Andras Nussbaum's family

The picture was taken in Stuttgart, Germany, on my granddaughter Sonja's 16th birthday in 1998. This is my son Andras Nussbaum's family. My son met a Saxon [Transylvanian German] girl from this area. They talked about getting married. I would have liked him to marry a Jewish girl. Mixed marriage is a different problem, especially Jewish-German marriages. These two nations are as far apart as possible since the Holocaust. We met with the girls' parents, and her mother said that she would like my son to be married by a priest. She asked if I had any objections. I told her: 'This doesn't depend on me. It depends on my son; he and she are the ones who are getting married. But if you ask me, I am strongly against it. I don't ask them to have a religious wedding, but I don't want him to Christianize. Every one should remain in their ethnic group, if they love each other, they'll stay together anyway.' Thereupon she says: 'Well, I don't have any objections to them getting married according to Jewish traditions. I am very religious and I'd like them to get married before God.' A Saxon woman was able to say that, and allow them to get married in a Jewish way. I wouldn't have been able to allow them to get married according to the Lutheran religion. In the end they didn't get married in either way. They had a civic ceremony. They should just be good people and love each other. If I'm not mistaken, their child didn't receive a religious education, wasn't even baptized, but the mother, Gerlinde, my son's wife, had a Christmas tree. They don't observe Chanukkah either, nor any other Jewish holidays, because my son is not religious. I told my daughter-in-law: 'Look, I wouldn't like my son to stay in Romania, because he won't have any future here.' At that time it was such that I didn't know whether I would see him again, but I would renounce him. I said there was one opportunity to make something of himself: Israel. The child was already born when they went to Israel in 1984, and they were assigned to language courses, and after that they were sent on special terminology courses. My son's wife is called Gerlinde, a pure German name. Because the mother is not Jewish, the child is not Jewish either. My grandchild is a Jew everywhere in the world except in Israel. In Israel they found jobs, my daughter-in-law worked close to Haifa, in Kirjat Jearim. She was never asked whether she was a Jew or not. Of course they didn't ask, because they respected her very much. But my son didn't have a good time; that was down to his colleagues, not Israel. When they had been in Israel for three or four months, they got a letter from the German embassy of Israel, saying that they could go permanently to Germany. They didn't understand why. After that they got an answer, that the wife's family was in Germany and this family had arranged it, as the woman was of German origin. They found out that Gerlinde had already left for Israel so they informed the local embassy. In six months they were already in Germany. My son is a physician, his wife is a designing engineer at a company; they live a life of ease. My son presented himself to the religious community there, but he doesn't have any function.