So I had one of those moments you live for.
I wasn’t exactly sure or excited when my travel agent booked us through Frankfurt, Germany on our way to Israel.
We were to have a three-hour morning layover.
I’m used to putting my tfillin on at 35,000 feet. But nothing could make me feel higher or closer to G-d then Tuesday morning, Dec. 25, when at the Frankfurt terminal awaiting a connecting flight to Tel Aviv, I joined a handful of other Jews who were saying our morning prayers.
But you know that somewhere during that davening, the thought crept in my mind, that here we were decades after the Holocaust, in a country ruled by pure evil, and we Jews were davening proudly, but still davening with our tfillen on in Germany.
Next to davening later that day at the Kotel, and seeing my son-in-law in his army uniform, it didn’t get much better than that.
Hitler, the SS, the Gestapo, a society of killing and racial purity, dead.
A small handful of G-d fearing Jews in a German airport with tfillen visible. I looked around the waiting area several times and felt so good, so strong about being Jewish.
That moment in time wasn’t on the itinerary. Like many of you, I lost relatives in the Holocaust.
I felt I was touching everyone of their souls on a gray, cold Tuesday morning in a German airport.