The Penance Corps

Eighteen years after the Hitlerian terror that wiped out 6,000,000 Jews, most of the people of Israel seem as bitter as ever toward the Germans. The mere visit of a German Protestant pastor to a Jerusalem school recently provoked a national outcry. Last month, public opinion forced Israel's top chamber music orchestra to cancel a concert tour in West Germany. A law states that no West German firm may operate in Israel.*

But thinking Jews are convinced that passions will never cool until a way is found to get German and Jew together. To this end, some prominent Israelis have encouraged a small but growing West German program that organizes tours of Israel for hundreds of average Germans --trade unionists, students, professors, churchmen. Most successful part of the program is a sort of penance corps organized by Lothar Kreyssig, a prominent layman of the German Evangelical Church, who has sent two teams of volunteer German youths to work in the harsh surroundings of Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms). Financed entirely by Germans, Dr. Kreyssig's Aktion Suhnezeichen (roughly, Operation Penitence) asks nothing of Israel but the right to work without pay on Israeli projects. Says a spokesman of the organization: "Only by sharing the life of the Jewish people and helping overcome the feeling against us can we combat anti-Semitism."

Kreyssig's first problem was to find an Israeli community that would accept his missionaries. Only ten of the nation's 275 kibbutzim agreed to the idea, and even then the first team that went out to a Negev collective last year found it hard to make friends. The second group, twelve young Germans installed at Kibbutz Ba-han on the Jordan frontier, has had an easier time. Each morning they rise at 5:30 a.m. and head for their assigned chores. Some work on tractors, others in cauliflower gardens or the citrus orchards. Admits a leader of the collective: "We were short of hands until they came along. They are earning their keep."

From the start, the Germans tried to fit into everyday life by attending synagogue services, joining local clubs. But the community remained aloof from the strangers for months. The turning point came when calls went out for blood to increase the supplies in the clinic's blood bank. The Germans volunteered with the rest. Since then, collective members have invited Germans into their homes, take them along to domino contests and movie nights in Tel Aviv. Fortnight ago, Israelis watched curiously as one of the Germans sobbed during memorial services for the Jewish victims of Crystal Night.* The murderous evening of raids in November 1938 that marked the start of Hitler's campaign to annihilate Germany's Jews.

The families at "Kibbutz Bahan do not quite know what to make of these outward signs of German repentance. "We cannot believe that Germany has changed since the Nazi period," says a youth hostel leader. "Yet we do know that these guests represent new forces in Germany."

* Although anomalously, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's regime permits Israeli weapons factores to sell machine guns, mortar shells and grenade launchers to the West German army.

* So named becase Nazi toughs broke windows in thousands of Jewish shops and homes.

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