Row in Germany Over Locating Israeli Youth Exchange Office in City With Medieval Anti-Jewish Carving
The carving of the ‘Judensau’ — a medieval antisemitic trope — is seen on the façade of the main church in Wittenberg, Germany. Photo: Reuters / Annegret Hilse.
A row has broken out in Germany over the location of a German-Israeli youth organization, with the country’s top official combating antisemitism insisting that one of the proposed venues, the city of Wittenberg, is inappropriate because of the presence of an antisemitic carving at the entrance to its 800-year-old church.
Last September, German and Israeli ministers agreed to expand the work of ConAct, which has been facilitating exchange schemes for young people from the two countries for the past 21 years. Wittenberg is the location of its office in Germany.
However, Felix Klein — the top federal official tasked with combating antisemitism — stated this week that the office should not be based in Wittenberg for as long as St. Mary’s Church, which dates to the 13th century, continues to display an obscene stone carving, known as the “Judensau,” that depicts a group of Jews suckling a pig. The carving is one of the earliest examples of antisemitic tropes expressed through artistic endeavor.
At least 50 churches in Germany display the same medieval image, with the most well-known example visible at the church in Wittenberg. A group of Jews are seen on their knees eagerly suckling the teats of a pig, an animal whose meat is forbidden under Jewish law, alongside the words “Vom Schem Hamphoras” — an insulting corruption of one of the names for God in the Jewish tradition.
Over the last decade, at least two attempts have been made to legally compel the church to remove the carving and place it in a museum. Both efforts — in 2016 and 2022 — failed, with Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruling in 2022 that the efforts of the church to contextualize the image had transformed from a “monument of shame” into a “memorial.”
In a statement issued on Wednesday, Klein said that “in order for Wittenberg to become the seat of the German-Israeli Youth Office, the antisemitic ‘Judensau’ must first be removed.”
He added that “a city in which antisemitism is so openly exhibited with the ‘Judensau’ at the town church cannot be a place of welcome for Jewish Israelis.”
Separately, the Jewish community in Wittenberg said that it agreed with Klein, pointing out that the city had been the base of Martin Luther, the sixteenth century founder of Protestantism. In his writings, Luther railed against Jews for refusing to convert to Christianity, urging the destruction of their homes and synagogues in his notorious 1543 tract “On the Jews and their Lies.”
Luther was a central figure in German history but also a “great antisemite,” the community’s chairman, Reinhard Schramm, told broadcaster MDR.
Opposition to Klein was voiced by Christoph Maier, the director of the Evangelical Academy in Wittenberg.
“The bilateral negotiations between Germany and Israel are sensitive and are currently only making slow progress due to the domestic political situation in Israel,” Maier said in a statement on Friday. “A location debate in Germany is not beneficial to the cause and comes at the wrong time for an already difficult political situation.”
Maier observed as well that there “is probably no city or place in Germany that is not burdened with antisemitism in one way or another.”
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