Conversion debate roils German Jewish community

JTA – Jews in Germany have been shaken this summer by a diminutive cantor with a big voice. But not in the way one might think.

True, Avitall Gerstetter has one powerful set of pipes, as anyone who has heard her lead services at Berlin’s Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue can testify.

But now, Gerstetter – the first German-born female cantor – is a persona non grata in that very sanctuary in former East Berlin after she penned a column critical of conversion in Germany in Die Welt, a major German newspaper.

In the column, titled, “Why the increasing number of converts is a problem for Judaism,” Gerstetter charged that too many people in Germany convert for the wrong reasons – such as to atone for their family’s Nazi past or to identify with the victims rather than perpetrators – and she criticised the fact that converts fill numerous Jewish leadership roles in Germany.

“I know that one shouldn’t talk about the giur,” Gerstetter wrote, using the Hebrew word for convert and citing Jewish law’s frowning on differentiation between converts and people who were born Jewish.

“But can this be true always and everywhere?” she asked. “The very large number of new Jews has led to a considerable change in Jewish life in Germany. In some services and during some speeches, I feel more reminded of an interreligious event than of the visit to the synagogue I have been familiar with since childhood.”

In the synagogue where she worked for two decades, her column hit hard. Its rabbi, Gesa Ederberg, converted to Judaism while studying at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary in 1995. A number of synagogue regulars have converted as well. Many perceived Gerstetter’s column as a personal attack.

Ederberg said Gerstetter raised important questions. “The phenomenon of so many converts in Germany is a really interesting and sometimes problematic phenomenon,” Ederberg said. “Being conscious and open about it is something that’s required of people who have converted, including myself.”

But Gerstetter was negative about most conversions, Ederberg noted, asking, “How can she lead our prayers if this is how she feels?”

A few days after the column ran, a post appeared on the synagogue’s Facebook page announcing that Gerstetter had been “released from her duties by the Jewish Community of Berlin until further notice”.

There was no explanation included, but the synagogue’s Facebook page also posted a separate statement on the same day emphasising that it “welcomes all worshippers, regardless of whether they were born Jewish or converted”.

Gerstetter is planning legal action against the Jewish Community of Berlin over her dismissal.

Gerstetter laid out two arguments in her column. First, she said that though conversion had helped revitalise the post-Holocaust Jewish community, the number of converts had “risen sharply” in the past three decades, and Jewish communities had been too quick to approve some conversions.

Those with Jewish fathers have a legitimate reason to convert, she said. But others, she said, may be motivated by a disconnect from the faiths of their parents, or – in a uniquely German twist – by a “wish to be allowed to switch to ‘the other side’, from the perpetrator’s family to a new, Jewish family construct as a bizarre form of abstract reparation”.

What’s more, Gerstetter argued, too many of the new converts are becoming rabbis and community leaders, leading to what she said was a Judaism not steeped in experience and tradition, but rather “a theoretical Judaism, almost an entirely new religion”, one that she called “soulless”.

Many German Jews reject Gerstetter’s contention that converts are attenuating the country’s Jewish community and character.

“To speak of a growing problem is out of the question,” said Rabbi Andreas Nachama, who heads the General Rabbinical Conference, or ARK, Germany’s progressive rabbinical body.

And “to speak of a ‘dilution’ is generally forbidden for ethical reasons alone and is an impertinence”, Nachama said, on behalf of the ARK. “All in all, gerim [converts] are an enrichment for communities.”

But others say Gerstetter has a point. Conversions “have gone out of proportion. It’s a symptom of trauma for both sides,” said Barbara Steiner, a historian and therapist whose 2015 book, Die Inszenierung des Jüdischen (The Staging of Jewishness), examines the conversion of Germans to Judaism after 1945.

Though it’s impossible to pin down the number of Jewish converts in Germany today, official records suggest that they make up only a small proportion of the overall Jewish population.

In all, there are about 100 000 members of Jewish communities under the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and as many more who aren’t affiliated. A great majority are Jews who arrived from the former Soviet Union since 1990.

Within the past 21 years, 1 697 people converted in, according to the Central Welfare Board of Jews in Germany, an average of about 80 people a year over that period. In 2021, a total of 43 conversions were completed, and of those, the majority were Orthodox, according to a source close to the Orthodox beit din, or Jewish religious court.

The question of how many of those converts have assumed formal leadership positions in their communities is even harder to answer. Whether that matters is core to the dispute Gerstetter brought to the fore with her column.

Published with permission from jta.org