Cantor Jennifer Bern-Vogel was used to hearing her mother tell the story.
On the evening of Nov. 9, 1938, her mother, then Marianne Katzenstein, who was 16 at the time, was in her family’s synagogue in Bielefeld, Germany, practising the organ. She finished up, used a key to lock the building and returned home. Later that night, the synagogue was burned to the ground by the Nazis in the Kristallnacht pogrom.
Only two items survived the fire: a Torah scroll and Katzenstein’s key.
“I just remember her talking about it, her voice would change and she was just kind of slower and softer and very nostalgic when she talked about the whole story,” Bern-Vogel, 67, said in an interview. “Whenever she told the story and then held up the key, people always — and I experienced it myself — there was always this kind of gasp.”
Bern-Vogel, who has been the cantor at Congregation Emanu El in Redlands, Calif., since 2009, said the story of the key was “legendary” in her family.
And on Saturday, 86 years after Kristallnacht, the key returned home.
Bern-Vogel spent the past week in Germany, where she had lived for more than a decade when she was younger, reconnecting with friends, family and the Jewish community of Bielefeld, where the synagogue was reestablished shortly after the Holocaust. It was her first trip to Bielefeld with her husband and daughter, and her brother and niece, as well as a cousin from Denmark, also flew in for the occasion.
On Friday night, Bern-Vogel and the cantor of the Bielefeld synagogue led Shabbat services together. Bern-Vogel sang a song that was adapted from a poem written by her grandfather, with music composed by a longtime friend from Germany.
And following Havdalah on Saturday, the town held a ceremony that began at the site of the destroyed synagogue before moving to City Hall, where the official hand-off was made. The key was added to the collection of the town’s history museum and will be on display at the current synagogue building.
According to Irith Michelsohn, the president of the town’s Jewish community and of Germany’s Progressive Jewish movement, Bielefeld’s Jewish community has 450 members. The synagogue the community uses now was renovated from an old Protestant church and was inaugurated in 2008.
Prior to the Holocaust, Bielefeld was home to almost 1,000 Jews, Michelsohn said. The community has been revitalised since Michelsohn took the helm on Jan. 1, 2000, at which point she said there were only 35 members.
Michelsohn said the key’s return is immensely meaningful to the community.
“I was so excited, because we only have one Torah scroll, and now the key, that’s all we have from our old synagogue,” Michelsohn said. “And now the key is back. That’s so great, you can’t imagine.”
Michelsohn said the key is especially important as a vehicle to educate the current community about its past. She explained that like many German Jewish communities, Bielefeld’s Jews are almost all originally from the former Soviet Union.
“You don’t have many people who are originally from Germany,” she said. “Some of them converted to Judaism, some immigrated from Israel or other countries or are working in Bielefeld with a university, but most of the members in all of our 120 Jewish communities in Germany are from the former Soviet Union.”
The key, Michelsohn said, represents an opportunity to “teach them something about history, about the past, what we lost.”
It also returns a physical reminder of the old synagogue building, which had been built in 1905 and was commissioned by the Katzenstein family. Bern-Vogel’s maternal grandfather had been the head of the Jewish community, and helped hundreds of families escape Germany.
“It symbolises a connection to the old and very, very nice building which we had,” Michelsohn said, adding that the destroyed synagogue was “such a marvelous building.”
Like the key she kept, the remarkable story of Bern-Vogel’s mother did not end in 1938. The following year, she and her younger sister escaped to England on the Kindertransport. Years later, she was at a Shabbat dinner in Israel when she met Julian Bernstein (later shortened to Bern), Bern-Vogel’s father, who also survived the Holocaust.
Julian was one of six children from a Lithuanian family, but only he and one brother survived the Holocaust. That brother, Leon Bernstein, and Bern-Vogel’s mother were both working for the World Jewish Congress; Leon hosted the Shabbat dinner where Julian and Marianne met.
The two were engaged within a week, and eventually settled in Iowa, where Bern-Vogel and her brother were raised.
In the later years of her mother’s life, Bern-Vogel said there had been efforts to bring the key to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But a contact her mother had at the museum passed away, and in 2017, so did she, at 94 years old.
“It just held a very deep connection,” Bern-Vogel said, referring to the key, a copy of which she still has. “I don’t think I thought about, when we were growing up, that the key would be anywhere else but with us. It kind of belonged to us.”
But as her mother aged, Bern-Vogel said her family wanted to determine where the key should go to be best taken care of and hold the most meaning. After a couple recent trips to Germany, Bern-Vogel said the answer crystallised.
“It just became clearer over the last couple of years, and especially after I went there last summer to meet with them at the synagogue and the museum, that it would really mean the most for everyone and future generations for it to be there,” she said.
Bern-Vogel said that even though her mother had a fraught relationship with Germany because of how her family’s time there ended, Bielefeld will always be their home. And she knows her mother would appreciate knowing that the key has made it back.
“I think that she would be incredibly moved by the reception that the key is going to have, and the people that are involved in the city,” Bern-Vogel said. “I think she would be very honored and happy, and I think grateful.”
