Make Me a Sanctuary

1st Adar 5786 Wednesday, 18 February 2026 On this first day of Ramadan I wish our fellow Muslim communities Ramadan Mubarak

I’m here in Berlin, leading a week of intensive study for rabbinical students on the subject of our environment, God’s world. But how, in this city, could I not be thinking about my grandparents and what they endured?

My mother’s father studied here for the rabbinate at the liberal Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, graduating in 1909. My father’s grandfather Jacob Freimann studied some decades earlier at the orthodox Hildesheimer Seminar. Both colleges stood on the same street, the Artilleriestrasse. Apparently, they were known respectively as ‘the light artillery’ and ‘the heavy artillery’. The institutions remained separate (though no shots were fired) until Hitler forced them to combine, before closing them both down and sending to his concentration and death camps all alumni unable to escape his murderous grasp.

My grandfather managed to flee Nazi Germany in April 1939. My great-grandfather died suddenly in 1937 on his way to celebrate his eldest daughter’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Holleschau. There he lies at peace in the town’s Jewish cemetery, mercifully untouched by the horrors that decimated his family, killing half and sending the others into exile.

But these are not the associations uppermost in my mind as I study the Torah I’m preparing to share. Rather, I find myself meditating on the deep resilience of Judaism, persistent survivor of exiles, wars, and the dragnets of numerous tyrannies.

Today’s rabbinical college, named after Abraham Joshua Heschel (who also studied here but hated the place), is situated in the nearby town of Potsdam, the military capital constructed for the Kaisers. As I walk past the stolid stately buildings and the huge grey archway, I see the stone footprints of power. Here the German army’s records were held, including the undisclosed results of the infamous 1916 Judenzaehlung, the census intended to prove that Jews were shirkers, avoiding service in the Kaiser’s front lines. The conclusions were never published because, it is widely presumed, they proved the opposite. The truth will never be known because the archives were destroyed by allied bombing in World War ll.

Throughout those violent decades years my grandparents in their rabbinates were trying to establish something very different, - less tangible, incomparably more fragile, yet ultimately more enduring: a Mikdash, a sacred tabernacle for the presence of God.

The Torah describes this structure in minute detail: acacia wood, curtains of scarlet and purple, clasps of gold and copper. But in truth it has no fixed footprint and occupies no single place. It is created and recreated, as it has been for millennia, wherever people come together to pray to God, care for each other, seek blessing and try to make the world more compassionate and less cruel. Any and every place where this is attempted is truly holy, not because the ground is sanctified but because space has been made for what transcends time and space: humility and service, kindness and blessing, and consciousness of the spirit that flows through all life, instructing us in our heart and soul not to hate, or hurt, or harm.

I look around me and see the huge stone contradiction of this ephemeral structure, this ideal, this idea. Yet which has proved the stronger, which has endured?

I discuss with my fellow students what it means to perceive the world as God’s creation and everything that breathes as precious, and to recognise that in this volatile and violent age we are here to try to protect and honour the holiness of fragile, vulnerable, transient life.