By Sascha Brodsky
In a way, Rick Landman’s Torah is going home.
This month, the 200-year-old Torah is returning to Germany, from where Landman’s grandfather took it after fleeing the Nazis. Landman, a Tribeca resident, presented the Torah to representatives of a German synagogue Congregation, Beth Shalom, at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, at 57 Bethune St., on Nov. 9.
Landman’s grandfather, Martin Oettinger, brought the Torah from Germany in 1946. That side of the family traces its German roots to the 1500s. Oettinger and his brother Albert fought in World War I on the side of the Kaiser.
Living in Germany, Martin Oettinger, an outspoken Jew, had an altercation with the notorious Nazi Julius Streicher in the late 1920s. Streicher was one of the Nazis to be hanged after the Nuremberg trials for his propaganda work and virulent anti-Semitism.
Fearing for his life, Oettinger fled to France within days of Hitler coming to power in 1933. Oettinger, Elsie and their young daughter Lisa, Landman’s mother, lived in Strasbourg for six years until they saw what was happening across the river in Germany on Kristallnacht. Seeing burning synagogues convinced them that France would not be able to protect them any longer. So they applied for “stateless passports” and left France for America.
The Oettingers eventually immigrated to Washington Heights in February 1939. It was Martin Oettinger, who, as soon as World War II ended, booked a ship to return to the land of his birth to find out what happened to his family, friends and business. On his return home to New York City in 1946, he brought back three Torahs. One he gave to his synagogue in Washington Heights, Congregation Beth Hillel, and the other two he eventually gave to his grandsons, Landman and his brother.
Nearly 60 years later, Landman donated his Torah to a German reform synagogue on Nov. 9, the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the beginning of the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
“Now that there is a Reform, egalitarian synagogue in Munich, the city from where my father’s grandparents were deported to their death in Auschwitz, this is the ideal place for the Torah to go,” Landman said. “It will be in honor of Gerson and Sofie Landman of Munich, who were killed during the Holocaust, and Martin and Elsie Oettinger, my maternal grandparents, who brought the Torah to America. They all would be surprised to know that Jews were once again thriving in Germany.”
Landman, who heads New York University’s real estate department, said that he turned down an earlier opportunity to donate the Torah because of mixed feelings he has over his identity of being both Jewish and gay.
“In 1965, after being told in Hebrew school that no two men would ever be married in front of a Torah, I decided not to donate the Torah at my bar mitzvah; but instead I loaned it until I could find a synagogue that would permit gay marriages,” he said. “Finally, in 1973 Congregation Beth Simchat Torah was formed and later when I became an active member, I lent the Torah to them.”
Landman said that donating the Torah has a special meaning because he is gay.
“When I read ‘Mein Kampf’ in school, I understood how scared my parents must have felt to be Jewish,” he said. “Then as a gay teenager, when I learned there were religious people who took the Bible literally, I was also scared. Both books contained passages that wanted me dead; ‘Mein Kampf’ for being a Jew and the Bible for being gay.”
