jews and jewish education in germany today - The Westbury Group

synagogue to meet the people and that maybe bring them in. I think we should look deeper at the American
models of JCC. If people want to do fitness, so let them do Jewish fitness. I just had in mind the JCC
Manhattan which provides everything and that’s maybe an important issue. It provides these things on a very
high level and high quality level and that’s something we need to do. We need to use what’s there in general
knowledge, in general resources. Let me give you one example with our Masorti kindergarten in Berlin. I
want it to be a Jewish kindergarten, but even more so I want it to be a good kindergarten. The parents might
not be able to judge the quality of Jewish education, but they can compare it with a non-Jewish kindergarten
next door. We need to have an image, we need to have a café, which is first and foremost a great café that
also happens to be kosher. If the newspapers on the racks happen to be mostly Jewish newspapers, fine, but it
also needs to be a great café and the cake needs to be delicious. So, that’s a very primitive example maybe,
but I think that’s a way of bringing people in, too. We have to invest into quality. And so with the
kindergartens and schools, it’s exactly the same thing. The parents who make the choice, they have to feel it.
And even for myself, if the Jewish school would be a bad school, I would not choose it. So here in Berlin, we
are lucky the primary school is a good school and the high school is as well, but it’s not yet excellent, so it
still needs work.
(Specific questions conc. The Masorti Centre Berlin)
● Could you just give a short overview about the Genesis and how it came to get established? Who are the
people behind it? When did it get started? And what is the main target group?
Masorti Germany was originally founded in July 2002, as a non-profit organization registered with the clear
goal to bring Jewish education and Jewish content from a Masorti perspective into Germany. So it’s less
lobbying for the Masorti movement, although this is a small part of it. As opposed to the Reform movement,
we have decided that we want to be an educational institution and not so much a political lobbying
institution. We have several key focuses of which some of them have been more successful than others: The
first goal was to establish a “Lehrhaus” (Beit Midrasch) in the broad sense for Jewish adults, which we
started small and it remained small.
At that time several educational initiatives for Jewish adults started in Berlin, so it was logical that the group
didn’t expand that much. It was also my experience with the years that adult education is important, but it is
not the key element for Community building. So we switched the emphasis to working with young families,
opened the kindergarten and pre-school and nursery. It’s for all Jewish girls and boys between 1 and 6,
starting with seven children in 2004. There are now 45 children enrolled and another 40 children on the
waiting list. With another 40 children on the waiting list, we are thinking about new premises, for example to
open another kindergarten. We want to keep that one small because the family education aspect is important.
The kindergarten offers full-time (8 a.m. to 5 p.m.) care, there is a mother’s group, there is some adult
education, and there is counseling. So it’s really going into family education and we want to deepen it.
● Counseling in general?
Family counseling, yes. There is a strong connection also between the kindergarten and the synagogue
Oranienburger Strasse 6 which is because some families belong to both.
For example, next week we will celebrate Lag ba Omer together as a joint activity. Another joint undertaking
which we did and which we need to do much more in future is publications, educational material. And then
we have a series of seminars on a national and international level; sending people for adult education to
London, to Paris, bringing people in from Hungary, from Leipzig, from Paris, and this is something what we
want to extend.
6 Synagogue Oranienburger Straße: Liberal-Conservative egalitarian minyan in the middle of Berlin; a synagogue
Community inside the Berliner Einheitsgemeinde (United Berlin Jewish Community).
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