August 18, 2017 — Wittenberg, Germany
AJC and Germany Close Up (GCU) co-sponsored a two-day seminar in Wittenberg, Germany for young American Jews and German Christians to study and reflect upon Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish legacy and productive Christian denominational efforts to grapple with his anti-Judaism during the recent decades of Christian-Jewish dialogue.
Wittenberg is the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, traditionally associated with Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses to a local church door, on October 31, 1517, 500 years ago.
GCU has been introducing young American Jews to Germany since 2007, and ACCESS, AJC’s global Young Leadership Program, has been partnering with GCU since the latter’s inception. ACCESS co-sponsors with GCU several programs annually that connect young Jewish leaders to thought leaders and decision makers in Germany, for dialogue and relationship building. This is the fifth time that an interreligious theme has been incorporated into an AJC-GCU trip. Among the twenty young American leaders were nine Goldman Fellows who just completed nine-week summer fellowships at AJC offices around the world.
While in Wittenberg, the young Christians and Jews studied together with Jewish and Christian religious and academic leaders who presented on European medieval anti-Jewish church art; Luther’s anti-Jewish texts; the embrace of his teachings by modern antisemites; and recent Lutheran church texts that enunciated a clear positive change in attitudes towards Jews and Judaism.
“Interreligious dialogue has special meaning when advanced in the context of the German-Christian milieu that includes both a history of persecution of Jews and the groundbreaking Christian-Jewish understanding of recent decades,” said Rabbi Noam Marans, AJC’s Director of Interreligious and Intergroup Relations, who led the AJC delegation and presented at the seminar. “Wittenberg is a particularly poignant place to have these conversations.”
As part of their introduction to modern Germany, the young American Jews visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and met with representatives of the Bundestag and Foreign Office.
AJC’s Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations in Berlin was founded in 1998.
