c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) One by one the icons of my childhood gently drop from the tree of life. In early March 94-year-old Erna Frankel died peacefully in her Alexandria, Va., home. While she and her late husband, Eric, were among my family’s closest friends, especially my parents and sister-in-law, the Frankels also represented something more _ a microcosm of turbulent 20th century Jewish life.

Erna and Eric were born in the long-ago Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm II, a heady time for German Jews. Children of the Enlightenment and political emancipation, they ardently believed they were an integral part of the Fatherland, “real” Germans who merely happened to have a different religion, Judaism, from the majority Christian population.

Erna’s father-in-law was a psychiatrist in Berlin, a profession that attracted many German-speaking Jews, including Sigmund Freud. Erna, a beautiful redhead, was born into a solid middle-class family. The first eight years of her life were filled with nannies, maids and the good life the German capital offered its residents.

Those years, just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, were the high-water mark of the “Kaiserkult.” Many young Jewish boys, like their Christian neighbors, wore dark blue sailor suits complete with gold buttons and caps with the names of German warships emblazoned across their brims. A visitor to Berlin was surprised to see that over half the men in the city had enormous mustaches just like their emperor.

But Germany’s shattering defeat in 1918 meant the end of the Kaiser’s rule, and a weak Weimar Republic took its place. Like many other Jews of the period, Erna’s family supported the fledgling democratic republic in the face of ferocious assaults from both Nazis and Communists.

Years later, Erna told me that many of her friends mistakenly believed Hitler was a passing political phenomenon. Of course, those young Jews of the Weimar Republic, an era immortalized by the musical “Cabaret,” were not the only ones who were wrong in their judgment.

Eric and Erna were married in the 1930s amid the ominous backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power. As the Nazi vise tightened on Germany’s half-million Jews, the Frankels still hoped the Nazi nightmare would end. However, the murderous Kristallnacht anti-Jewish attacks in 1938 finally convinced the young couple it was time to flee their native country.

They bribed a German border guard and drove to Luxembourg in a car with a false bottom containing money and personal possessions. Later, the Frankels found haven in Virginia just before World War II began.

Eric and Erna were the lucky ones because so many of their relatives were murdered during the Holocaust. As a child I vividly remember her crying each time she looked through her family photo album. Long before the words Holocaust and Shoah entered my vocabulary, I had experienced their meaning in Erna’s tears.

For more than six decades until her death, Erna lived in the same house on Alexandria’s Argyle Drive: first as a wife and then as widow during the past 40 years. She always reminded me of the film star Ingrid Bergman, radiating elegance and class. For me she was a living symbol of the extraordinary German Jewish community that was destroyed in the Holocaust.

Erna had two separate lives. Her first 34 years were lived in chaotic Germany as it convulsively lurched from a truculent empire to a beleaguered republic and then to a Nazi dictatorship. Forever scarred by the murder of so many friends and family members, nonetheless Erna and Eric rebuilt their life together in a new land.

She loved Israel and made many visits to that country, including one with my parents when they were all quite old.

Erna was also founder of a synagogue she regularly attended until a debilitating illness prevented her from leaving her home.

But the traumatic experience of her early years in Germany was always close to the surface. In 1952 Erna expressed fear that if Dwight Eisenhower, a revered general, became president, he would become another Paul von Hindenburg, the German field marshal, who was either unable or unwilling to block Hitler’s rise to power. She was fearful Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., an American demagogue, would grab power from Ike and establish an anti-Semitic dictatorship.

Happily, she was wrong, but Erna’s message was clear: Political freedom and Jewish security are priceless and must be constantly protected.

Shalom, shalom, dear Erna Frankel, who taught me so much and who shared so many memorable moments with my family. You will be missed.

DEA END RUDIN