let us stay, noting that we had no weapons nor any quarrel with the German police. Our hope, I explained, was peacefully to register our outrage at Reagan’s actions. While we would not resist if the police insisted on our removal, I said, we would not go voluntarily.

Still the police made no move, and our group erupted again in boisterous songs and prayers. Thieke repeated his warning that we would have to leave. Finally, he gave the signal and the police stepped forward, gripping each of us firmly by the arm and leading us out of the building, as klieg lights’ worth of camera bulbs lit up the night. The moment the cops moved all of us out of the building, they went back and collected our belongings, which they deposited in the parking lot before locking the door.

Never will I forget the officer who took me out. As we slowly walked out of the building, he turned to face me. Looking into my eyes, he said, “Will you ever forgive me for doing this to you?” He offered his hand, and I took it as the cameras flashed anew. I responded: “I can forgive you, but I can never forgive the murderers, or those who wish to forget.”

I had instinctively reached out to shake the policeman’s hand because his words had felt genuine and heartfelt. Yet immediately thereafter I began berating myself for surrendering to that human impulse, as I instinctively grasped that newspapers around the world were going to run that photo. I feared the picture was going to give a false impression of Jewish-German reconciliation, which was the last message we wanted to send on the day before Kohl and Reagan rehabilitated the SS.

As I rued my mistake, the suspicion formed in my mind that the officer with the outstretched hand might well have been a setup—part of the same adroit public-relations effort that included Thieke’s show of solicitousness. It may have all been carefully designed to smother with goodwill the justifiable anger much of the world felt toward the German government. I often think of that moment. As I’ve grown older and have become more conciliatory and more apt to judge others favorably, I’ve often thought that perhaps the German policeman was sincere. To this day I’m unsure.

I had not considered how we were going to find a place to sleep; the nearest town was at least three miles away and public transportation did not run at night. By the time we had caught our collective breath and made sure everyone in our party was well and accounted for, I was stunned to realize that the substantial press corps that had been with us only moments before had totally disappeared. No doubt all of them had sped off to file their stories. I then learned an important lesson: when the press needs you, they are everywhere. When the story is over, they will disappear.

We wondered what to do about finding shelter as a light rain began to fall. Our difficulty was solved by a kindly Lutheran minister who appeared abruptly on the scene. She had heard about our demonstration on the radio, she explained, and had felt moved to drive to Bergen-Belsen to offer us what help she could. The minister immediately volunteered to put our whole group up for the night in her rectory in the nearby town of Celle. We gratefully accepted her offer, realizing that if she hadn’t shown up, we would almost certainly have spent the night in the rain. It was an uplifting, even holy, gesture.

Aftermath

The following morning, we drove back to Bergen-Belsen, or at least as close as we could get before being stopped and turned back by tough, well-armed, mounted police on the largest horses I have ever seen. It became clear that we would be unable to get into the camp while Reagan and Kohl were there.

When I had a chance later that evening to catch soundbites from the speech Reagan had given at the camp, after he and Kohl toured the Documentation Center where we had been only a few hours earlier, I almost felt sorry for him. He thrashed about rhetorically, searching for the magic words that would mitigate the well-deserved fury of Jews and people of conscience. Standing at a podium in front of the memorial obelisk, speaking to a crowd of international dignitaries that included no Jewish community representatives, Reagan tried to set a moral tone: “Here lie people—Jews—whose death was inflicted for no other reason than their very existence.” He closed with a solemn intonation of “Never Again.” In between, he spoke movingly of the “sparkling young life” of Anne Frank, snuffed out at Bergen-Belsen. He stated: “We are here because humanity refuses to accept that freedom or the spirit of man can ever be extinguished.”

Yet for all the fine words Reagan’s speechwriters had handed him, there was a hole at the center of the speech, for it contained no expression of contrition for his decision to go to the Bitburg cemetery. The president ought to have at least had the decency to say that, even though he had decided not to cancel his visit to Bitburg, he understood why his going had grieved so many. Absent that minimal acknowledgment, and given the bitter reality that even as Reagan intoned “Never Again,” his helicopter was warming up to whisk him off to Bitburg, how could the Great Communicator have imagined that his Bergen-Belsen speech would have pacified the Jewish community?

The book of Ecclesiastes says, “Cast your bread upon the waters,” in other words: you can never know with certainty which acts will reverberate for good and which for bad. For many, President Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery had nothing to do with the opening of the floodgates to the distorters and deniers of the Holocaust. I’m not sure. With a heavy heart it must be said that a good man, a man who cared about Jews and Israel, “cast his bread upon the waters” when he could not find the strength to admit his mistake, change course, and cancel his visit—unwittingly contributing to the decline of Shoah memory.

As for us, what exactly did we accomplish in those two days of protest at Bergen-Belsen? Hopefully, on some level, we made our presence felt, forcing Kohl, Reagan, and many around the world to take notice of a group of Jews who were unwilling to quietly accept an American president’s decision to honor Nazis. Others may have made that point rhetorically, none so eloquently as Elie Wiesel in his remarks to Reagan in the White House. Still others traveled to Bitburg to demonstrate with European Jews who gathered there in protest. Yet it was necessary, in order to make that point stick, for some Jews to stage a sit-in at Bergen-Belsen in the very place where tens of thousands of our people were mercilessly murdered, to say “no” to Kohl and Reagan in an “in your face,” hands-on way.

If I flew home from Germany with any heaviness in my heart, it was over what some might consider a small matter, the state of my relationship with Andy Steiman. When Andy drove me and Ronnie to the airport in Frankfurt prior to our departure, I had wanted to assure him of my abiding affection and to say how sorry I was that I had felt compelled to cut off contact with him at that crucial moment in the museum. Somehow, though, I hadn’t been able to find the words. Perhaps, I told myself, Andy considered the matter closed and didn’t want to discuss it anymore.

Several days later, however, I received a handwritten letter from Andy. In his less-than-perfect-English, Andy wrote:

When I saw you off at the airport here. . . . I was afraid that you were so disappointed in me that I would lose you as a friend. Going home, I felt so ashamed for what I’ve done, especially because I’ve realized the mistake I’ve done. I hope that the press didn’t prey on the weakness I showed. . . . Avi, let me tell you that I feel more united with you now than I did during our very intense experience at Bergen-Belsen. I am only ashamed of having done something at your expense rather than paying the Rebbegelt [i.e., suffering the consequences of a bad decision from which one learns a useful lesson] on my own. But as a group, we all did the right thing. In front of history, we’ll get the merit we deserve.

What could I write in response to ease Andy’s anguish? There was so much I wanted to say that it took some time for me to finally sit down and compose that letter. This is what I wrote to Andy and, by extension, to all of German Jewry:

Dear Aryeh:

Please excuse the lateness of my reply. I received your letter and have read and re-read it over and over.

You did not disappoint me. I found you to be a deeply sensitive and caring Jew. It’s not easy to live in Germany. By and large, I found German Jews, because of Germany’s horrific past, to be frightened. You, Andy, have been living in Germany a long time, almost all of your life. The fact that you were with me at my side during those difficult days is reflective not of weakness, but of strength.

When Furst demanded we leave, you reacted in the way you felt was correct. You didn’t do what you did out of malice, but out of deep concern for the welfare of your community. . . .

Our Shabbat together, sleeping, eating, drinking, dancing, and praying at Bergen-Belsen, has made us brothers forever.

While I was thankfully able to repair my relationship with Andy, the protest had other unintended consequences, and I learned firsthand the price a child could pay for a parent’s high-profile activism. Soon after returning home, our young son Dov—now an acclaimed scholar of Judaism and theology but then a student at a haredi elementary school—excitedly told me his principal had invited me to speak to his fellow students about the Bergen-Belsen protest. As I concluded my talk, a young rabbi came forward and told the students I had violated Jewish law as I demonstrated without permission from the g’dolim (more revered rabbis). He went on to say that I had desecrated God’s name by spending Shabbat with naked women. (He was referring to the pictures of emaciated Jews on the walls of the Documentation Center.)

I looked at Dov—then eleven years old. His knees were shaking, tears flowed from his eyes. He softly said, “Abba, that’s my rebbe (religious-studies teacher) next year.”

I never received a word of apology from the school. Even more hurtful, at no time did the school reach out to Dov. It was a devastating experience. The tears in Dov’s eyes will forever be etched in my heart and soul. I only pray that the positive impact of my activism on my children outweighs the pain they sometimes endured along the way.

At Bergen-Belsen, the police, by pre-arrangement, allowed the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors to enter the camp immediately after Reagan and Kohl had left—but not a moment sooner. Their leader, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke eloquently at a service to “reconsecrate” the memorial.

By the time our group was finally permitted to re-enter and arrived at the obelisk to hold our own memorial service, there were no media and very few bystanders around. Although we were alone, I had the feeling that our spiritual protest at Bergen-Belsen was as powerful as anything we had done in the museum.

Ronnie recalls, “As I faced the mass graves in the stillness, I said silently; ‘You can go back to sleep again, it is quiet now.’”