Decades before the Nazi rise to power, Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk famously wrote of contemporary German Jewry, in Meshech Chochmah (Vayikra 26:44), “They think that Berlin is Jerusalem.... [F]rom there will go forth a great storm that will uproot them.”

But no one ever predicted that more than half a century after the end of that consuming whirlwind, a vibrant Orthodox community would take root in Berlin, and that the city would become the hub of all Orthodox Jewish life in Germany.

I was in Berlin for four days just before Pesach. The original purpose of the trip was twofold. First, to observe an award ceremony in which the German government conferred its First Class Order of Merit on Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, the rosh beis din (emeritus) of the London Beis Din. Since 2009, Dayan Ehrentreu has been the rector of the reestablished Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, founded by Rabbi Dr. Esriel Hildensheimer in 1873.  And second, to attend the official opening of a Lakewood Kollel branch in Berlin.

But I soon realized that those two events were part of a larger tapestry: the renewal of Orthodox Jewish life in Berlin in the wake of the large influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in the 1990s.

Closing a Circle

Prior to sitting down in our hotel lobby with Dayan Ehrentreu after his arrival in Berlin from London that morning, Rebbetzin Ehrentreu admonishes me to keep the interview short, as the Dayan needs some time to rest before the award ceremony. As soon as we begin, however, I realize that those words were more directed to her husband than to me. His mood is expansive and forthright; his blue eyes twinkle as he speaks. I immediately grasp why the mispallelim in his Hendon minyan — approximately 30 of whom and their spouses have accompanied him to Berlin — are so attached to him.

Dayan Ehrentreu was six years old at the time of Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938. But the memories of what he calls “the most frightening period of my life” remain fresh: “I vividly remember my late father being taken by the Gestapo to Dachau. I can still see the flames consuming the Holy Scrolls, which had been removed from the Ark to the courtyard outside the synagogue to be burned.”

I wonder, then, whether he doesn’t feel at least ambivalent about receiving an award from the same German government that caused his family to flee from Frankfurt am Main for England in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht.

He does not answer directly. But he tells me that the chief motivation for accepting the award is to enhance the stature of the Orthodox community in Germany with the government and to honor all of those who have “given their heart and soul to returning Torah Judaism to Germany.” It soon becomes clear to me that the Dayan is much more interested in discussing the new Lakewood kollel in Berlin than his award.

Kollelim are a subject close to his heart. At the age of 28, he founded the Sunderland Kollel, near Gateshead, in 1960. He remained at the head of the Sunderland Kollel for nearly 20 years, until Dayan Tuvia Weiss of Manchester was appointed to become the Gaavad of the Eidah HaChareidis, and Dayan Ehrentreu assumed his position as av beis din of Manchester.

I mention that I was just recently in the Edgware neighborhood of London, where Dayan Ehrentreu founded the Edgware Kollel of which he still serves as nasi. His eyes light up on hearing that, especially when I describe passing by eight or nine minyanim in the course of a two-block walk on Leil Shabbos. “Twelve years ago, none of that was there,” Dayan Ehrentreu comments proudly.

He then proceeds to relate his role in the new Lakewood kollel. Rabbi Josh Springer, CEO of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, and Rabbi Aaron Kotler, CEO of Beth Medrash Govoha, had been discussing the possibility of bringing a new kollel to Berlin. A little over a year ago, Rabbi Kotler came to the ordination ceremony of the Rabbinerseminar, which was held in Frankfurt, together with three of his major supporters. At a meeting there, Dayan Ehrentreu pleaded with Rabbi Kotler to open and support a kollel in Berlin. “I’m too old. I can’t do it myself,” the Dayan told him.

Dayan Ehrentreu, 86, is admittedly not a youngster. But he tells me that he does not know “what retirement means.” He still delivers between ten and twelve derashos every week. And his schedule includes plenty of travel. Since 2008, he has served as the av beis din of the Conference of European Rabbis, which serves 13 countries.

But it is Germany into which he has poured his greatest energy. “I come whenever they ask,” he says of his involvement with the German community. Earlier on the ride from airport, I gained a sense of the depth of that involvement as I listened to Dayan Ehrentreu and Rabbi Moshe Halperin, one of the heads of Rabbinerseminar, review each of the 15 recipients of semichah to date — the communities in which they were placed, their impact on their current communities, and their future plans. In our conversation, the Dayan explains to me that he administers a lengthy oral exam prior to conferring semichah and thus gets to know each musmach personally.

The rebuilding of the community in Germany constitutes the closing of a circle for the Dayan. At his installation as rector of the Rabbinerseminar in 2009, he noted that in 1920 his grandfather, Rabbi Chanoch Ehrentreu of Munich, had been invited to become the rector of the Hildensheimer Seminary, after the passing of Rabbi David Tzvi Hoffman. He turned down the honor at the behest of the Munich community.

Here I stand, 89 years later, Chanoch Ehrentreu, in the Ohel Yaakov Synagogue in Munich. The first Ohel Yaakov Synagogue, in which my grandfather of blessed memory served his community, was burned to the ground. And now, in a beautiful new Ohel Yaakov Synagogue, I finally sign the name Chanoch Ehrentreu to the ordination certificates of the Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, 89 years after my grandfather and namesake was obligated to decline this honor. I do so, and thus, for me, the circle has closed.

A Constant Presence

By the time I reach the tenth floor at the Foreign Ministry for the award ceremony, Minchah is already in progress in what might pass for a small ballroom. Minchah at the Foreign Ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany, surrounded by fine wood paneling and elegant stem glasses at the adjacent bar, is just one of the many dissonances to which I will have to adjust during my stay in Berlin.

After Minchah, we are invited to move into the room where the award ceremony will take place. Memory is thick here. In his opening remarks, Rabbi Josh Spinner, representing the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, points out that this very building was once the Reichsbank, from which the Holocaust was financed. As we enter, a string quartet, which includes Ambassador Felix Klein, the German Ambassador to Diaspora Jewish Communities, is accompanying Rabbi Zsolt Balla, as he sings “Lo Amut Ki Echyeh.” Between speeches, the quartet plays the music of German Jewish composers, whose work was banned under the Nazis.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, in his last official act in office prior to a German government coalition reshuffle, confers the award on Dayan Ehrentreu. Gabriel begins his speech with a Talmudic adage that one man’s candle provides light for many, and concludes by praising Dayan Ehrentreu for having lit many candles “in a country that had shown its darkest side to you and your family.” Gabriel takes note of Dayan Ehrentreu’s choice to receive the award in Berlin rather than London. That vote of confidence in German democracy, the Foreign Minister says, obligates the modern German state “to do our utmost to keep Jewish life flourishing,” something that can only be done “if we work hand in hand with Jewish institutions... in Germany and abroad.”

In his acceptance speech, Dayan Ehrentreu recalls the thousand-year history of Torah scholarship in Germany. The story of German Jewry, however, was thought to be over after the Holocaust. But now a thriving community has risen from the ashes. He quotes the words of Rabbi Chanina ben Tradyon, in response to the query of his talmidim as to what he saw as he was being burned by the Romans wrapped in a Torah scroll for teaching Torah in public: “The parchment is consumed, but the letters are flying above.”

The message: “The parchment, which is physical, can be destroyed, but the letters, which symbolize the spirit of Torah, are immortal. It is indestructible; it is eternal. Torah will survive. Look at Berlin and the thriving and vibrant Torah community of Adass Jisroel.”

When we adjourn to the Skoblo Family Synagogue and Education Center at 33 Brunnenstrasse, for a reception in Dayan Ehrentreu’s honor, we are greeted by dozens of singing children. I am struck by their chein and enthusiasm.

Only now do I fully appreciate what the Dayan’s constant presence in the life of the community members has meant to them. Rabbi Spinner characterizes his impact as being the source of “moral authority” from the very beginning.

In her speech on behalf of the community, Mrs. Ita Afanesev, whose husband Rabbi Shlomo Afanesev supervises the communal kashrus and gives a shiur at the Rabbinerseminar, refers to an incident 16 years earlier when the yeshivah was under tremendous pressure from the larger community to accept someone who was not halachically Jewish. At stake was all support from the general community. When the question was put to Dayan Ehrentreu, he answered succinctly, “Do the right thing. And the Eibeshter will do the right thing.” Those words have served as the guiding light of the community until today.

A Fateful Meeting

The renaissance of Orthodox Jewish life in Germany can be traced to the vision of businessman and philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder. While serving as US Ambassador to Austria under President Reagan, Lauder had much opportunity to observe the withering away of Jewish communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In 1987, he created the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation to reverse those trends through youth education. From the beginning, Lauder displayed a marked affinity for religious Jews. The late Rabbi Chaskel Besser, for instance, worked for the Foundation as director of its activities in Poland.

In 1997, while in Poland on Foundation business, Lauder happened to meet a young man, Josh Spinner, in a Warsaw hotel. After graduating from Columbia University and spending a year in yeshivah in Israel, Spinner had gone to work with Jewish teens in Belarus. Impressed with Spinner, Lauder called him in Minsk shortly thereafter and invited him to visit the Foundation offices in New York.

In New York, Lauder told Spinner that after his two years in Belarus, he would never be content to be just another corporate lawyer, a pitch that resonated with something Spinner’s father had once told him: “It is impossible to know for sure what one’s life mission is. But if you can find something to do that will not happen without you, that is likely to be it.” Spinner agreed to work for the Foundation as a part-time consultant, while pursuing semichah and looking for a wife.

Lauder was eager for the Foundation to get involved with the large Russian immigrant community in Germany, and over the next three years, Spinner visited many of the smaller communities in Germany that could not afford a rabbi or chazzan on Yamim Tovim. Two factors stood out from his research on German Jewish life. First, there was only one Orthodox rabbi or educator in all of Germany who spoke Russian, even though the decisive majority of German Jews were by then immigrants from the FSU, attracted by Germany’s generous immigrant benefits. And second, there was not a single religious institution or makom Torah — beis medrash, yeshivah, or kollel — in the entire country.

By 2000, Spinner had completed his semichah from Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem and married Joelle, a native German speaker from Zurich, whom he had met in New York when she was working on restitution of Jewish art plundered by the Nazis. The Spinners chose to move to Berlin on behalf of the Lauder Foundation because of the relative youth of the population and its cosmopolitan nature.

Spinner did not begin by trying to build a communal infrastructure, but by creating a yeshivah. The lives of the young Jewish immigrants had been upended by leaving the FSU, and in that state of turmoil there were inevitably those prepared to explore their Judaism in a more intense fashion. The post high-school yeshivah, Beis Zion, opened in 2001 with eight students, and at its peak had forty-five talmidim.

A Midrasha for post-high school young women opened around the same time in Frankfurt, and subsequently moved to Berlin. That move brought one important side benefit to the community. Rabbi Meir Roberg, former headmaster of London’s Hasmonean School and a native of Germany, and his wife Miriam, had taken up positions as senior educators in the Midrasha. With the move to Berlin, the Robergs became “the religious grandparents they never knew” for the community families.

Everyone Makes a Difference

At the gala Leil Shabbos dinner welcoming those in attendance for the opening of the new Lakewood kollel, the talents that first commended Rabbi Spinner to Ronald Lauder are on full display. He welcomes each of the visiting dignitaries — Lakewood Rosh Yeshivah Rav Malkiel Kotler, and Philadelphia Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Sholom Kamenetsky; Howard Tzvi Friedman, chairman of both the Bais Medrash Govoha board of directors and AIPAC, who has arrived together with his brothers from Luzensk; those primarily involved from the BMG side with the establishment of the new kollel — Rabbi Aaron Kotler and Rabbi Sroy Levitansky; and numerous long-time supporters from London, Zurich, and Berlin itself.

But the highlight — at least for me — is a story Rabbi Spinner tells involving Rav Shlomo Wolbe that captures the full magnitude of a yeshivah in Berlin. Two talmidim in the yeshivah were in Eretz Yisrael, and they decided to visit Rav Wolbe, who was himself a native of Berlin. They knocked on his door and identified themselves to the person who answered as “two yeshivah bochurim from Berlin.” Upon receiving the message, Rav Wolbe did not respond immediately. Then he said, “Tell them to return tomorrow.”

The messenger thought that perhaps the Mashgiach, who was hard of hearing, had not understood the message. But the next day when the young men returned, Rav Wolbe explained, “I needed a day to absorb the information that there are yeshivah bochurim in Berlin.”

While a number of the first talmidim in the yeshivah eventually went to Israel for further study, in time more and more graduates of the yeshivah and the Midrasha began to marry and settle in Berlin, where they formed the core of the nascent community.

As a consequence, the Berlin community has always had a strong emphasis on Torah learning. Marcel Bordon, a prominent businessman and marbitz Torah in London, who has been involved with the community from its early days, tells me that what initially attracted him to Berlin (despite the reservations of his parents, both Holocaust survivors) was precisely the eagerness of the community members to learn more Torah. I felt that strongly at our Shabbos day meal with one of the kehillah families. Our host continually pressed his guests for divrei Torah.

At Shalosh Seudos, a native Israeli now teaching in a German university told me, “There are communities that are very welcoming, but they do not place a very great emphasis on Torah. There are others based on the primacy of Torah learning, but they are often not very welcoming. Our community is both.”

Idealism also runs high. Each member of the community feels that his presence there makes a difference, not just for Berlin, but for all of Torah Judaism in Germany.

In a 2012 interview, Rabbi Spinner told Jewish Action that he and his wife have chosen to live in Berlin for the “chinuch banim.” He related how when his oldest daughter was seven, the family traveled to Antwerp for an aufruf for one of the talmidim in the yeshivah. The young girl was very excited by the large numbers of mezuzahs she saw on the doorposts. The next Leil Shabbos in Berlin, she told her parents, “There aren’t many mezuzahs in Berlin. It’s our job to make sure there are more mezuzahs in Berlin.”

“I wouldn’t trade that sense of purpose for anything,” said Rabbi Spinner. “That is chinuch par excellence.”

Too Few Role Models

Today, any young German Jew who becomes religious and wants to stay in Germany is almost certain to settle in Berlin. There are 175 students in the local kindergarten and school, which goes up to 10th grade, with a long waiting list for the kindergarten.

For the school kodesh principal, Rabbi Tzvi Baron, and his wife Penina, Berlin is the latest stop on a long career that has taken them from Israel to Johannesburg and the Ukraine. Upon my return from Berlin, a talmid chacham in my neighborhood tells me that it was Rabbi Baron who first got him excited about Gemara learning 40 years ago in Johannesburg.

The 90 or so families in the Berlin community also serve as the showcase of Orthodox life. Any young German Jew interested in exploring his or her Judaism, from high school students to young professionals, is likely to spend several shabbatons every year in Berlin with the families of the community. And almost all the activities of Lauder Yeshurun, the Foundation’s German kiruv arm, in conjunction with a wide variety of partners, are centered in Berlin.

On Friday morning, Rabbi Andrew Savage, the director of the Lauder Foundation in Germany, and I sit for a couple of hours with the local kiruv professionals, who describe their work. The central challenge that they are all confronting is that most German Jewish communities are not attractive to young Jews: They are too small and the community members are too old to draw the young. Second, the only models of religious Jews to which they have been exposed are either religious functionaries or communal employees of some kind. There are few models of religious balabatim.

As a result, Berlin has become the hub of a virtual community. Older high school students involved in online learning are likely to come to Berlin for a shabbaton at least once a month. And the younger e-learning students also come regularly with their parents for Shabbos, besides for an annual ten-day family seminar.

Only the university student and young-professional program, Morasha, with 15 branches and over 1,000 members around Germany, seeks to develop local communities, with learning programs, regular shabbatons, and summer and winter trips. Berlin is still the largest branch, and has begun its own young minyan on Shabbos.

A New Beginning 

In 2015, both the yeshivah and Midrasha closed their doors. By then, most of those of traditional age for entering the yeshivah were either German-born or had come to Germany from the Former Soviet Union at a very young age. Unlike the immigrant generation of the 1990s, they felt themselves more German than Russian. Because they were more secure in Germany, they were less searching, less open than the preceding generation. As a consequence, enrollment in both the yeshivah and Midrasha dropped sharply.

The closing of the yeshivah was a huge blow for a community that prides itself on its thirst for growth in Torah knowledge. “It definitely seemed like a step backwards,” one community member recalls.

As anyone who has worked with baalei teshuvah from Russian-speaking families knows, they often possess a drive and intensity that allows them to achieve in five years what others cannot in twenty. The yeshivah had produced several Torah scholars of note, including most of the musmachim of the Rabbinerseminar.

The arrival of five Lakewood yungerleit and their wives from America is viewed by the Berlin community as a major event — a renewal of the community’s growth in Torah. A great deal of preparation preceded the opening of the kollel. Much of the groundwork was laid by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky, who serves as a sort of roving ambassador for Beth Medrash Govoha, establishing and advising Lakewood kollelim in numerous communities around the world and across North America.

Rabbi Levitansky shares with me the essence of his philosophy: Above all, the kollel must be one in which the avreichim continue to grow in learning; it cannot be seen as only for the benefit of the local balebatim. A kollel in which the avreichim are shteiging will have a major impact, but that impact is not its primary goal. Thus when a suggestion was raised to limit the initial group of avreichim to four due to financial pressures, Rabbi Levitansky put his foot down because he did not feel that two pairs of chavrusas would be sufficient to foster the growth of the avreichim.

Rabbi Levitansky and the rosh kollel, Rabbi Yaakov Baum, looked for avreichim who could think out of the box and would take the initiative in looking for ways to draw in community members.

And that has happened. The avreichim take turns giving chaburahs every Sunday. Two mishnayos are sent out to every member of the community each morning, and there’s a shiur given on those mishnayos by one of the avreichim every evening.

Rabbi Savage points out that only now are the first boys in the community reaching their teenage years, and it is crucial that they have role models of bnei Torah in front of them and a framework in which to grow to be bnei Torah themselves. As important as the learning of the bochurim is, adds Rabbi Savage, perhaps even more important is their knowing that their fathers are going to the beis medrash to learn with the kolleleit every night.

Rabbi Baum tells me that he was confident of success before coming to Berlin, in large part because of the quality of people laying the groundwork. But he is much more confident now, after five months in Berlin. Most important, he has felt the thirst for Torah. On Sunday morning, the beis medrash is packed, with both fathers and sons, as Rabbi Sholom Kamenetsky provides a taste of yeshivah lomdus in a half hour, pre-Pesach shiur on heseibah (leaning).

When I ask Rabbi Baum about his goals in Berlin, he confides that he dreams of the day when it will seem the most natural thing in the world for a bochur in Mirrer Yeshivah in Jerusalem to identify himself as being from Berlin.

That feeling of being part of something important permeates the weekend. Prior to Maariv on Motzaei Shabbos, the Lakewood Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Malkiel Kotler, addresses the kehillah. He reads from a letter written by the Ridbaz, who preceded his grandfather Rav Aharon Kotler in Slutsk, after he was forced to flee Chicago by train on Shabbos from those who sought to kill him for his efforts to end corruption in the local kashrus.

The Ridbaz writes that he sees no hope for American Jewry. The only possible thing that could save American Jewry by the thousands would be if he and ten hand-picked avreichim could sit and learn without distraction.

“Prepare for five thousand,” Rav Malkiel concludes.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 707)