Limmud discussion: Did the Jews of Germany pray for the welfare of Hitler and the Nazi party?

After Kristallnacht, during which synagogues throughout Germany were burned down, the Nazis moved to close remaining synagogues throughout the country.

“There was a liberal synagogue which functioned sporadically in Berlin until 1940,” Mr Wineman said.

“All the Orthodox synagogues were closed – apart from a synagogue attached to a Jewish school. They managed to convince the gestapo that this was an educational, not a religious, establishment.

“My friend’s dad, a fifteen-year-old boy at the time, was a warden of that Shul. All the great luminaries of what was left of the Orthodox community in Berlin came to this one little youth synagogue. To get there they had to walk through ranks of SS officers, stationed outside the shul, jeering and beating them as they came in. As they came into the shul, there was an SS officer there watching all the proceedings.”

When Mr Wineman heard this story, he said, his reaction was “what did you do when you came to the Loyal prayer? How could you pray for a government that was bent on your destruction?

“He was only a fifteen year old boy at the time, but he had a memory of what the prayer was about – and of course they did make the prayer, they wouldn’t stop the prayer just because it was the Nazis, that would not have been good politics.”

The concept of Jews praying for the welfare of the country in which they live, as Mr Wineman pointed out, dates right back to the Bible. In Jeremiah 29:7, the prophet tells the people: “And seek the peace of the city where I have exiled you and pray for it to the Lord, for in its peace you shall have peace.”

The Sages espoused a similar viewpoint, as we can see in the third chapter of Tractate Avot: “Rabbi Chanina, the Deputy High Priest, says: Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, man would swallow his fellow alive.”

There are a number of different examples throughout history, as Mr Wineman described to the audience. Sacrifices were made for the Roman Emperor, for example, and in Medieval times prayers were occasionally said for the Holy Roman Emperor. When there was a regime change, the prayer would be changed. Jews in the American colonies who had prayed for King George III prior to the Revolution would pray for the American Republic afterwards.

Jews in France prayed for both the Bourbon monarchs and for Napoleon, but in between, during the interregnum caused by the Revolution, beseeched God to “Look from Your Holy Place on our land [of France] and our people [of France].”

However, the case of Germany is a particularly interesting one, particularly when one considers the strongly patriotic nature of the German Jewish community up until the Nazi period.

As Mr Wineman described, an 1845 version of the prayer, published in Konigsberg, urged God to “crush nations under the King’s feet".

Jews in Germany during World War One were just as patriotic as Jews in Britain were - as Mr Wineman noted, more Jews died fighting for Germany in World War One - some 12,000 - than have fallen in all of Israel's wars from 1948 onwards. A World War One version of the prayer published by Germany’s key Jewish communal organisation at the time beseeched God to “in wrath and fury destroy them… weaken their army, swallow up their designs, and bring them and their ships down to the depths of the sea.”

But at the same time, the Jewish community in Britain was praying for the welfare of the British and the downfall of its enemies, while Jews in Russia prayed for the (extremely antisemitic) Tsar, asking God to “trample nations under his feet and let his enemies fall before him.”

“So you have all of these Jewish communities in Europe, praying to the same God, all of them requesting of God to crush the enemy, while other Jews [in said enemy’s countries] were making almost identical prayers for them.”

In 1929, during the Weimar Republic, a new prayer was instituted; rather than the martial tone of the World War One prayer, it asked God to help a country reeling from hyperinflation: “May its honour be exalted, to repair it from its ruin, to restore it, to glorify it”.

Six years later a new German prayer book was published, by which time the Nazis were in power.

The prayer did not mention either the Nazi regime generally or Hitler specifically. It was focused on the country in general: “Turn away from the gates of our country pestilence, the sword and hunger in order that all its children can dwell in quietude and at peace…. May the sound of crime never be heard in our borders, when you eradicate war from the face of the earth…”

Mr Wineman said that there was some anecdotal evidence that German Jews would mutter under their breath towards the end of the prayer, in reference to Hitler, “soll brochen die bein, venomar amen.” (“He should break his bones, and let us say amen”), but made it clear that there was no concrete proof to back that up.

One possible side effect, however, of that terrible period, is that today, unlike many other Jewish communities in the world, Jews in both Germany and Austria reportedly do not recite a prayer for the welfare of the state.