Dhe cantor of the Jewish community in Berlin, Avitall Gerstetter, who was initially “released” via Facebook, will take legal action against her now officially pronounced dismissal. The letter of dismissal spoke of a “behaviour-related” termination and “serious loss of confidence”. Two weeks before her dismissal, Gerstetter wrote a guest article in WELT, in which she criticized the relationship between converts and “born Jews”.
Gerstetter’s lawyer, Markus Kelber, said: “We currently do not know how the termination should be justified.” inadmissible measure,” said Kelber. When asked by WELT, the Jewish community in Berlin said that Ms. Gerstetter had been fired, but not whether or how her guest post was related to it.
Pioneers among themselves: Germany’s first female Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) with Gesa Ederberg (far left), Berlin’s first female rabbi since the Shoah, and Avitall Gerstetter (front right),… first Jewish female cantor in Europe, in the New Synagogue in Berlin
Source: pa/dpa/Christoph Soeder
Specifically, in her WELT article, Gerstetter had problematized what she saw as an increasing disparity between converts and “born Jews” in German communities and especially in high community offices. Over the past three decades, the proportion of so-called “Giurim”, i.e. people who have converted to Judaism, has increased to up to 80 percent in some prayer communities, wrote Gerstetter. Thus, in some places only 20 percent of those praying in a synagogue actually grew up in the spirit of the millennia-old Jewish traditions and were not only taught about them as adults.
“Every Jewish tradition that has grown over many generations seems hardly affordable, especially since rabbis and cantors have often only converted late,” wrote Gerstetter. The imparting of Jewish knowledge is therefore often rather rational and abstract, which is why she criticized it.
The rabbi of Gerstetter’s synagogue on Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse, Gesa Ederberg, is a convert herself. Whether Ederberg played a role in Gerstetter’s dismissal cannot yet be said on the basis of publicly available documents.
Gerstetter compares “trans-Jewish” with “salon anti-Semites”
In this context, WELT is only aware of an e-mail from Ederberg, which she sent to community members on August 16 via a mailing list. In it she informed about Gerstetter’s release – and shared a link to a public folder in which, among other things, Gerstetter’s WELT contribution was available as a PDF. Other content that was added to the folder in the days that followed are letters from parishioners who accused Gerstetter of venting their criticism to a broad public. Some went so far as to accuse Gerstetter of “elitist separatism” and “bully” behavior. According to the folder, converts in particular felt offended by Gerstetter’s contribution.
A convert from Frankfurt am Main, who according to her own statements was born into a Protestant family in 1965 and has been “officially Jewish” since 1996, put her contribution in the folder under the heading “Jews with a migration background out?”. Among them, she assumed that Gerstetter’s criticism of the urging of Christian-German converts into rabbi positions was similar to the “bourgeois educated salon anti-Semitism” of the 19th century. The author wrote about herself that, despite her conversion in 1996, she had “in reality always been” a Jew: “I am a trans Jew. I have not ‘converted’, I have merely publicly attested to my true identity.” In the next line, the author herself tried to compare it with people who “free themselves” from the “wrong biological sex”.
The author went on to write: “The fact that I and the others who feel the same way want to ‘compensate’ an SS grandfather (…) is a statement (…) like ‘Foreigners only come to Germany for social benefits to parasite’” – nothing more could be said about it. In her WELT contribution, Avitall Gerstetter also discussed various reasons that could motivate people to convert. One of them, which was subsequently discussed in a particularly controversial manner, was the desire to arrive on the “right side” of history after the German crime against humanity and to switch from the group of perpetrators to the group of victims. Gerstetter called this “conversion of indulgences”.
Avitall Gerstetter
Source: pa/dpa/epd-Pool/Christian Ditsch
People known to a part of the public are also represented with contributions in the folder shared by Ederberg. The folder also contains an article by the author Esther Scheiner, in which she dismisses Gerstetter’s projects for interreligious understanding, such as a cross-religious football tournament, as “nice attempts” and describes their criticism as cheeky and arrogant. Scheiner has also written in the past for the online medium “Die Freie Welt”, which is run by the husband of AfD politician Beatrix von Storch.
When asked by WELT, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, expressed reservations about the controversy opened by Gerstetter. “Conversions to Judaism have always existed,” said Schuster; they are more widespread in liberal than in traditional Judaism. But he would not speak of a disproportion. However, Schuster also expressed skepticism when it came to the question of religious offices being held by converts: He was “rather reserved. It can certainly lead to problems,” said Schuster.
“Being Jewish is not only a question of status, but also a question of young people’s socialization, which cannot be learned easily,” explained Schuster. Nevertheless, caution is advised when making “generalizations”. “The fact that Judaism with a Christian character would emerge as such is going too far,” said the chairman of the Central Council.
Gerstetter has received public support – again in a WELT contribution – from Rabbi Walter Rothschild. There he wrote that in the liberal Jewish communities there was an above-average proportion of converts “who took on leadership roles even though they had little personal experience”.
It was precisely the Causa Homolka, according to Rothschild, that “revealed what many already knew: that this process has reached a stage where converts convert other converts.” decreed were actively excluded. Walter Homolka, longtime director of rabbinical training in Potsdam and himself a convert, was recently criticized for abuse of power and covering up sexual assaults.
Rabbi Ederberg 2013: “Conversion highly problematic”
Rothschild’s final judgment was drastic: “The converts told the Jews what to think, how to pray, how to practice, and what to do.”
Ederberg urged
What: pa/dpa/Christophe Gateau
Possibly this leads to the center of the controversy surrounding Avitall Gerstetter, who, being a Jew, was released from a synagogue in which Gesa Ederberg, a converted rabbi from a non-Jewish household, officiates. Gerstetter was probably dismissed because she had publicly criticized the shift in the composition of the community and the balance of power in favor of converted Jews.
Spicy: WELT has statements from Ederberg from 2013 in which she expresses exactly the same concerns that Gerstetter formulated in her allegedly relevant WELT article. In an email exchange in which Ederberg was asked about the motives for her conversion, she explained her point of view. Accordingly, she also considers conversions in Germany to be problematic, she often met people who wanted to convert for the wrong motive, and the numerical ratio between converts and non-converts in the synagogue Oranienburger Straße and most other synagogues in Berlin was unbalanced. The difference to Gerstetter: Ederberg never made these concerns public.
How the Jewish community in Berlin evaluated these statements by Ederberg, which were presented to them in the form of quotations but not as a complete e-mail correspondence, could not be found out from their press spokesman. “In order to be able to evaluate the alleged quotes from Rabbi Ederberg,” one needs the complete correspondence, not just the quoted excerpts, he said.
