What is "The Next Harvest"?
Posted on January 12, 2010
In the Fall of 2008, when a Jew from Gloucester Massachusetts bought a house in Oppenheim Germany, he became the first Jew to live in that city since my mother. When she fled with her brother and parents in 1941 it marked the end of the nearly one thousand years of Jewish presence there.
Nearly seventy years after my mother’s departure I traveled to the Rhineland to meet Oppenheim’s newest resident – Jerrold Oppenheim - and film the reaction his arrival has evoked. Among Jerry’s new neighbors is Heribert Hamann, an architect obsessed with locating the remains of this once flourishing jewish community and its lost synagogues and mikvahs. Professor Hamann’s research led him to my uncle and mother in the U.S., eyewitnesses to the destruction of Oppenheim’s last synagogue.
