The Israeli town of Nahariya, located on the northern part of the Mediterranean coast, was founded by German Jews in the 1930s, and in the 1960s immigrants from Germany and their children still made up the better part of the population. But Erich Gunther Deutecom, who preferred to go by Gidon, wasn’t quite like the others. Matti Friedman attempts to reconstruct his story:
Almost everyone in the town knew German, even if they’d sworn never to speak it again. He was unique because he was the other kind of German. . . .
There’s a small botanical garden you can visit today in Nahariya, a tidy enclosure of tropical plants stalked by peacocks and third-graders. I’d passed it hundreds of times but didn’t know, until informed by Rafi Levinson, a friend of my parents, that it began as a park created by a mysterious stranger who disappeared decades before. This earlier park was divided into twelve sections, one for each of the tribes of Israel, arrayed around an odd structure known as the Tabernacle. The German had created the park with his own hands and money, giving the town a rare public plot of green in a scrappy area where most open spaces were used for cows or cabbage.
“The story,” the doctor said, “was that he’d had a dream where an angel told him to come to the Land of Israel and build the temple.” Nahariya was never more than a station on the way to Jerusalem, he said. “But you don’t build the temple right away. You have to make a long journey.” When Israel captured the Old City and the Temple Mount from Jordan in 1967, Deutecom understood that his plans had been given divine sanction.
In the early 1970s the German abandoned his park and Tabernacle. . . . He next surfaces in a small agricultural village called Segev, in the hills of western Galilee. Here, too, he planted a garden, this one of cacti.
Among Deutecom’s papers are sketches of a grand structure he called the Friedens Tempel, or Peace Temple, which he meant to build in Jerusalem. The temple would bring together Jews, Christians, and Muslims, echoing the biblical description of “a house of prayer for all nations.”
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/german-temple