The Alsace vineland — ping-ponged between France and Germany for hundreds of years — is proof that a Yid says l’chayim no matter what comes his way  

Photos: MB Goldstein

Although the Alsace region is part of France today, this strip on the country’s northeastern tip, with its world-famous wine growing villages, has been ping-ponged between France and Germany numerous times over the last few hundred years. Yet despite the persecution the Jews of Alsace faced over the thousand years of their sojourn in this province of both French and German influences, Judaism in Alsace took on its own distinct character.

As we’ll be driving through this picturesque, old-world countryside, we have more than a wine route in mind. Jewish history in Alsace reaches back across the centuries, to at least 1165, making the communities here some of the oldest still-functioning kehillos in Europe. After all the years of national transfers and geographic shakeups, we’re traveling through these parts to see if we can find local Jews still keeping the ancient customs and conversant in the old Judeo-Alsatian dialect.

On the train up from Basel, the closest Swiss city to the French border, we pass the village of Ensisheim, where the Maharam of Rothenburg was held captive from 1286 until his death in 1293. Nothing remains of the castle fortress where Rav Meir was jailed, so we decide not to stop there, but continue through rural northeastern France to our first destination, the history-rich medieval town of Colmar.

Still Holding On

The first thing we notice, as our local guide and driver Reb Yehoshua Klein swings his car out of the train station, is a square named Place du Capitaine Dreyfus. The anti-Semitic scandal in which Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Alsatian officer in the French army, was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans rocked Western Europe in 1894, though it seems strangely out of place in this beautiful town today. Dreyfus (which Mr. Klein says is a reference to the Shalosh Regalim — “three feet” in Yiddish), is a common Alsatian Jewish last name, along with Bloch, Blum, Weil, and Levi, to name a few others.

In modern times, Alsace was annexed to the German Empire in 1871 at the end of the Franco-German War, returned to France after World War I, reoccupied by the Germans in World War II, then again restored to France.

Colmar, whose Jewish roots date back to the 13th century, was a wealthy kehillah over the past hundred years or so. Houses are big and the town is beautifully kept. Like all of France’s Jewish communities, the original Ashkenazic Alsatian community was boosted by an influx of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the 1950s and 60s. The chief rabbi of the town today, Rabbi Yaacov Fhima, was born here, although his parents and grandparents arrived from Morocco.

The pretty and well-situated town is popular with tourists. There are playgrounds, cafés, and canals galore, as well as a 12-meter-high replica of the Statue of Liberty, in memory of Colmar’s famous son Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the 19th-century sculptor who created Lady Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the United States in 1886.

We ring a bell at a side door for entry to Colmar’s shul. Signs inside announce the weekly Talmud Torah classes as well as classes for adults, and the yard has a succah structure as well as play equipment for the Jewish kindergarten.

Although Colmar is a community in decline, in the big sanctuary, only used on Yom Tov these days, we find a few French Jewish children’s books and candy wrappers on one seat. Rabbi Fhima shows us the box he stands in to give the sermons — reminiscent of a cherry picker rising in the middle of the shul. The daily minyan for Shacharis is held in a side room, and a small group of kollel men from Strasbourg learn in the shul building for afternoon seder, which helps out with Minchah.