ON NOVEMBER 9, 1981, a young Dutch-Jewish East German singer led a concert in Erfurt, East Germany, to commemorate Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when the Nazi regime sparked a pogrom against German Jews. The concert in Erfurt’s medieval Regler Church attracted about 1,000 people, some there to commemorate the Holocaust, the majority assembled to protest the Communist government, which frowned upon unofficial gatherings. The singer, Jalda Rebling, who is now in her 50s, recently told me about the concert over coffee in Boulder, Colorado, and casually mentioned what may be the most unusual aspect of that evening: much of the music she sang was in Yiddish. In the 1980s, Jalda said, Yiddish music and East German churches offered opportunities for anti-government protest away from the watchful eyes of the police and the Stasi, the country’s secret police. Churches as centers of protest against the politics of the East German Communist government made sense. But Yiddish?

Eight years later on Yom Kippur, October 9, 1989, Rebling left the Rykestrasse Synagogue in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of East Berlin to find the streets cordoned off by a huge detachment of police. As she had in 1981, she sought shelter in a church,this time the red brick Gethsemane Church in the same neighborhood. One month later, the Berlin Wall came down.

East Germany is not generally remembered as a nation of Jewish culture makers, let alone Yiddish singers. Most studies of postwar Jewish life in Germany focus on its western half. But East Germany, established in 1949 under the auspices of Soviet occupation, was built by many socialist Jews. Ideologically driven, they had fled Nazi Germany and returned in the postwar period to build what they hoped would be a socialist alternative to the Nazi past. They were joined by about 20,000 displaced persons (DPs). Although the number of officially registered Jews may have been small, their presence was great.

With East European Jewish DPs and a socialist commitment to internationalism, Yiddish resurfaced after the war to play its role throughout different periods in East German history. It was both a romanticized folk culture of socialist Jews and a way to celebrate workers’ culture, but Yiddish was also a tool of the government to propagandize Communist internationalism. As Rebling’s story illustrates, it also became a means of expressing antigovernment resistance.

Born in Amsterdam in 1951, Jalda Rebling grew up in East Berlin among the postwar Jewish community of Holocaust survivors and political partisans. Jalda’s parents both survived the Holocaust. Her father, Eberhard Rebling, a German non-Jew, a pianist and musicologist, had fled Nazi Germany in 1936 out of hatred for the regime. Jalda’s mother, Lin Jaldati (born Rebekka Brilleslijper), came from a long line of Dutch Jews and by the outbreak of the war was well known in the Amsterdam theater world as a Yiddish singer and dancer. Although Jaldati’s native language was Dutch, she had studied Hebrew and picked up Yiddish from the Eastern European immigrant shopkeepers and peddlers of Amsterdam, who brought a different kind of yidishkayt to the city’s stately canals.

During the war, when Jaldati went into Amsterdam’s underground, she gave Yiddish house concerts to those in hiding. In summer 1944 her own hiding place was betrayed, and she and her sister, Jannie, were sent to the Westerbork transit camp, where she met the Frank family. Deported to Auschwitz with Anne and Margot Frank, she was also with the sisters in Bergen Belsen when they died. Later in life, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, recalled how Jaldati would sing Yiddish songs at Westerbork to console the inmates; it was Jaldati and Jannie who relayed to Otto Frank the tragic fate of his daughters.

After liberation, Jaldati, accompanied on the piano by her husband, traveled throughout Europe giving Yiddish concerts in Sweden, Poland, and Germany. In 1948, the couple performed in Berlin for the United Nations Relief and Rescue Agency (UNRRA). They became recognized by leaders of the emerging music community of soon-to-be East Germany, their fate inextricably tied to that of Yiddish in the divided country. Said Jalda, “My parents gave a concert for the Kulturbund in Berlin with such famous people as the writers Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig in attendance. Members of this cultural community were involved in building East Germany, and they invited my family to join them. They told my parents, ‘We need you to clean up the ruins in people’s heads here in East Germany.’”

With this kind of invitation, the family relocated to the newly named German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1952, one year after Jalda’s birth. It wasn’t a surprising move: in the early years of the Cold War, socialism, Communism, and the culture associated with them were considered enemies in Western Europe and the United States. It made sense for those from the leftist, wartime socialist underground to feel more comfortable in a state supposedly based on the ideals of that alternative society.

With his impressive connections and native German, Eberhard quickly became an important voice in the socialist activities of the musical community. Lin Jaldati took on a different role. She and Yiddish would be a counterbalance to the great German (rather than Eastern European) Jewish socialist writers and composers. These artists were influenced by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, not by Second Avenue Yiddish theater and Yidl mitn fidl. Yiddish was far from their musical universe. And yet, at the same time they were ideologically committed to culture “for the people.” What better way to do that than through Yiddish, which was spoken on the streets of Berlin in those days by some survivors and had been celebrated by socialist Jews since the turn of the century?

Perhaps even more ironically, Yiddish was performed as part of East Germany’s official musical culture at the same time that the Soviet Union was destroying its great socialist Yiddish tradition and unmasking and denouncing Jewish artists. Jalda, in her wry way, reminded me, “David, Moscow and Berlin were far apart.” More pointedly, she cited a December 1952 Yiddish concert given by her mother at the House for German-Soviet Friendship in East Berlin, just months after a group of Soviet Yiddish poets was murdered in the dreaded Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Even if this may have been done to mask the destruction of Yiddish further east, the act of performing Yiddish at the height of anti-Jewish paranoia in the Communist world sounds shocking today.

Jalda Rebling grew up amidst this heady mixture of politics and music, a period, she says, “when people really believed they were building peace.” A more negative view is that Lin Jaldati was used by the state to show off its progressivism, especially in comparison with its “bourgeois” West German neighbor, which had placed unreconstructed Nazis in positions of power. A brief biography of Jaldati even suggests that she was the only official East German interpreter of Yiddish music, frequently called on to represent the GDR at international conferences. Jaldati’s career came to be defined by the tension between singing Yiddish out of a commitment to socialist ideals and performing to provide an increasingly repressive Communist government with a brighter world image.

No matter how she was cast politically, Jaldati used her position as the Communist diva of Yiddish music to foster Holocaust memory at a time when the Holocaust was barely discussed anywhere in Europe, let alone the Soviet-controlled East. The singer’s death-camp encounter with Anne Frank, who became the first global icon of Holocaust memory, provided her with the credibility of an eyewitness, apparently the last person to see Frank alive. Jaldati organized a collective of artists and writers who began commemorating Anne Frank in the GDR with theater productions in Dresden and East Berlin. In that same year, Jaldati was featured in the East German journal Das Magazin.

In East Germany as elsewhere in the world, the 1960s were a time of both repression and the expression of an active counterculture. At the same time that the Berlin Wall dividing the city went up in 1961, a folk music culture was emerging, complete with American-style hootenannies. Jalda, who was still quite young, recalls that the movement had an important Yiddish component: “We brought Yiddish culture to the mills, to workers throughout East Germany. A Jew from Canada, Perry Friedman, came as a music student to Berlin and actually moved into our house. He and my mother started hootenannies in the early 1960s. Everyone came together. In all languages, including Yiddish.” In January 1960, Jaldati, Friedman, and others put on the first hootenanny in the GDR at the Club of Youth and the Athlete on Stalinallee (later renamed Karl Marx Allee), complete with Yiddish music.

Raised in a house with the sounds of music in Yiddish, Dutch, German, and the regular canon of socialist music, Jalda recalls her own big break into music. She told me about her two songs on East German radio: “a Bulgarian song, which was of course the music for the Hora, and Dzhankoye,” the famous socialist Yiddish song celebrating Soviet Jewish agricultural colonies. (It’s hard to imagine Dzhankoye and the Hora entertaining East German families in the mid-1960s after the Berlin Wall went up.) There were other signs of the Yiddish infiltration into German postwar culture. In 1964 a major East German publishing house brought out Lin Jaldati’s biography. In 1966, Jaldati and Eberhard Rebling issued a recording of Yiddish music, “Es brennt, Brüder, es brennt (s’brent, briderlech, s’brent): Jiddische Lieder.” As for literature, East German firms were busy publishing German translations of Sholem Aleichem. The Communist Volk und Welt published Tewje der Milchmann (Tevye the Milkman) in 1955 and Der Sohn des Kantors (Motl the Cantor’s Son) in 1965. In 1967, the Dresden Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst also came out with an edition of Tewje der Milchmann. Perhaps Dzhankoye on the radio wasn’t so farfetched.

But everything changed dramatically after the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its neighboring states. As a result of Israel’s conquest of a significant amount of Arab territory, anti-Zionism became a central feature of Communist ideology. And that anti-Zionism all too frequently meant state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Jalda remembers that the countercultural music scene was quickly affected. Independent folk music was subsumed by the official music community. Yiddish was excised from official East German musical culture. Jalda’s mother did not perform in East Germany from June 1967 until 1975, aside from a November 9 commemorative concert in 1968. German translations of Sholem Aleichem disappeared and were not reissued by East German publishing houses for nearly 20 years.

In the late 1970s the NBC television series Holocaust was seen by 220 million people in Europe and the United States. It was an emblem of its time. Historians agree that during this decade the memory of the German persecution of Jews broke open in both Germanys, alongside growing interest in Jewish culture. It’s hardly a coincidence that the 1970s also marked a generational shift from those, like Rebling and Jaldati, who had experienced the horrors of the war firsthand to their children, like Jalda, who approached questions of history, memory, and culture with intellectual as well as emotional curiosity. Until that era, the story of the war as told in East Germany and the Soviet Union focused on socialist heroism in the face of fascist atrocities. That was, after all, the story of Jalda’s parents, and it was the story told at the memorial sites at concentration camps in East Germany, most famously at Buchenwald. But Jalda remembers when war memory began shifting from an emphasis on socialist heroism to one examining Jewish victimization. Lin Jaldati started performing once again in Yiddish in some of the most popular venues in Berlin.

In 1979 the Anne Frank Kindergarten in Berlin wanted Jaldati to perform for the fiftieth anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth, and Jaldati asked her daughter, who had become a well-known theater actress in her own right, to join her on the Yiddish stage. The Rebling-Jaldati family’s Anne Frank production became a hit, airing on GDR TV and selling briskly as a record. It became the family’s signature production on tour, the highlight of which was a performance at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Jalda notes that while “we sang in Yiddish, there was also a German song by Paul Dessau. In fact, we brought the first two pieces of German-language music into Yad Vashem. ”

Jalda gradually found herself at the center of East German Yiddish culture. From that 1981 Kristallnacht concert at the Erfurt church, she and other younger Jews started to excavate the history of the Soviet Yiddish writers who were killed in the Stalinist purges. Jalda saw her mother’s generation of socialist East Germans giving way to a new, more countercultural era. As she claimed in our interview, “I was never part of the official culture that my mother was a part of.” Jalda started her own band and worked exclusively on Jewish music well outside the parameters of official East German musical institutions. She began to perform Yiddish and other music for the Jewish holidays. “My mom, who had always been a committed political activist, couldn’t imagine that anyone German would be interested in this. But she was wrong.” Jalda and her small band gave Hanukkah concerts for the Berlin and Leipzig Jewish communities and performed for non-Jewish audiences. In the early 1980s, in the face of escalating Cold War tensions, Jalda created Yiddish peace songs: “Shpil zhe mir a lidele fun sholem…” (Sing me a song of peace).

In 1987 Jalda and others established the Yiddish Culture Festival (Tage der jiddischen Kultur) in Berlin. It took place at the Theater unterm Dach of the Kulturhaus in Ernst Thälmann Park, which had been established the year before as an alternative communal art space in the borough of Prenzlauer Berg. As Jalda recalled, “Several writers read works from contemporary Soviet Yiddish writers and the group also presented the work and the story of the murder of the Soviet Yiddish poets. [Margit Falk and] I sang Yiddish songs.”

The 1987 festival was hugely popular and caught the attention of East German authorities, though in unintended ways. In those early Gorbachev years, anything that presented a sunnier image of the GDR was considered worthy of support. The festival appeared on the front page of the Berliner Zeitung, the official newspaper of East Berlin, and a few weeks later UNESCO offered funding. This recognition enabled the organizers to turn their modest exploration of Yiddish in an alternative space into a major Yiddish cultural festival that brought East into conversation with West. Among the festival’s participants were Golda Tencer, director of the Esther Rokhl Kaminska State Jewish Theater of Warsaw, and members of the State Jewish Theater of Romania in Bucharest. Each year, the festival featured Yiddish culture from another Communist country. Sadly, one year after the festival’s founding, the grande dame of East German Yiddish culture, Lin Jaldati, passed away. One year after that, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

When Jalda speaks about German unification in 1990, her face turns somber. For many East German Jews, unification brought on the disintegration, not only of the Communist state, but also of the Jewish cultural life that had been built by stalwart activists like her parents. As the East German state went bankrupt, the Yiddish Cultural Festival that Jalda had shepherded nearly died, saved only by UNESCO funding. A few years later, Yiddish music had become an institution in the unified Germany, for better or worse. The dynamism of German unification gradually rendered invisible the Jewish cultural life that Jalda Rebling, Lin Jaldati, and others had promoted.

The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, Kristallnacht. Now events commemorating that date suggested competing German memories, one rooted in a past of oppression, the other in a vision of the future. But the tradition survived: on November 9, 1990, a unified German Jewish community commemorated Kristallnacht together for the first time. An official ceremony was held, in Hebrew, in the Rykestrasse Synagogue, the main synagogue on the eastern side of Berlin. Speakers included the president of the German Parliament, the long-standing chairman of the West Berlin Jewish Community, the president of the Western Academy of the Arts, and the rabbi of the West Berlin Community, whose hazan sang for the occasion.

Still, Rebling points out that East German Jewry, now subsumed into the official West German Jewish community, was absent from the proceedings: “Those who had filled this synagogue with Jewish life, Shabbat after Shabbat, for decades, were reduced to the role of showing the guests around the house, holding doors open for them, and being spectators.” So Jalda did what any good Yiddish stage performer would do. She commemorated Kristallnacht as she had always done: “On that same November evening, we remembered Kristallnacht in our own way, at the Gethsemane Church.”

The story of Jalda and her parents represents the experience of many East German Jews. In the beginning, this community, energized by socialist universalist ideals, saw Yiddish culture as a way to overcome their horrific memories of war, to honor a secular Jewish past, and to build a possible international future. Their children, the generation that came into adulthood in the 1960s, had a different perspective living in a state that put up walls and silenced Jewish culture. They turned to Yiddish as a way of responding to and resisting an oppressive state – a state that co-opted idealism for its own purposes.

Whatever the preceding decades had wrought, in the frenetic environment of 1990s German unification, the vision of Yiddish culture in Communist East Germany was lost. West German Jewry absorbed its “poor” eastern Jewish cousins, and the next chapter in the history of German Jewry, the influx of former Soviet Jews, began. Immediately after the wall fell, these Jews used East Germany as their access point to Europe. This latest wave of migrants to the country had little use for idealism, since any hint of socialism raised the specter of the harsh world they were fleeing.

Jalda Rebling remains one of the most important performers of Jewish music in Germany today. But her career has taken yet another turn. She is the hazzanit (female ritual singer) of Berlin’s Jewish Renewal community, known as Ohel Ha-Chiddusch (“The Tent of Renewal”). She received her religious ordination in the American-based, neo-Hasidic, Buddhist-inspired, deeply feminist renewal movement in 2007 and leads services all over the world. Some may see this turn to Jewish spirituality as the ultimate rejection of the nonreligious Communist Yiddish past of her parents. But her spiritual community is profoundly egalitarian and antiestablishment, and it deploys song as a means to forge connections among diverse people – values that sound remarkably like those of her parents as well as the 1960s music scene of Jalda’s young adulthood. Although the community meets at different locations around Berlin, the official address of Ohel Ha-Chiddusch is Gethsemane Strasse 11. It stands just around the corner from the Gethsemane Church, which served as Jalda’s personal tent of renewal in the final days of Communism. 

David Shneer is associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.