There is a little-known item of history linked to this town, scene of the romantic operetta “The Student Prince.” This is the station for the U.S. Army’s senior Jewish chaplain in Europe, Lt. Col. Philip Silverstein.
During Hitler’s regime, the Protestant Bishop Germann Maas defied the Nazis by speaking in defense of the Jews, and the people here helped their Jewish brethren as best they could.
Today, a few of the Germans and the Americans now stationed here paradoxically defending a onetime enemy, recognize the historic irony being played out on Heidelber’s fabled streets.
That tableau is unusual, but so are many things about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) mission and the American “Rabbis in Uniform,” the chaplains who bring Yahadut (Jewishness and Jewish spirit re-born) in Europe as they minister to U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy men and women of all faiths, far from Main Street America.
JWB-CJC IS ONE OF THREE ENDORSING AGENCIES
JWB is one of three “endorising agencies” recognized by the Department of Defense in molding its chaplains corps for U.S. armed forces at home and abroad. JWB’s CJC represents the American Jewish community with honor and distinction in faraway places where Jewish roots are often thin and bruised by history. In modern and medieval times, Germany is such a place.
The presence of the Jewish chaplain underscores for all American Jews the equality of faiths in America-Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. It demands unusual men in uniform to fill the assignment in this unusual American “discipline.”
Chaplain Silverstein is one such unusual man. Recently arrived here from Korea, he played a key leadership role in building what reputedly is the first U.S. synagogue in that far-off oriental place.
Adinah, his wife, is a Korean convert to Judaism. Like many other chaplains’ wives, she helps to run the many programs here in Heidelberg which flow from his desk as they do from every chaplain’s office wherever U.S. troops are stationed. In postwar Germany today, these programs have special implications.
Meria, their five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, will probably be attending a French school across the border as part of her already multi-cultural, broad-scale education.
Heidelberg is the headquarters, U.S. Army Europe (USAEUR) and the U.S. Seventh Army. Germany today is the geographical linchpin in Free Europe. NATO forces in Europe are garrisoned in strength here, the main roadblock to any possible Soviet attempt to subjugate the 250 million people of Free Europe. In all this, American society, and its Jewish component as well, have special visibility. The U.S. is seen as the land of equality, strength, success and freedom, by most Europeans, and especially in now-democratic West Germany.
AMERICAN CHAPLAINS SEEN IN SPECIAL ROLE
American chaplains — Protestan, Catholic, Jewish — have a special role here Europe is a religion-centered (if not religious) society in both governmental and social attitudes.
In Europe, government funds religion with taxes. It follows that religious leaders have special visibility. For Americans here, their chaplains have such a visible posture in the surrounding society, taken for granted in a place like West Germany.
While serving the American soldier, sailor, airman and airwoman and their families as well as thousands of U.S. civilians who are part of the military services, the chaplains of all faiths are noteworthy. For the Jewish community, American or German, there is a posture of importance over here.
Chaplain Silverstein analyzes it this way:
“Even if there were not one Jewish soldier, we would still need the 24 Jewish chaplains in the Army to explain what American means. Because nobody can believe it. In America, there is not religious ‘sufferance,’ there is religious equality. You don’t really have it over here.”
CHOPPER WHISKS US TO MEET MISSILE COMMANDER
By helicopter — a UHIH “chopper” — we skimmed the treetops to fly from Heidelberg to Kreuzberg to meet Brig Gen. Walter Kastenmeyer, a tall, lean, gray-haired officer with blue shell rim glasses and acute intelligence. The general was dressed in an Army camouflage uniform. He is commander of the 200th TAMMC (Theater Army Material Management Center). Nowadays, missile systems are the specialty of TAMMC.
But the forward march of chaplaincy services are close to his mind and heart.
He has called for broader and wider support for chaplaincy services of all kinds.
“We need to be nudged,” he said, in urging more services and concern for the individual soldiers, male or female, far from their American homes.
NATO GOVERNED BY “STATUS OF FORCES” PACTS
In Europe, the military is often organized into large “communities,” alongside its military missions. These virtually self-contained communities are provided with living services (housing, supply, base exchanges, human services, etc.) in an environment sometimes far, sometimes near (but never integrated) to the local “economy.” Local-guest relationships in NATO are regulated by detailed “status of forces” agreements within each country.
Within this transplanted American military society, Jewish servicemen-women seek their places with other religious groups. In this, the chaplain is both catalyst and prime mover.
Lt. Col. Peter (Pete) Gleichenhaus, 45, executive officer of the deputy-commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army Europe, earlier in Heidelberg, had emphasized the need for whole networks of Jewish “lay leaders.” These lay leaders selected by the chaplains who are so few in number, bring the continuum of Jewish religious culture to the far-flung and lonely areas.
“If, in fact it is important for Jews in the armed forces to retain their Jewishness and also just as important for concerned Jews in civilian life to retain our Jewishness, then we must find wider and better ways to support those wearing the U.S. uniform.
“Not enough is being done,” Col. Gleichenhaus insisted, “for the soldier, his family and his children in terms of continual Jewish nourishment by religious, cultural and educational services.
“The soldier in Fulda cannot go to a synagogue. Somehow a synagogue has to be brought to him, his family and the other men and families nearby.”
NO CHAPLAIN CAN REACH EVERY JEW
With his array of duties and the vast distances separating him from his “congregation,” no chaplain on his own can cover every Jewish person or family.
That is why the “lay leader,” appointed by and responsible to the chaplain (an important chain-of-responsiblity relationship) is a program that needs to be pushed harder and harder. There is no other way to “cover” the scattered, Jewish military “Diaspora.” Chaplains of other faiths, with their “flock” more concentrated, do not face the same challenge the Jewish chaplains do.
Paul Ellenbogen, a civilian lay leader whose official job is chief court reporter at Headquarters, USAEUR, focused on a key issue:
“Jewish identity is the real problem over here, preserving it and strengthening it.”
Lt. Col. William L. Brigadier (his name, not his rank), whose specialty is keeping the latest modern missiles at-the-ready, is an “army brat” who grew up to be an officer with key responsibilities and Jewish “lay leader” at a Kreuzberg “kaserne” (military community). He is sensitive to the varying needs in, and out, of the field. Jewish chaplains are spread thin, a “congregation” may be strung out over 300 military stations.
“This is a new army with new kinds of people,” he said — including chaplains. He is disturbed that some gentile chaplains, fine fellows in every other respect, just do not, or cannot, deliver “non-denominational prayers” at public military meetings where all faiths are gathered.
“NON-DENOMINATIONAL” SENSITIVITY OFTEN OVERLOOKED
This “non-denominational” program is recognized and repected in most instances of civilian, interfaith public meetings. Apparently, this sensitivity is often overlooked in the military, where chaplains of all kinds of educational background are found.
Perhaps the Chaplains School at Fort Monmouth, N.J., is the place to impart guidance for such interfaith delicacy. When that happens, a combat officer of sensitivity, Brigadier by name, will deserve the real credit.
For the young Jew overseas in uniform or in civilian-military connection, the Jewish chaplain and the support network of JWBCJC is a spiritual safety net set before him.
Next: Chaplains and Surgeons
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
