In the last blog I indicated that Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal had all mentioned the importance of looking at the question of forgiveness and German and Jewish relations. It was important for me to wrestle with this difficult question too. I wanted to find a collaborator of my same age from Germany. I reached out to contacts that I had and was referred to Toby Axelrod, Assistant Director of the Berlin Office of the American Jewish Committee. She suggested Ursula (Ulla) Schorn, a dance and movement therapist very involved with second generation Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. Ulla and I began emailing back and forth, sharing our backgrounds and interests.
I discovered that Ulla’s father was a Nazi and she was raised in Hamburg, Germany. My father was in the United States army, a tank driver who saw heavy combat at the Battle of the Bulge. Ulla and I were close to the same age. I was born in 1943 and Ulla in 1942. Ulla was and still is a dance and Gestalt therapist working in Berlin. She studied extensively with Anna Halprin and is a Halprin practitioner. In fact in 2014 she, along with two other authors, published a book on Halprin called Anna Halprin: Dance-Process-Form.
I invited Ulla to come to the United States and to spend a week joining the four dance company members and myself in exploring the theme of forgiveness. She agreed. Now my thoughts turned to figuring out how to make that a very meaningful week.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs offered to provide a space for us to work in. As part of the Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) he had created a very flexible space with a good wood floor that on the weekend was used for religious services for youth but during the week was free. The folding chairs could be removed and it was an ideal space for dance. Separate from the main building, it provided privacy. I invited composer-percussionist Newman Taylor Baker to join us and accompany our movement. I also decided it would be helpful to have a guest theologian speak to us each day on forgiveness providing some of their favorite text for us to use as motivation.
For the season of 2000-2001 four dancers were under contract to work for 16 weeks. Stacy Limon Cohen, Julia Pond, Becka Vargus and Candice Franklin had already been working together for over two months prior to the week in March when we gathered together to work in Scarsdale at WRT.
Ulla graciously agreed to accept home hospitality with Murray and me in our home in Jersey City. Each day we drove together from my home to and from WRT in Scarsdale giving us plenty of time to get to know each other as well as enjoy meals together. I learned of the various feelings she had of growing up with a father who was in the military, the guilt connected with her father being a Nazi and the pressure he put on her and her siblings to have a certain level of excellence. At my house and traveling we were two women simply learning about each other. However when we were at WRT working with the dancers a different level of symbolism happened. I felt I was representing a Jewish point of view and Ulla a German point of view.
On Monday, Rabbi Kenneth Chasen, the assistant rabbi at WRT, used the biblical Joseph story, particularly 45:1- 8 to motivate our thinking. This text is about Joseph revealing himself to his brothers who had sold him to the Egyptians. Joseph does not hold it against them. On Monday, while Ulla and I both improvised with the four Avodah dancers we were not on the dance floor at the same time. Clearly there was a level of discomfort for us to formally interact with each other.
On Tuesday, Nell Gibson, an Episcopal Lay Leader recommended by Canon Lloyd Casson (since Canon Casson was unable to be part of the week, due to other commitments), presented material from the New Testament. She shared Luke 34 – “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.’” Ulla and I both found ourselves on the dance floor at the same time but did not interact together.
Wednesday was the breakthrough day for me. Rick Jacobs presented two different texts and since Rick had danced in the company from 1980-86, I requested, on the spur of the movement, that he come up with a movement idea for the text he was presenting. He agreed. He introduced text from Moses Maimonides – “Even if a person spent his entire life sinning, yet repents on the day of his death, and dies as one who has turned to God, all of his transgressions will be forgiven.”
The improvisation for the Maimonides text had one person at a time imagining that it was the last day of her life and that the rest of the group were people from whom she needed to ask forgiveness.
The second text that Rick shared with us was even more powerful. It was from Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. “Known as ‘Rabbi Shlomo’ to his followers, Carlebach (14 January 1925 – 20 October 1994) was a Jewish rabbi, religious teacher, composer, and singer who was known as ‘The Singing Rabbi’ during his lifetime” (Wikipedia).
Carlebach was born in Europe before WWII and came to America from Vienna as a teenager because of the Nazis. In the 1990’s he returned to Vienna and to several other cities in Austria and Germany to give concerts. While there, he met with non-Jews as well as with Jews. Someone asked him why he did it. “Don’t you hate them?” he was asked. His answer was, “If I had two souls, I would devote one to hating them. But since I only have one, I don’t want to waste it hating. We have just one life, one soul – we shouldn’t waste it on hating: not the Nazis, most of whom are gone by now, not their children who are not guilty of the sins of their fathers and mothers, and surely not the people around us.”
The improvisation task for this quote was to respond in movement, interacting with each other, revealing the soul that does not hate!
Ulla and I were now interacting together in movement. My notes from the day indicate the Ulla and I found ourselves dancing together with simple mirroring movement, naturally flowing back and forth in terms of who was leading. The empathy we felt for each other in this experience was powerful and very emotional for both of us.
The rest of the week went well with more interacting with Ulla. I don’t have any notes related to what happened on Thursday and Friday but I know that I began to understand more of the emotions she carried from being the daughter of a Nazi.
After she left I found myself wrestling with new emotions related to forgiveness that I had not experienced before. Things were no longer black and white and I was definitely on a new journey in both my own personal life and in what I wanted to express as a choreographer.
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