Reporter tracks down Jewish roots EDITOR'S NOTE: Staff

BERLIN -- I was 15 when I discovered my family was Jewish.

I was at a family reunion in a Washington, D.C., conference room when a man at the podium with the same last name as mine started talking about how the Rauhs were always skipping synagogue.

"The Rauhs are Jewish?" I whispered to my mother.

She faced me and nodded yes, her eyebrows raised to indicate I should have picked up this piece of family trivia years ago.

But how could I? It had never come up at home and my religious life up to that point included Sunday school lessons, youth group ski

trips and a seat among the first sopranos in the Christ Church Girls Choir in Greenwich, Conn.

"Do they know we're not?" I asked, trying to keep my voice down. Apparently they did.

But from the sea of heads rocking back and forth at the elder Rauh's jokes (involving Yiddish phrases I had never heard of), I wasn't buying my mother's answer.

After all, if I didn't know that nearly everyone in the United States named Rauh was Jewish, why would they know I was not.

Going home

When my boyfriend heard I was going to Germany in September, he said the only German phrase I needed to know was "Juden, die Papiere," which means "Jews, papers."

He skipped Germany on his first foray into central Europe, a summer program for Jewish teenagers that shuttled them through former concentration camps in Poland, before flying the emotionally exhausted crew to Israel.

Although laden with sarcasm, his attitude is not unfamiliar to American Jews, some of whom remain anti-German to this day.

But to Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which represents about 110,000 Jews, this is home.

I met the gray-haired 67-year-old on a trip to Germany last month. He waited out the war with his mother in Belgium while his father spent it in three concentration camps. After liberation, Spiegel's father insisted on returning home.

Few followed his lead.

In Bamberg, a German city in northern Bavaria that today is a

UNESCO World Heritage Site, only three of the city's 800 synagogue members returned after the war. It is estimated roughly 500 of them left Germany before the Holocaust and the rest were killed during the war.

Heiner Olmer was born in Bamberg in 1949 to Polish parents who met at a displaced persons' camp in the city after the war and decided to stay.

They formed a new Jewish community of Poles who, like Olmer's parents, had lost everything -- and everyone -- during the war. But it dwindled as families left the small city in the 1950s for work and educational opportunities elsewhere, and by the mid-1980s, about 30 Jews remained.

Olmer, the synagogue director, assumed his only job would be administering the Jewish cemetery.

Today, his hands are full. German reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union opened the floodgates to thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe, and the Bamberg synagogue now has nearly 900 members.

But despite the rising number of Jews in Germany, anti-Semitism persists, and Spiegel said there isn't a week that goes by without some Jewish cemetery being desecrated.

Ancestors

The Jewish cemetery in Burgkunstadt, where my great-great-great- grandfather is buried, isn't taking any chances. A stone wall surrounds the headstones and a thick, locked gate tries to keep unwanted visitors out.

The Rauhs were German Jews who immigrated to Cincinnati in the late 19th century. My grandfather, Richard Rauh, was Jewish, but he left the religious life of his two sons up to my grandmother, a Roman Catholic.

When my parents married, they raised my brother and sister and me in the Episcopal church. Until the reunion, I didn't have a clue.

I climbed the German cemetery wall on a recent Saturday, jumping down into the soft overgrown grass that provides a green cover to a few of the fallen headstones.

My relatives have visited the cemetery and some even found Koppel Rauh's headstone among the many graves. I yearned to see my family's name carved in one of the thick stone slabs, but after weaving through row after row of graves, I came up short.

I didn't see my name in Altenkunstadt, either, although I looked hard as I walked the cobblestone streets my relatives must have pounded when they lived there in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There are no more Jews in Altenkunstadt, but if you turn down Judenhof, you'll find the town's historic synagogue. Built in 1726, it is now a cultural and community center and one of the few German synagogues to survive the 1938 Kristallnacht, when Jewish synagogues, cemeteries, homes and businesses throughout the country were burned or destroyed.

A plaque outside says that on April 24, 1942, the village's remaining 13 Jews were deported to Poland and killed in a concentration camp.

"The secret of redemption is remembering," it states.

'Arbeit Macht Frei'

On my last day in Berlin, I boarded the S-train and rode north, passing apartment buildings and train platforms until the cityscape gave way to small towns where window boxes are filled with pink flowers.