Behind the Headlines: German Jewish Leader is Mourned As One Who Warned and Reached out

A man who witnessed the near destruction of German Jewry in the Holocaust, but survived to help preside over its renaissance died last Friday at the age of 72.

In keeping with his wishes, Ignatz Bubis, the outspoken and respected leader of Germany’s Jewish community, was buried Sunday in Tel Aviv.

That he chose to be buried in Israel, rather than in Germany, illustrates a failure he said he felt toward the end of his life — the failure to convince his fellow Germans that they cannot escape their past, but bear a unique responsibility to be a light unto other nations in remembering and preventing another Holocaust.

Bubis’ death came weeks after he said he would rather be buried in Israel than in Germany because he feared that his grave would be desecrated like that of his predecessor, Heinz Galinski.

On Sunday, his request was fulfilled in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv, where German President Johannes Rau and Israeli President Ezer Weizman led some 200 mourners at his funeral.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany reported that Bubis died at a hospital in his home city of Frankfurt. The exact cause of death was not given, but Bubis had suffered a series of illnesses in recent months. He is survived by his wife, Ida, and their daughter, Naomi Ann.

Across the nation, Bubis was mourned as a man who brought his own experience as a Holocaust survivor to bear on behalf of all minority groups in Germany.

In Berlin, the public was invited to write words of condolence in a book in the Jewish community center. Flowers were placed there and at another Jewish center.

Because he survived the Holocaust, part of Bubis’ job was to warn his fellow Germans not to stray down the path of intolerance again. But he was also one of those eyewitnesses whose jobs have been increasingly replaced by memorial stones and museums.

Germans are marking with fanfare their metamorphosis into a phase when they’re not branded by the crimes of their elders. They want to be considered a normal nation, even using the term “Never Again Auschwitz” as a slogan behind which their soldiers joined the NATO forces in Kosovo.

When Bubis believed his fellow citizens had failed to learn from their tragic history, he blamed himself.

“I am ashamed for you,” he said from a podium in Berlin when neo-Nazis threw stones and tomatoes at Germans demonstrating against racism in 1992.

“All decent Germans carry his message in their hearts,” wrote the journalist Volker Mueller.

Jewish leaders in Germany and abroad and German politicians from across the political spectrum — some of whom had verbally sparred with Bubis — mourned his death.

Although Bubis recently expressed sadness about the gaps between Jews and non- Jews in Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Germany had lost someone who “helped to make it possible for fellow Jewish citizens to again see a future in Germany.”

Today, through immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, Germany’s Jewish community has more than doubled to 75,000 since Bubis took leadership of the German Jewish community in 1992.

“The death of Ignatz Bubis leaves a great gap that will be very hard to fill,” said Andreas Nachama, the head of Berlin’s Jewish community, in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

He said Bubis had warned with one hand and reached out with the other.

In fact, despite the fact that he often stood at odds with Bubis, Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen mourned the loss of a “personal adviser.” Diepgen had fought bitterly against the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which Bubis had backed.

Newly appointed German President Johannes Rau called Bubis a fighter for democracy “who dedicated his life to making sure the shadow of German history would not extend over the future.” He said Bubis was “a German patriot.”

Bubis was known for being outspoken when he believed his fellow citizens needed to be criticized. Last year he took German writer Martin Walser, expressing an opinion held by many postwar Germans, to task for saying it was time to stop using the term “Auschwitz” as a whip against Germany.

Be it in favor of the integration of new citizens, or against right-wing extremism, Bubis let his opinion be known.

In 1996, he met with Yasser Arafat in Germany, where he asked the Palestinian leader to have more patience in the struggle for peace.

Bubis said he supported a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, but not at the expense of protecting the memorials at concentration camp sites. Germany’s culture minister, Michael Naumann, recently promised to nearly double the funding available to such memorials.

Bubis, who was born in 1927 in Breslau — now Wroclaw, Poland, but then a part of Germany — lost his father and two siblings in the Holocaust. He was liberated from a labor camp in 1945 by the Russian army and called his survival an accident. He later settled in Frankfurt, where he became a successful, if sometimes controversial, real estate investor.

In 1985, Bubis and other members of the Frankfurt Jewish Community prevented the performance of a play called “Garbage, the City and Death,” in which one character, “the rich Jew,” was rumored to be modeled after Bubis.

Always active in Jewish communal life, Bubis said his goal as head of the Central Council was to focus on the problems of today. But, as the generations drifted into the future, he increasingly found himself grappling with issues the past.

Bubis’ most recent words — presaging his own death — chilled many Germans to the core and reminded them that for many members of Bubis’ generation, the wounds of the past have not healed.

In what would be his last major interview, published last month in the newsweekly Stern, Bubis lamented that he had not helped close the gap between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.

Supporters and critics alike rushed to contradict him, noting, among other things, that Bubis had already achieved much during his seven years as president of the Jewish community.