The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

ORTHODOX JEWS DECRY DEVELOPMENT OF FORMER HAMBURG CEMETERY

By
May 10, 1992 at 1:00 a.m. EDT

BERLIN, MAY 9 -- The TV pictures were, as the German anchorman pointed out, uniquely disturbing: Orthodox Jewish men wearing black hats and coats being dragged across a street by German police.

"These are pictures that stir terrible memories -- German policemen taking away Jews," the anchorman said.

The scene was Hamburg, last week, at a construction site beneath which lies a 350-year-old Jewish cemetery that has become the subject of a stubborn controversy involving 11 U.S. senators, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, a besieged and bewildered developer, a frustrated city government and Germany's own tiny Jewish community.

The controversy has built for more than six months, and the well of goodwill on all sides is emptying. It is a classic clash of property law vs. God's law. German law says the construction site belongs to the developer. Jewish law says any land used for a cemetery belongs for eternity to the dead buried there.

The conflict of German vs. Jew in the battle over the Ottensen Cemetery has turned the argument into an especially painful confrontation, fraught with emotion and historical resonance.

The facts are simple: A Hamburg developer, Buell and Liedtke, bought property in 1988 for a $200 million shopping center with a department store, a movie theater and a cafe. The site looked like an empty lot. But for three centuries, it was a Jewish cemetery containing 4,000 graves. During the Nazi period, the government destroyed the gravestones, took the land and built two air-raid shelters there.

After the war, the land was returned to Hamburg's surviving Jewish community, which in turn sold it in 1953 to Hertie, a department store chain. When Hertie built its store on part of the former cemetery, it agreed to have any bits of gravestones or bones found during the construction work exhumed and removed to another Jewish cemetery under rabbinical supervision.

There was no uproar then.

But when Buell and Liedtke tried to begin construction on a larger piece of the old cemetery late last year, Orthodox Jews from Israel, Britain, Belgium and the United States protested to protect the souls of the dead from disturbance by the developer's bulldozers.

Throughout the early months of this year, every time Buell and Liedtke tried to start work on its shopping center, Jewish students from London, Jerusalem and Antwerp, Belgium, forced their way onto the property and tried to block the bulldozers. The developers put up a tall fence; the Jews went to court.

"For us, disturbing the rest of the dead is nearly like killing a person," said Rabbi Israel Weingarten, dean of a Talmudic college in Belgium and an official of the Society for the Preservation of Jewish Holy Sites. "Jewish law says that when a man dies, his body still has a living spirit that stays with him. Land for a cemetery is given to the dead forever."

The court challenge to the shopping center plan failed, so the opponents -- an ad hoc coalition of German environmentalists, small business owners and Jews from around the world -- turned up the political heat.

Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.), joined by 10 other senators, wrote to Kohl, recognizing that this was a local issue but urging him to "use your moral and political stature to bring about a suitable resolution to this difficult and emotional situation."

Wednesday, D'Amato received Kohl's reply: "I have always worked actively toward understanding between Jews and Germans. The former Ottensen Cemetery is the responsibility of the state of Hamburg. . . . I hope you will appreciate that the federal government, which you have asked for support, does not have the legal or actual powers to become involved in this matter."

A spokesman for D'Amato said Kohl's reply "fails to take into account the moral authority his office can provide by weighing in on this issue."

In Hamburg, city spokesman Reimer Rohde agreed. "The chancellor is trying to make this a Hamburg problem, which it isn't," he said. "It's an all-German issue, a legacy of Nazi rule. We in Hamburg have tried for decades to honor the memory of our Jewish population. We rebuilt the main synagogue burned by the Nazis."

Rohde said the city has tried valiantly to mediate the dispute. "You have to realize," he said, "that since the Nazis destroyed it, there has been no obvious evidence of a cemetery on this site. It existed only in memories and archives. The developer has tolerated a great deal. He tolerated the protesters, he built and paid for the fence, he waited months before calling in the police. And he has lost $25,000 for every day when he could not build."

Last month, an appeals court told the developer he could go ahead with construction. Last week, when work resumed, Jewish protesters broke through police lines to protect the sacred site. Hamburg police dragged at least nine demonstrators away and held them for several hours.

"These were of course frightful images," Rohde said. "But the police have their job to do too. It just looks especially terrible because of our history. You can be assured the police used a minimum of force. We know the world watches and judges us differently."

The arrests were exactly what Germany's official Jewish community had warned against when the group's chairman, Heinz Galinski, appealed last month to Jews around the world to stay out of the Hamburg dispute. Galinski said the presence of Jewish protesters would "create a political windfall for the destructive forces regaining strength in this country," a reference to recent successes by far-right political parties.

Germany's Jewish community, which is supported by tax money, is a partner in a compromise agreed to by the developer and the city: Build the shopping center, and the developer will pay for the removal of any remains to another Jewish cemetery, under rabbinical supervision.

But the Orthodox Jews leading the protests reject that solution.

"Impossible," Weingarten said. "Over so many years, bones and skulls break and get to be like dust. It's a violation of Jewish law to move them in that condition."

Next week, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem will visit Hamburg in an attempt to determine whether the removal of the remains can be achieved within religious law.

"Then we will see if there is any way to find a compromise with the fundamentalist, ultra-Orthodox Jews," Rohde said. "Of course, it's very hard to reach a compromise with fundamentalists. That's their nature."

Rohde said the cemetery dispute has become "an inter-Jewish controversy between German Jews and fundamentalists."

Weingarten said his group is not "fundamentalist" and cited support from the World Jewish Congress and British and American politicians as evidence that "this is about respect for the dead of any religion, not just about Orthodox Jews."

Weingarten said the willingness of the German Jewish community to accept the interment of remains shows only that "these Jews are afraid of losing the money and privileges they get from the German government. They don't want to be a problem."

Developer Peter Voss, manager of Buell and Liedtke, has said he is open to another solution. He will sell the site to anyone who pays him $30 million. And the city of Hamburg announced that if Jews put up the bulk of the money, the city will contribute to the purchase.

But Hamburg's Jewish community denounced that idea, saying that large a sum should be spent on the living, not the dead. And the foreign Jewish groups involved in the protests say they do not have that kind of money.

The stalemate continues. After months of ignoring the issue, the German media have become intrigued by the seemingly insoluble battle.

Thursday, former chancellor Helmut Schmidt issued a front-page appeal in the opinion weekly Die Zeit, headlined "Remember." He called the images of police wrestling with Jews "unacceptable. The bones that still lie underground must be granted their rest by the descendants of those who robbed them of it."