But Ya’akov Arbel, an Israeli tour guide and an old Poland hand, has been around long enough to know that hasn’t always been the case. “Before Spielberg made Schindler’s List,” he told me on a recent visit to the city, “there wasn’t a dog coming to Krakow.”

***

On a rain-soaked Friday morning late last year, Arbel led three dozen Israelis visiting Poland. He was in a rush—the group was headed to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the highlights of the tour—but some of the visitors were enjoying the rain, a refuge from the Israeli heat. One by one, they climbed aboard the bus. Arbel, counting and recounting, was still two people short. Finally, the stragglers arrived. It was an elderly couple, and the wife, an Auschwitz survivor, had gotten cold feet and had to be persuaded to join.

A few minutes after the bus pulled out, Arbel took the microphone and started talking. He talked about Jews and Nazis, Poland and Germany, concentration camps and death camps. To ease the tension, he spiced his speech with bits of trivia, even the occasional joke.

“I must do all the talking here,” Arbel told me during a rare moment of rest, sipping tea to soothe his throat. “One of the most important attributes for a tour leader to Auschwitz is the understanding that he should talk as little as possible inside the camps, because the eyes tell the story there.”

Arbel’s bus joined another 30 in the huge parking lot outside the camp, and some of the visitors wrapped themselves in Israeli flags as we headed toward the entrance. There, in accordance with Polish legislation aimed to protect the local workforce, the group was handed over to a Polish tour guide, one of the 250 men and women employed by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arbel was there only to translate. Mostly silent, he followed his group, looking and listening.

***

Arbel was born in Germany. His parents, Holocaust survivors, fled to Israel when he was a year old. He is a banker by profession, and 10 years ago he decided to devote himself to his love of history and geography and become certified as a tour guide. “I love doing it,” he said, “and it’s a cheap way to go places.” In the last three years, he has mostly been accompanying groups headed to Poland, visiting that country three or four times a year. As we walked through the gate leading into the camp, Arbel paused for a moment. “Every time I come here I want to cry,” he said. “But I can’t cry. I must be professional and separate myself from the place, and one of the tools is to use humor. But you must be sensitive to the component of the group. Sometimes humor can’t fly here.”

The breakdown, he added, comes often after the tour. “When you are walking in Auschwitz, you are on a mission, a mission to tell the story of a foregone Jewish life. But once you are done, and you let it decompress, you get back to your hotel and just wrap yourself in depression. And since every tour is different, and unexpected things happen here, this depression goes home with you. I have many horrible flashbacks in my sleep long after I return from here.”

I commented that such a lifestyle, consisting of repetitive visits to this dark place and the bouts of depression that are bound to follow, was somewhat masochistic. Arbel shrugged. “It is the least I owe to my predecessors, to the history of Jewish life,” he said, before heading into one of the prison cabins.

***

Arbel is in the minority among Israeli tour guides specializing in Poland. Most of them are graduates of programs run by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and research facility, and sponsored by the Ministry of Education to train guides to lead groups of high-school students and soldiers.

There are 300 such guides currently working in Israel. To join their ranks, one must respond to a newspaper ad inviting people to enroll in the program. Each year, said Dorit Novak, the director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, 50 people apply. “We pass the names and résumés to the Ministry of Education, where the first selection is processed,” she said. “Then, we invite the final candidates to one day where we conduct interviews and psychological assessment, and we usually end up with 20 finalists.”

The Yad Vashem course lasts almost six months and includes many seminars and workshops. The candidates then go on a tour of Poland, followed by two more tours on which they serve as guides. If they receive positive feedback they must take one final test, which examines the depth of their knowledge of the Holocaust. The drop-out rate is 15 percent.

“The guide is a key figure in the educational experience young students and soldiers go through while traveling in Poland,” Novak said. “A good guide must have great knowledge and even greater sensitivity for the group as a whole and to every group member. He or she must deal with an age group where the people are very sensitive and about to be exposed to a shocking experience.”

The challenges are part adolescent psychology and part crisis management. (The museum makes an exception to its Polish guide policy for these specially trained leaders.) “A good guide shouldn’t tease,” Novak added. “He shouldn’t manipulate and move people from one experience to the other, but let every experience sink in with the kids. Understatement is the most important thing, because words can never match the visuals.”

This being a delicate undertaking, it calls for a certain sort of person. The average guide is between 30 and 50 years old, has another job or has chosen to become a tour guide as a mid-career change of vocation, and is committed and knowledgeable. While the guides vary in gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, and places of residence, many are children of Holocaust survivors, Novak said.

Hanni Efrimov, 40, graduated from the Yad Vashem program in 2003. In the last few years she’s been to Auschwitz 12 times every year. “It is not normal,” she said. “I must admit that I am a little bit addicted.” But, she added, the tours are not “a pornographic journey into the Holocaust. We deal mostly with Jewish life in Poland, because in order to understand what we had lost, we must first learn what we had. The death camps are not the most important part, and it’s also the shortest trip. It is more important to see how people lived in the ghetto, what choices they have made in a world with no choices, to learn about the thinkers and writers. We must teach about the forces, because suffering doesn’t teach you anything.”

Another important part of the guide’s job, Efrimov added, is to tailor the experience to suit the sensibilities of young men and women who are either in the midst of, or are about to enter, their mandatory military service. The Holocaust, she said, is the quintessential lesson of the dangers of using force and the importance of preserving one’s humanity. “We teach them about the thin line between being a human being and a monster,” she said, “but also about the inspiration of true friendship, where you are starving but still willing to share your 20 grams of bread.”

***

Ya’akov Arbel’s tour group is now midway through its tour of Auschwitz. Their Polish guide, Magdalena Adamczyknycz (pronounced adam-chick-nitz), is a 36-year-old local woman, married and the mother of a young girl. She first visited the camp in the eighth grade as part of a class trip. “It was the first time I heard about the Holocaust,” she told me when we were standing outside cabin 27. Like most Israeli groups, this one had decided to hold a small, private candle-lighting ceremony and to share their personal stories about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Adamczyknycz was waiting for them to be done, standing in the chilly fall breeze.

“I traveled a lot after school,” she said as she waited, “and I realized that when I say in Polish the name of the place where I was born, Oswiecim, no one recognized it, but when I was saying the name in German (Auschwitz) then everyone knew about the tiny place where I come from. That made me realize about the history of my birthplace and of my history and how I am part of it.” Like her Israeli counterparts, Adamczyknycz, too, had to pass a series of exams to obtain her position. With 1.3 million people visiting the camp last year—a steep increase from 2004’s record of half a million visitors—the demand for tour guides is only growing.

Adamczyknycz got her certification in 2005. “I felt that it is my mission to try and tell the story of every person who perished here, more than a million stories,” she said. She used to work full time but now works only three or four months a year. This, she said, was a necessary step she had to take after becoming a mother. “It is a huge conflict,” she said, “because you are facing a trauma, sometimes live testimony of a survivor, and then you must go home and switch it off, play with your daughter, switch immediately from the complete gloom into a shining mother. It made me very pessimistic about life and about human nature, and that’s why I decided to decrease my rate [of work].” Instead, she found part-time employment as an English teacher in the local school, but the camp, she said, is always on her mind. “The ability to keep the memory alive,” she said, “to educate kids about Auschwitz and one year later see them coming back here with their parents, I miss that.”

Not, she added, that being employed by Auschwitz was without its downsides. Apart from the psychological toll of constant immersion in such grim subject matter, Adamczyknycz said, identifying oneself as an Auschwitz employee kills all chance of small talk and makes sharing work stories with friends deeply uncomfortable. “But it is still worth it,” she said, “especially when we get a group from Israel, where you really don’t know what will happen.”

Such impromptu outbursts of emotions are common with Israeli groups, and one occurred when the group I had joined visited the second floor of cabin 16. Walking between a glass-encased display of suitcases and another filled with hair and shoes, someone let out a terrible shriek.

It was Yehudit Barnea, 72, from Tel Aviv, the Holocaust survivor who earlier that morning had had her doubts about joining the tour. Shaking, she stood in front of a photograph on the wall, pointing at two little girls. “This is my sister and I on the day the Russians liberated the camp,” she said in a broken voice.

Barnea arrived to Birkenau in 1944. She was 6 years old. “Usually, they killed kids my age,” she said after we finished walking in Birkenau, where she had to revisit the memories she struggled to forget. “But we were twin sisters, and we were immediately led to Mengele’s cabin.” She has strange memory about the place. “I remember that everyday he was taking blood from us and he was experimenting with our lungs, and I remember that we were his favorite kids. I was actually very disappointed to see him in a movie, because I remembered him as a very tall and blond and beautiful man who had nicknames for us. But after walking here, I can’t believe that I was here, that I got out of here. It is just a story, it’s not really me.”

***

The drive back to Krakow was long and silent. At the hotel, a much-needed rest awaits, followed by Shabbat dinner. Outside the door of my room, someone had hung a silhouette of an old Jew holding a Bible. From my window, I could see the old Jewish cemetery. And yet there is no real Jewish life in Krakow. The reality of Jewish life here oscillates between the cemetery and that silhouette, a kitschy object the likes of which clutter many stores and cafés. Drivers for hire offer a tour of the Schindler factories or the ghetto. Even the toilets in Auschwitz are a commercial enterprise, costing 1,000 zloty (about 30 cents) per use.

I was musing about commercialization, memory, and authenticity as I walked to dinner, passing on the way a steakhouse that featured a klezmer house band. But as I reached the restaurant, I was dismayed to find the other members of the group in a decidedly different mood. They, too, could see the Holocaust business and the profits Krakow gathers from exploiting the memory of its dead Jews, but it was a price they were willing to pay.

They came here to look for something that is long gone, to run after a metaphor, to see and forgive and forget. They had come here hoping to get lost in the past. For that, they needed good guides.

“A guide in this kind of tour, he owns great power over the people he guides,” Arbel told me after we finished the emotional prayer for the wine and challah, and waitresses were serving traditional Jewish food to the table. “You don’t show them here tourist attractions, but you guide them through their past, their purpose, you go through what could have been their alternative life.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

Alexander Palloch arrived at the station a bit after 6 p.m. At 20, Palloch had already built a reputation as an unemployed drunk; he’d twice been arrested for distributing extreme right-wing propaganda. He spent much of his free time getting into fistfights.

According to police reports, eyewitnesses later testified that Palloch wasn’t particularly drunk when he approached the 16-year-old—his parents have requested he not be identified, so we’ll call him “Leo”—at the bus station. Still, Palloch was belligerent. “Jewish pig!” he yelled at Leo, and began pounding the stunned boy’s face. Leo struggled and managed to get away. He ran onto Bahnhofstrasse, too fast to notice that Palloch was giving chase. But Palloch was faster: After 30 or 40 meters, he caught up with Leo, knocked him to the ground, and punched him again.

Watching the scene unfold from his car, Mario Traebert, a local resident, slammed the breaks and opened the door. He yelled at Palloch to stop. The bully froze for a second, just long enough for Leo to escape. Traebert opened the passenger door and yelled at Leo to jump in. The bruised boy obliged. Watching his prey speed away, Palloch ran after the car and managed to kick its back door.

The incident could have easily been regarded as just another fight between two teenagers. It could have been filed as just another one in the 150 assaults instigated each year, according to local police records, by young men associated with the extreme right: thugs attacking immigrants, left-wing activists, or homosexuals.

But the words Alexander Palloch chose to shout just before attacking Leo prompted the police to classify the crime as an anti-Semitic attack, a far more infrequent occurrence in Laucha. With very few Jews living in the region, the number of attacks in Saxony-Anhalt usually hovers around one or two per year, though these incidents are treated more seriously than other hate crimes. Indeed, the more one looked into the attack, the more visible were the dark specters of history. As I learned from in-depth conversations with local authorities, activists, and residents, Laucha, which on the surface seemed to be the locus of a successful story of German reunification, was going through a battle for its very soul.

***

As a native-born Israeli who has lived in Germany for three years, I am constantly fascinated by this battle. Whenever a news report offers a glimpse of the old demons thrashing beneath the blanket of postwar German sensitivity and tolerance, I rush to the scene. So as soon as I heard about Leo, I headed to Laucha.

Leo makes a compelling protagonist. His maternal grandfather, Yoseph Lev, survived the Holocaust by hiding in the empty building of the Warsaw ghetto as the rest of his family was hauled off to Auschwitz. His paternal grandfather, Amitzur Shapira, was one of the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered in the terrorist attack during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Born in Israel, Leo moved to Laucha as a child after his mother, Tzipi Lev, divorced his father and fell in love with a German man, Olaf Osteroth. She was a choreographer specializing in mass gymnastics; he, an avid hot-air balloonist and a notable figure in the world of German aerial sports. They met on an athletes’ exchange program between Israel and Germany, and before too long Tzipi and her two sons were headed to Laucha.

In many ways, the tiny German town wasn’t too dissimilar from their home, Oranit, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank named for the pine trees that surround it. Like Oranit, Laucha was quiet and rural, the sort of place where everybody knew everybody else. And despite their historical baggage, Tzipi and her sons found little in Laucha to make them feel unwelcome. Little, that is, except for the house on 14 Obere Hauptstrasse: Every year on April 20, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, the resident of the second floor of the two-story house would place a small statue of the Führer in the window, along with the Reich’s black, white, and red war flag. Anyone walking by the house on April 20 could also hear loud Nazi-era music booming from within. But everyone assumed it was just an isolated incident, one loose screw in an otherwise orderly town.

***

In 1999, a handful of people from Laucha decided to organize a soccer team known as BCS99. It was conceived as an educational enterprise—the idea was to set up a place for Laucha’s youth to learn the lessons of good sportsmanship—and as such was funded by the municipality, the regional council, the German Football Federation, and a host of local businesses.

The driving force behind the team was Lutz Battke, a chimney-sweep and the resident of the second-floor apartment on 14 Obere Hauptstrasse. Everyone in Laucha knew that Battke was involved with some sort of right-wing politics, but this didn’t seem to trouble any parents, who were happy to have somewhere to send their kids. As far as most parents were concerned, Battke was helping their kids stay out of trouble, turning them into athletes instead of hooligans, teaching them discipline. And if the man who could keep the local kids off the streets and inspire them to invest their hours training rather than drinking or fighting also held a few extremely unkind opinions, so be it. As long as he didn’t act out on these opinions, went the common logic, no damage was done. Tzipi Lev herself subscribed to this logic, sending her oldest son, Leo’s brother, to play for the club. Another player was Alexander Palloch, Leo’s attacker.

From his perch as the club’s coach, Battke devoted a considerable chunk of his time to his other passion, politics. Using the clubhouse as a meeting place, he oversaw the local branch of the National Democratic Party, or NPD, an extreme right-wing party widely considered to be a neo-Nazi organization. A few local politicians objected, but the community at large showed no support for these protests—as far as they were concerned, Battke was an upstanding member of the community and whatever political activity he engaged in was acceptable.

But as time passed, Battke took steps toward gaining real power, and his sporting activity started to merge with his political goals. In 2001, for example, he designed a flag for the football club that—with its black, white, and red palette—suspiciously resembled Nazi iconography. Jana Grandy, Laucha’s then mayor, vowed to boycott the club and tried to stop its public funding. She failed. Two years later, in 2003, Battke formed a political party, which he named after the club, and was elected to local office. In 2007, when Tzipi Lev and Olaf Osteroth brought an Israeli dance group to perform in Laucha, Battke tried, according to local news reports, to recruit a few of the club’s players to march in protest; when the club’s managers told him that was a step too far, he canceled the march. Instead, he printed posters featuring a blood-dripping Star of David and hung them all over town. Again, the local press reported about Battke’s actions, which he explained as being in opposition to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. And again, nobody seemed to care: By 2009, when he was up for re-election as a city councilman, Battke ran as an independent, landing a spot on the NPD ticket, and won more votes than any other candidate.

Alarmed by Battke’s rise, Saxony-Anhalt’s Ministry of Economy tried to suspend Battke from his job as regional chimney sweeper, a position that resembles that of rural volunteer fireman. Battke fought the move in court and won—the NPD, after all, is not outlawed in Germany.

Its legal status aside, however, the NPD still alarms most of Germany’s human rights organizations, who treat the party as dangerous and extremist. When I called the Mobile Beratung für Opfer rechter Gewalt—a nonprofit group that aids victims of right-wing attacks—and expressed an interest in traveling to Laucha, the helpful social worker on the other end of the line went silent. Then she suggested I might need bodyguards, and assigned two of her volunteers to join me and my photographer on our visit to the small town.

As the four of us drove into Laucha, the possibility of violence seemed remote. To the east and the west, vineyards dotted the landscape, and a cheerful sign at the entrance to town toasted the local resident crowned that year’s Wine Queen. The town’s medieval houses and narrow streets sat under a looming church spire, watching sternly over the small square at Laucha’s center.

Leo’s house looks no different than the other stone houses in town. Sitting at the simple dinner table shortly after returning from high school, Leo bore no marks from the attack. His attitude, too, was defiant; even though he had lived in Laucha for most of his life, his accent made him sound more Israeli than German.

“I’m not afraid,” Leo said to me in Hebrew about living in this remote town. “I consider myself also an Israeli, but I can’t see myself living in Israel. My friends are here, my connections are here, I’ve been here from the age of 7. As a Jew, I cannot run or hide. To the contrary, I have a right to live where I want. Precisely because of what happened to my grandparents.”

When asked if he’s angry with the Germans—a question that many of his relatives in Israel raised in the days immediately following the attack—Leo shook his head. But he did feel, he admitted, that what happened to him was brushed off by far too many of his schoolmates as a mere act of bullying. He wished, he said, that people in Laucha would realize the attack was very different from a mere violent outburst.

“My generation is all the time asking not to connect them to the past,” he said. “But if that’s the case then they are supposed to be much more angry than me about this incident. They cannot let that happen. Unless they like to be called Nazis.”

As I was talking to Leo, Frank Rothe, a photographer, left to take some snapshots of Laucha. He shot the pastoral countryside, the ancient municipal plaza, people going about their daily lives. Then, he arrived at the field where Lutz Battke was presiding over soccer practice. Rothe introduced himself to Battke, and Battke told him curtly that no photography was allowed at the club. Rothe replied that since the club was municipal property, he could snap shots whenever he wished. Battke pulled out his battered Nokia cell phone, said a few things to the person on the other end of the line, and handed the phone over to Rothe. Michael Bilstein, the soccer team’s vice president and Laucha’s current mayor, tried to convince Rothe to leave, but Rothe wouldn’t budge. When the conversation finally came to an end, Rothe flipped the cell phone shut. A screen saver came on the phone’s small display. It was a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

***

After hearing Rothe’s account, I wanted to chat with Lutz Battke. He wasn’t at the practice field, so, accompanied by my volunteer bodyguards, I drove to his house and climbed up to the second floor. The shoes Battke had just worn during the football practice were outside the door. I knocked. A woman opened the door, saw my face, and slammed it immediately. I knocked again. There was no answer.

Outside in the street, a young man with short blond hair agreed to answer our questions. He claimed he had never heard of Leo. We told him he was an Israeli-born boy who was beat up by a bully for being a Jew. “Should he even be here?” the young blond asked. “And should you?”

The young man, we later learned from neighbors, was Ronnie, Lutz Battke’s adopted son.

As Battke himself was nowhere to be found, I decided to talk to those residents of Laucha who supported his enterprise. One is Olaf Pleitz, the proprietor of a local company that supplies sanitary appliances and tools for hospitals. Pleitz is one of the key financial sponsors of Battke’s football club. When I called to ask why he was sponsoring a man who had Hitler on his screen saver and goons on his football squad, Pleitz erupted. He shouted that he had the right to sponsor whomever he damn pleased, and that he can’t possibly know what goes on in all of the many organizations he supports.

He was right—as a business owner, he owed no explanation for his actions. That, however, wasn’t the case with Rotkäppchen, a producer of sparkling wine and another enthusiastic sponsor of Battke’s club. The company’s owner, a man with the surname Heise, lives on Tannengartnen Strasse in Laucha, a three-minute ride from Tzipi Lev and Olaf Osteroth’s house and from the practice field where his firm’s sign decorates the fence. When we pulled into his driveway, his wife was leaving the house. We asked her if it was possible talk to Heise, and she said he wasn’t home and asked what we wanted. We said we wanted to know whether Heise could tell us why his firm sponsors a football club that employs a known right-wing extremist as one of its leaders. She took our contacts.

Eight minutes later, Claudia Korenke, one of the firm’s spokespeople, called us from Frankfurt. She talked at length about Herr Heise’s activities to strengthen Germany’s relations with Israel. After I pressed her on the company’s ties to Battke, she promised to get back to me. The next day, she emailed to let me know that Rotkäppchen had decided to cut all ties and sponsorship deals with the club.

I called Alexander Palloch, the bully; his mother said her boy was innocent because he was a Protestant, and therefore forbidden by God from hating foreigners. I called the police to complain about Battke’s Hitler screen saver—based on German laws prohibiting display of Nazi imagery—but the police said that whatever Battke chose to do with his cell phone was his private business. I also called Mayor Bilstein. I wasn’t expecting much; after the attack, Bilstein told local media that there was no evidence that Battke was connected to the attack, and that the children adored him. “[Battke] works with young children, and I do not believe he has bad influence on them,” he said. “We’ve never heard complaints from parents about him. If there were complaints, that would be another story.” But when I finally got him on the phone, the mayor sounded contrite. Leo’s attacker, he said, “comes from a broken home, he escaped from school, and the only guidance he had came from the football club. We can’t allow NPD supporters to coach and teach in this club.” He promised to look into Battke’s politics and vowed that he would resign his position as the club’s vice president if Battke wasn’t removed from his position as coach.

“In 1999, we thought that the club would help to integrate people like Battke into society,” Bilstein told me on the phone. “It is now 2010, and we must admit that we failed. We have succeeded in sports, but everyone is just talking about the Nazi team of Laucha.”

The following day, the Laucha police called again. They told me that they had decided to open an investigation concerning Lutz Battke’s screen saver.

Hearing this bit of news, Lev and Osteroth were happy but not thrilled. They were fighting, they said, for their hometown, a place ravaged by decades of dictatorship before the reunification and years of economic hardship after it. They believed that if people in Laucha had the chance to meet Jewish people, the old animosities would disappear. They also believed that anti-Semitism in Laucha was just a convenient vehicle for material frustrations, not some deep-seated belief. They believed all that, but they weren’t sure. If they turned out to be wrong, they said, they’d pack up and leave, maybe for Israel.

Toward the end of our stay in Laucha, Osteroth took me up in one of his hot-air balloons, and we floated above the region’s green fields. Osteroth said that as long as his family was here, they had to fight. “The role of my generation is not to look back in shame, but to ensure that there will be no closing of the eyes in the present,” he said. He pointed down, toward the center of town. “Otherwise,” he added, “place after place here will become Naziland.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

Its name was Yamit, and I soon learned that the sea—its Hebrew word is Yam—was at the center of life in town. At some point in every day, most of Yamit’s 2,500 residents would find themselves on the beach. I was only in the second grade when we moved there, but I quickly learned to emulate the morning routine of the town’s older kids: get up each morning at five to look at the waves and decide if the day should be spent surfing or at school. I remember shoes being worn only when absolutely necessary and evenings spent huddling together with the other families—most of them, like us, young parents and young children—in the town’s square, watching movies on an outdoor screen or just chatting. Life in Yamit was heaven.

It didn’t last long. In 1979, after Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David peace accord with Egypt, we were told we would soon have to leave our homes and watch as Yamit, along with the rest of Sinai, was handed back to the Egyptians.

It was the second major trauma my father had to face in a decade. After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, my father was working in Sinai, building fortifications for the Israeli Army that were supposed to be Israel’s impenetrable line of defense against the Egyptians. Sinai was about 600 kilometers from our home, so we would see my father for only one day each week. He’d come home on Tuesday evening, each time looking more dusty and disheveled. And he always seemed eager to get back to work, back to the desert. To make up for lost time, he’d ply me with presents: a toy car, sneakers, a new bicycle.

Then came the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the impenetrable line that took up six years of my father’s life collapsed under the invading Egyptian Army in less than 24 hours. My father came home looking defeated. He was 32 with four children and no clue. Yamit, for him—for us—was a new beginning, a rebirth.

Settlers Saviona and Tsali Maneh hold their infant son, Itai, outside their bomb shelter near Yamit, March 10, 1972.
CREDIT: Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images

But as much as we cherished life in Yamit, we weren’t naïve. Israel had captured Sinai once before, in 1956, and was forced by international pressure to withdraw. After recapturing it in 1967, Israel never annexed the desert peninsula, making us Israeli citizens living in a state of uncertainty. Evacuation was a possibility we’d all entertained. Almost every family had relatives somewhere in Israel who said that it was only a matter of time before the government gave Sinai back, that we would end up as collateral.

But Begin himself had reassured us: He visited town often, and each time he did he promised us that when he retired, he would move to Yamit and be our neighbor. We believed him, and we loved him for it.

A short time after the Camp David peace accord was signed, Begin arrived for another visit. He landed with his helicopter near the giant eucalyptus tree in the center of town, spraying sand in the eyes of the angry and hurt people who came to meet him. Begin stepped off the helicopter, dashed through the sands, and crossed the road that encircled the city. More people gathered, but Begin kept marching, past the local police, the fire station, and the post office. Just before the synagogue, he took a sharp turn, and as he was about to climb the stairs to city hall, a young girl emerged from the building, barefoot and wearing a bikini. “You took my house!” she shouted at the prime minister. “You son of a bitch.”

Three years later, on April 23, 1982, the last family had left Yamit, and our empty homes were bulldozed or blasted by the army.

My family and neighbors had left Yamit, but Yamit had never left us. Soon after the evacuation, those of us who still kept in touch started noticing that life had gotten oddly unlucky. Family after family would report instances of death and divorce, suicides and bankruptcies. We thought it was just a miserable coincidence, that when it rained, as the saying goes, it poured. But it didn’t take long to realize our problems were never coincidental. Even the level-headed among us agreed that what we evacuees were dealing with was Yamit’s curse.

***

Israeli women and their children gather in Yamit’s city center, December 10, 1981.
CREDIT: Ya’akov Sa’ar/GPO via Getty Images

By now, Israel has had ample experience forcefully resettling civilian populations, most notably when it evacuated 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip five years ago. By 2005, the soldiers and bureaucrats whose job it was to empty a stretch of land of its Jewish inhabitants had been trained, and the population had grown accustomed to seeing Israeli law-enforcement personnel drag away Israeli citizens from their soon-to-be-destroyed homes, often with both sides weeping. But, back then, when Begin landed in town and told us that Yamit would have to be evacuated, nobody could imagine what such an evacuation might look or feel like or how it might be carried out.

“There are long-term implications of such dislocation, the dissolution of people’s dreams,” says Stevan Hobfoll, chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Rush University Medical Center, who researches the psychological implications of Israel’s territorial disengagements. “Ongoing disruption is related to depression in particular and anxiety disorders generally. There are reverberations to these things. Perhaps you were planning to have a certain life course, and your life course has changed, and you may not have as good opportunities, and you may experience this as a failure, and now you feel like a failure.”

With no mental-health services available to Yamit’s refugees, the government paid each family a small compensation and considered the case closed. But Yamit’s residents found it exceedingly hard to fit in anywhere else; having grown accustomed to a carefree life on the Mediterranean, living anywhere else seemed like an insufferable compromise.

This was the case with Uzi and Sima Greenberg. They had immigrated to Israel from Romania and came across Yamit by mistake, visiting Gaza and taking a wrong turn along the way. “This was our dream,” Sima said recently in Dekel, referring to the couple’s small apartment across the street from Yamit’s swimming pool, surrounded by likeminded young and idealistic families.

Since Uzi was working for the Israeli Army, they were forced to be one of the first families to leave, as their apartment belonged to the Army. One day a representative from the Army came to the Greenbergs’ apartment, inspected it, and charged them for every broken blind or scratch on the floor.

“This was the small deception: They charged me for a broken blind and then proceeded to destroy the whole place,” Uzi said. “But the big deception was a government asking common people to volunteer and inhabit Sinai and then pulling the plug on them.”

After the evacuation the Greenbergs went through a long period of depression. They refused to leave their house and meet other people. Even after they moved to Dekel, a new community in the northwestern Negev made up entirely of Yamit refugees, they were inconsolable. It took them almost a year to bring themselves to finish building their new house. In the meantime, they lived with stripped walls, bare water pipes, and exposed electrical wires.

Eventually, they opened a grocery store in their back yard. But whereas everyone in Yamit was friendly, the same people, having suffered the trauma of evacuation, were now profoundly changed. Neighbors who had once spent all day consorting amicably in Yamit were yelling at each other in Dekel. The Greenbergs were no different, and within months their fledgling business was on the verge of bankruptcy; their neighbors, it appeared, preferred the 10-kilometer drive to the nearest grocery store to giving the Greenbergs a bit of business.

The Greenbergs grew distrustful. They took all of their money out of the bank and hid it in their home. They ran up debt, lost weight, found God. Debtors began coming by the house and confiscating the Greenbergs’ possessions. Eventually, Uzi couldn’t take it anymore. He would leave the house for long stretches, and when he returned he threatened to burn the house down with his family in it. Once, falling short of his threat, he nonetheless spray-painted slogans on the walls of his own home: “Stinking House,” he wrote. Sima wasn’t doing much better: Finding the stress impossible to handle, she set the family’s dog on fire. Uzi had her committed to a psychiatric hospital. Outside, in their yard, the two palm trees they brought with them from Yamit withered.

***

Israeli soldiers evacuate a young Yamit settler, April 20, 1982.
CREDIT: Beni Tel Or/GPO/Getty Images

The Greenbergs weren’t the only ones whose lives came undone after leaving Yamit. The more stories we heard, the more deeply we believed that a curse did exist and that it plagued all of us who were forced to evacuate Yamit. In some cases—fatal car crashes, sudden cases of cancer—the curse was the only palpable explanation we could find. But for the most part, the misfortunes that befell us and our neighbors were simply the result of young people being subjected to intense psychological pressures, misunderstood and lacking support.

Much of the curse had to do with the ways Yamit’s refugees were portrayed in the media. Shortly before the evacuation, a delegation of a few dozen religious settlers from the West Bank made their way by sea into Yamit, bypassing the Army roadblock that stopped everyone but Yamit’s residents from getting into town. With their beards and yarmulkes, the West Bankers couldn’t look more different from the people of Yamit—secular, tanned, scantily dressed—if they tried. But most Israelis never met anyone from Yamit; to them, a settler was a settler, whether he lived in Samaria or in Sinai. The West Bankers locked themselves in cages, resisted with force, and acted out all kinds of theatrical scenarios that the mainstream residents of Yamit found terrifying. Still, however, when Israelis think of Yamit, it’s these images that come to mind.

While the West Bankers were doing their best to be visible and vocal, most of our neighbors were doing their best to remain calm and practical. They negotiated timelines and bottom lines with government officials, received their compensation, and moved elsewhere. But even they were not free of stigma: As they settled in towns and communities all across Israel, Yamit’s refugees were often accused of being gold-diggers—calculating opportunists who moved to Sinai knowing it would be returned to Egypt and anticipating the monetary compensation. Worst of all, for many Israelis, ecstatic about Begin’s coup of statesmanship, the people who fought to keep their homes in Yamit were enemies of peace.

Confronted with such vicious accusations, the residents of Yamit often chose to disconnect from the rest of Israel.

On the last day of the evacuation, for example, Avi Farchan, the most active organizer of protest against the decision, said his goodbyes, went home, and asked the Army officer in charge of the operation to lower the flag to half-mast. Tough officers and cynical journalists both cried uncontrollably. Then, Farchan walked in to his empty house, lay on the floor, and sobbed. When he finally got up, he felt that he needed to walk. He walked for days, until he reached Jerusalem. He had the flag from Yamit with him, and he left it with the Western Wall’s rabbi. Then, he packed his family into their car and drove south once more, as far as they could go, to a new community in the Gaza Strip called Eli-Sinai.

In 2005, the Farchans were evacuated once more. Again, there was talk of a curse. But the real curse, Avi Farchan said, wasn’t cast on the residents on Yamit; rather, he argued, the residents of Yamit had cursed the state of Israel.

“After Yamit,” he said, “Begin completely deteriorated, and Ariel Sharon, who made the unforgivable decision to blow up the houses in Yamit, invaded Lebanon two months later, and look what happened to Sharon after the evacuation from Gaza.”

***

Israeli schoolchildren near Yamit, March 10, 1972.
CREDIT: Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images

A year after the evacuation, my oldest sister, Orna, died from a brain tumor. She was 19. When we went through her belongings, we found poems she’d written as we were getting ready to leave Yamit. They were typical displays of teenage angst, but instead of swooning over a lover, Orna was mad at the world for taking away her home. “I sat on the beach,” read one poem, “and pondered the pinkish dream/ that I drew/ and it was destroyed/ and so was I/ and I drowned.”

A few days before the evacuation, we sat down and had one last meal, with tears in our eyes. Someone took some spray paint and wrote: “Avrahami Family, 15.4.82, Yamit” on the external wall of our house. Ten days later this wall was taken on a truck to a nearby place together with all of our belongings, including my surfboard that I have never used since. My father made a point to return a day after we were evacuated, sit on the golden dunes, and watch how the explosives shattered his dream, like someone watching his own execution.

Orna’s death was just the beginning of our Yamit curse. After she passed away, my father escaped to New York, bought designer clothes for hundreds of dollars, and gave them away to homeless people, just because it was money from Yamit. Like many of our former neighbors, he believed that if he put the money he got from the government to good use, it would mean that he’d come to terms with losing his home, with losing Yamit. With the money soon squandered, he became homeless himself, washed dishes in return for a bed somewhere, got cancer, recovered, and died in a car accident in 1994 in one of his endless rides, aimlessly driving to nowhere in order to forget. But for him, and for the rest of Yamit’s refugees, the signs were there all along. “Caution,” they read, “the past is ahead of you.”

There was only one problem: he may not have been Jewish, and the rabbi who appointed him to the presidency of the Hamburg branch of Keren Hayesod, the global equivalent of the United Jewish Communities, may not even been a real rabbi. As if being a Jew in Germany wasn’t complicated enough, this case of identity wars is threatening to tear apart Hamburg’s Jewish community, which is one of Germany’s most resurgent and influential. And, like so many things in Germany, this affair is all about adhering to the rules.

Born in 1955, Wankum first discovered his Jewish roots when he was 13. Observing that his neighbors, the Wolfs, shut down their dry-cleaning business every Saturday, he asked his mother about this odd business practice. The Wolfs, she said, were Jewish, and so were the Wankums, even though they’d concealed it during the war for obvious reasons.

Enamored with his new identity, Wankum reached out to Hamburg’s Jewish community, and even received documents from its leaders that helped him avoid military service. But his Jewish provenance remained questionable, and he never joined the community as a full-fledged member.

In 1999 when Wankum was offered the presidency of the local branch of Keren Hayesod, he found himself facing an unexpected hurdle. To accept the position, he was told, he needed to be an official member of the community. And to do that, he needed to prove, beyond any doubt, that he was indeed Jewish. He was helped in his quest by Rabbi Dov Levi Barzilai, Hamburg’s chief orthodox rabbi. In December of 1999, Barzilai heard four witnesses, including Wankum’s brother and his wife’s uncle, and then signed a paper declaring, officially, that Wankum was a Jew. Soon thereafter, Wankum accepted his new position.

Under Wankum’s leadership, Keren Hayesod experienced unparalleled success. But in late December 1999, following terrible liquidity problems with his company, Wankum declared bankruptcy, which, in Germany’s unremitting political and economic landscape, is a death sentence: Bankruptcy and debt are unacceptable, and forgiveness is never offered. To anyone, that is, but Wankum. Remembering his charitable past, his fellow community members kept him in their warm embrace, and, in 2003, bestowed on him the highest honor imaginable, the chairmanship of Hamburg’s Jewish community.

It was at that time that Wankum aroused the interest of Stefan Knauer, a veteran journalist for the venerated German weekly Der Spiegel. Nearing retirement, Knauer decided to abandon the hard-edged topics he’d been covering throughout his career and examine instead the state of religion in his local community. The Jewish community in particular struck him as insular, further igniting his curiosity. He was especially fascinated by its boisterous chairman, Wankum. Then, one day, he had an epiphany. “[Wankum] was just looking for rehabilitation,” Knauer said in a recent interview, “a place where no one can criticize him after his bankruptcy, and the Jewish community is the best shelter because any criticism about its chairman is immediately tagged as anti-Semitism and Nazism.”

Guided by his suspicions, Knauer started to ask around about Wankum and his religious affiliations. Wankum, on his end, kept referring the reporter to Rabbi Barzilai, and claimed that 2,000 years of Jewish history gave him the right not to talk to the media.

“We started to look in archives in villages around Hamburg where his family used to live,” Knauer said. “There were registration forms with religion identity and we found that Wankum’s mother was named Ruth Morgenstern and she was registered as Lutheran. But you can’t really know because many Jews hid their identity under the Third Reich. On the other hand, how do you explain that his middle name is Christoph?”

Knauer’s quest might have ended up nowhere if it weren’t for Ruben Herzberg. A local educator and a former beneficiary of Wankum’s funds, he was appointed the community’s chairman after Wankum’s term ended in 2007. Soon thereafter, he said, strange things began to happen. “When I was elected as chairman,” he said, “I found out that we basically don’t have any money to maintain ourselves and that we must find ways to cut our expenses. I might be naïve, but I was expecting our rabbi to care about the situation and take a pay cut.”

Rabbi Barzilai, however, would do no such thing, and an exasperated Herzberg began looking into the rabbi’s conduct. During one such investigation, he learned that several community members, Wankum among them, had no documents certifying his Jewishness. Alarmed, he asked the rabbi to provide proof that Wankum was indeed a Jew.

“After a while we understood that Rabbi Barzilai has no documents,” Herzberg said, “just four witnesses and that only one of them was Jewish himself.” In his defense, Rabbi Barzilai claimed he was not permitted to divulge the names of Wankum’s witnesses, but Herzberg asked around and learned that no such rabbinic edict existed. Suspicious, Herzberg decided to call the central rabbinate in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, where Barzilai claimed to have gotten his rabbinic certification. They were shocked to learn it wasn’t kosher: the chief rabbi of Netanya wrote Herzberg back, saying that the people who appointed Barzilai had no authority to do so. (Barzilai’s credentials are currently being examined by a German rabbinical court. He refused to comment for this piece.)

At this point, Hamburg’s wars of the Jews escalated. “During our checkup,” Herzberg said, “we found that 20 people were missing documents in their files; 16 responded and brought us the papers, but four, including Wankum and his brother, never answered and were ousted from the community.”

Herzberg fired Rabbi Barzilai, an act he he’s claimed in previous interviews with the press was motivated by financial issues, with the community refusing to pay his pension. Some of his colleagues in the community were so livid about what they perceived to be Wankum’s deception that they suggested digging Wankum’s deceased mother from her grave in the Jewish cemetery and interring her elsewhere. Within months, former collaborators became the worst of enemies.

“I will tell you what Herzberg is according to the Jewish halacha,” Wankum fumed recently. “He is a total schmuck, a pathological liar of the worst kind. He just wants to clean the community from anyone who was there before and he uses methods that Nazis used in order to do it.”

Any attempt to question his sincerity, Wankum added, was malicious. “After all I did,” he said, “the claim that I used Judaism as shelter is a disgusting lie. I have a daughter who volunteered in a kibbutz and lives a traditional life in Israel. So what kind of other proof do I need?” Wankum also said that it was sheer jealousy that motivated his enemies and fueled the fallacious claims against him. “Our fight” he said, “is a fight for Jewish identity.”

Stefan Kramer, the General Secretary of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, agrees. “What Herzberg and his friends are doing is Chillul Hashem,” he said, using the Hebrew term for desecration of the holy. “For me there are more important things in Judaism than whether you mother is Jewish or not. If you support Jewish issues and if you educated a daughter and live in Israel it is much more Jewish to me than people who want to drag you mother out of her grave. Herzberg is Jewish by birth, but him running to the media, letting goyim in, shows me that he lacks Jewish brains. Jews can’t sit in a house of glass and throw rocks outside, definitely not in Germany.”