Germany

If anyone has any connections to either Jewish book publishers/agents or publishers who would be interested in my young German converts topic (see post), please, please contact me as soon as possible. I really think that this topic is under-covered, and both Germany and the worldwide Jewish community could benefit from such a book.

**Note: I’d like to preface this post by telling you just how long and hard I’ve worked on this article. I have been working on it ever since my trip to Germany in August, and I ended up amassing over 10,000 words of material, which I’d like to hone into a book proposal (**any tips on that??**). This is the 3,500-word version that appears on the front page of this week’s Jewish Week. I hope you enjoy, and I’d LOVE to hear any reactions.**

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Bernd Wollschlaeger, carrying the Torah, broke from his parents to become a Jew. His father, left, fought for the Nazis.

Trekking through ice-coated fields in a brutally cold Russian October, Lt. Arthur Wollschlaeger pressed on, as he and his swastika-emblazoned companions conquered the western Russian city of Orel — another victory for the unrelenting German Werhmacht infantry. He had earlier taken part in invasions of Poland, Holland and France — a World War II military career that began when he first entered the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, in 1938.

Half a century later, 30-year-old Bernd Wollschlaeger — Arthur’s son — trudged through olive fields in his Israeli Defense Forces convoy, a new M-16 slung over his shoulder as his unit approached Ramallah and set out to guard Israeli settlers living on the West Bank.

“I was a soldier very much like my father,” the younger Wollschlaeger, now 50, wrote in his self-published 2007 memoir, “A German Life: Against All Odds, Change is Possible.” He has been a Jew for 23 years.

Wollschlaeger, who grew up in a staunchly nationalist and Catholic home in Bamburg, Germany, first became fascinated with Judaism when he peered inquisitively at a six-pointed star that decorated an apartment near his dentist’s office. It was part of that town’s tiny Jewish community, he would later learn.

But the first incident to really ignite his passion for Judaism was the terror attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a moment that shook Germany back to the largely unspoken atrocities of World War II.

Though pockets of Germans have been converting to Judaism since the end of World War II, Wollschlaeger is an early member of a little-studied second wave of predominantly liberal German converts, a small but growing group now two or three generations removed from the Holocaust. Local rabbis estimate that each year hundreds of Germans convert to Judaism.

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