"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Right: Robert Abbott at the Berlin Wall just to the right of Checkpoint Charlie (West Berlin, FRG May 1988).

On Sunday (March 10), we visited the remnants of the Berlin Wall. It persuaded me to think of the "walls" I've encountered, their purposes, and their implications: mechitzas, the Vietnam War Memorial Wall, the Western Wall, the Israeli security fence that runs along the West Bank, and so forth.

It also began to snow today, thickly and heavily without abate for the next two days. The snow, too, helped crystallize the living history of the Berlin Wall for me.

The cold weather had become so piercing we could not stand outside longer than a few minutes to listen to our guide. While I pulled wool socks and fleece socks over two other pairs of socks, my  RA Sarah managed to pile on four jackets over her fleece and sweatshirt. Germans, to me, however, seemed only mildly aware of the cold, with their noses cheerily pink because they hadn't buried their faces under an assortment of Moroccan scarves and multiple hoods like Kivunim kids. They walked and walked and biked around the city, while Kivunim kids would scramble on the bus after ten minutes in front of the Berlin Wall and swear to never step off the bus again. My Lithuanian-Russian ancestors had failed to prepare me for Central Europe.

We passed the second oldest cemetery in Berlin, which housed the grave of Abraham Geiger, another leader of Reform Judaism and another nod to the apparent failure and contradiction of Reform Judaism in its place of inception.

Our city bus tour concluded with a visit to the Old Royal Library. In May 1933, National Socialist students took out 20,000 books, stacked them, and burned them. In this main square, central to the city, a monument remains; a glass window in the cobblestone ground reveals a large, white room, filled with empty shelves and shelves and shelves. The monument bears an inscription that reads in English:

"Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." - Heinrich Heine

This "sunken library" succeeds in evoking the eerie feeling of memory of the past as well as immense loss. Heine's words, written over a hundred years before the Third Reich, proved anticipatorily allusive. His own works were burned by the Nazis.

Among the many stumbling stones we stumbled over throughout the day, Germany Close Up lead us to one in particular. Sonja, one of the Germany Close Up staff, had two Jewish family members deported from their home in Berlin: her maternal great-grandmother and her maternal grandmother. To the right, her great-grandmother's stumbling stone appears. Able to personify a name on one of these blocks on the ground, we lit a yarzheit candle and said kaddish for her. Her memory remains part of the fabric of Berlin, both the city itself and its history.

We then visited the German Jewish Museum, a place which I wrote in my journal that I felt I "was walking through a large piece of barbed wire." Designed by Daniel Liebeskind, the museum bore resemblance to Eisenmann's Holocaust memorial with its arbitrary zigzag construction, stone-gray interior, and open symbolism.

Below are two famous murals on the Berlin Wall that I really liked. The "Fraternal Kiss" sharply depicts the iconic embrace between Honecker and Brezhnev. The second illustrates the combined German and Israeli flag and the strength of their relationship. At the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the next day, a German official emphasized "Germany as a staunch ally of Israel" (more on his remarks, on the UN and EU and Hezbollah as an identified terrorist organization, next time).

Rebecca Abbott

(Kivunim - www.kivunim.org) - a gap year before Barnard