The Chancellor’s Tears
It was one of those human moments in politics that lingers long after and remains unforgettable. Like Willy Brandt kneeling in Warsaw and Helmut Kohl holding hands with François Mitterrand in Verdun. The chancellor’s struggle with tears during his speech at the reopening of the Reichenbach Synagogue in Munich. A place I visited with my family on high holidays as a child. A place where, long before I could read and write, I understood that something terrible had happened to us Jews in Germany. And that, even though these events are in the past, we still need protection. It sounded illogical, but at least I understood why the synagogue, so beautiful and cozy inside, was hidden behind massive marble walls—invisible from Reichenbach Street.
Like most German Jews of my generation, I grew up as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe. The trauma was fresh, the collective pain part of our identity. The German chancellor shared this pain with us on Monday, in a moving moment of closeness and humanity. It was a moment that for many linked the past with the present: the eliminatory hatred of the Nazis with the eliminatory hatred of Hamas on October 7. For the stories of the inhuman cruelty of the Nazis that our grandparents shared with us resemble the images of horror that reached us from southern Israel on October 7. This is what makes the current situation so unbearable for Jews around the world. Especially in Germany. On October 7, the news of Jewish babies being burned alive was celebrated by Islamists on the streets of Berlin.
Since then, we have seen pro-Palestinian mobs tearing up posters of hostages, smearing Jewish monuments with Hamas triangles, verbally and physically attacking Jews, and shouting the Jihadists’ eliminatory slogans in lecture halls at German universities – long before Israel began to defend itself against Hamas’s massacres and rocket terror. It has long been clear that Hamas wants death and terror, not freedom and life for the Palestinians.
The wave of antisemitism sweeping Germany’s streets and social media is no longer an antisemitism problem. It is a democracy problem. And it affects society as a whole. The shouts and demands at pro-Palestinian demonstrations paraphrase the Hamas charter: the destruction of the Jewish state is only the beginning. Hamas’s ideal world is the ideal world of ISIS and Al-Qaeda: a world ruled by Sharia law – instead of European democracies. A caliphate in which women are stoned, homosexuals are hanged, Christians are persecuted, and dissidents are thrown from rooftops. Hamas-affiliated associations in Germany have announced that men and women who are transported to pro-Palestinian protests should sit separately from each other on buses. There are already cases today in which decisions made by Sharia judges are being adopted by German judges. The threat posed by the radical mob is so great already that the Berlin concert by Jewish conductor Shani Lahav, who was disinvited in Belgium, was protected like a state visit by Donald Trump.
Middle East policy is no longer exclusively a foreign policy issue. It is, willy-nilly, a socio-political barometer. Does a decision strengthen or weaken the enemies of the free world? That should be the litmus test. And with it, the question of whether or not it promotes Germany’s own strategic interests – and that includes close cooperation with Israel in all areas.
Friedrich Merz’s moving speech at the Reichenbach Street synagogue was a significant event for democracy in Germany. An unforgettable moment that linked the past with the present – and gives hope.
—
This article was originally published in Germany’s newspaper DIE WELT, in German, on September 17th, 2025.
