How civil society disintegrates

When Ruth Oppenheim, a long-time member of Barrington’s Temple Habonim, died March 12 at the age of 98, a congregant at the temple told me, “Our synagogue has just lost an important part of our history; more than that, our larger Jewish community has just lost a significant part of our collective history.” With Ruth’s death, world Jewry lost one more living witness to the horrors of Nazi Germany.

Ruth was not quite 11 when she suffered and survived the trauma and terror of Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938. Through persistence and a large dose of lucky circumstances, in the winter of 1940 Ruth and her family of six found themselves reunited in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

This past Sept. 15, Temple Habonim sponsored a fundraiser in honor of Ruth Oppenheim at the Avon Theater on Providence’s Thayer Street. The synagogue had arranged for the Avon’s single showing of the re-release of the 1989 version of “Reunion,” with Jerry Schatzberg directing Harold Pinter’s feature-length screenplay of Fred Uhlman’s novel by the same name.

Mah Nishtanah? Why is this film different from all other Holocaust-related films that I have seen? The story is told in flashbacks from the perspective of an elderly Jewish man, Henry Strauss, who returns to his native Stuttgart after a more than half-century absence to try to discover whatever had happened to his teenage friend. In the early 1930s, the young Henry, then known as Hans, had developed an intense yearlong friendship with a classmate, the aristocratic Count Konradin von Lohenburg, at an elite all-boys school — a relationship that Talya Zax at the “Forward” celebrates with the words, “But oh, the halcyon days of this doomed duo.”

The early 30s in Stuttgart was a time of increasing societal uneasiness at the birth of Nazism, but not a hint of what the triumph of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party would mean for that “doomed duo,” for Germany, for the whole of Europe or for the world at large. Who could have anticipated those infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht in 1938 or Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of their once-ally, Russia, on June 22, 1941? Or those hellholes of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka and, in Russia, Babi Yar? Most tragic is the refusal of German civil society in the early 30s to see their disintegration and their inability even to begin to sense the coming storm.

I came back from the Avon bursting with questions, asking myself why I was so moved by this particular film, perhaps more deeply stirred by “Reunion” than by any other movie concerning the Holocaust. That very evening, I began searching online for reviews of the movie, only to be confused at first by the large number of films with the same name. I narrowed my search with “Holocaust related,” and several different reviews of the 1989 version popped up along with the “Forward” review of the April 2026 two-week revival in New York City.

I found Talya Zax’s review especially enlightening. First, the title of her piece: “In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Shatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026.” Why does the movie seem to speak more powerfully to American audiences today in 2026 than it did in 1989? The subtitle offers the answer: “Almost four decades after its premier, ‘Reunion’ is a masterful look at how civil society disintegrates.”

Today, in this autumn of 2026, the 1989 film about the early 1930s in Germany shows us the film equivalent of “chapter and verse” precisely how our American society is disintegrating before our very eyes and ears.

By now we ought to feel frightened enough to do something about it.

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.