This sermon was delivered on Yom Kippur afternoon at Temple Beth El.

It’s so great to be in this sanctuary that I love, with this community that I love. Thank you Rabbi Knight, Cantor Rodniski, Rabbi Erdheim and Rabbi Nichols for these beautiful services and for making space for me during the High Holidays and always.

Forgiveness does not come easy — for Jonah, in the book that bears his name — nor for us.

My father was a Holocaust refugee. In 1938, at the age of 12, he fled Germany. A recently published biography on his life taught me that he estimated that 20 to 25 members of our family were murdered by the Nazis.

Forgiveness does not come easy. 

And yet, here we are on Yom Kippur, entering our Yizkor, healing and Neilah service. The gates are beginning to close and we are asking for forgiveness from God, and being called to forgive others.

On the topic of forgiveness, I was recently told a funny story about my father. He served as head of the Reform movement, often traveling to visit congregations across North America. On one such trip, an assistant rabbi picked him up in a German-made Mercedes. Sheepishly, the rabbi said he had gotten a great deal on the car.

Without hesitation, my father replied, “I haven’t forgiven the Romans yet.”

For context, nearly 2000 years ago, the Romans had destroyed our Second Temple, devastated Jerusalem, and exiled our people. My dad hadn’t forgiven them, so German cars? Out of the question.

My dad’s resistance wasn’t irrational; it came from a place of deep personal pain.

But it raises an essential question: What does it take to forgive?

The book of Jonah is a story of reluctant forgiveness in five acts.

Act I: The Call

Jonah is commanded by God, “Arise, Go to Nineveh… and proclaim their wickedness.” (Jonah 1:2)

Nineveh, was the capital of the Assyrian empire – a violent, ruthless, enemy of the Jewish people. God calls Jonah to deliver a message of repentance to them.

To us, that might be analogous to being called in the 1930s and 1940s to deliver a message of mercy to the Nazis – or today, calling for compassion to modern violent extremists who chant for the destruction of Israel.  It is saying, “If they have a change of heart, we will forgive them.”

It’s a radical ask – and Jonah can’t do it.

Act II: The Fleeing

Jonah flees in the opposite direction. He goes to Yafo, boards a ship, and falls fast asleep in the hold, trying to escape not just physically, but spiritually. God’s mission for him to go to Nineveh was simply too painful.

My father returned to Germany only once when he was a soldier in World War II. As my dad’s biographer, Dr. Michael Meyer, told it, “When the fighting in Italy had ceased, Schindler was able to convince his captain to lend him a jeep so that he could drive into Germany and search for possible survivors from his family.”

My father found no relatives who were alive in Munich but his stop in the concentration camp Dachau, where he saw former inmates, the living dead, struggling to regain their strength, forever changed him.

A half decade later, when my dad was a rabbinical student and heard from his teacher Leo Baeck that Baeck was giving a lecture in Germany, my father asked him, “How can you go back? The hand that you shake may be the dagger that killed your brother.”

To which Baeck, a survivor of Theresienstadt responded, “It might also be the hand that stretched out and gave me a piece of bread.”

Like Jonah running from Nineveh, going back to Germany again was just too hard for my dad. And while, much later in life, my father did once accept an invitation to deliver three lectures in Germany, a high fever caused him to cancel.

Act III: The Storm

In the book of Jonah, God sends a storm. The ship is in chaos. Jonah finally tells the sailors to throw him overboard not out of despair, but responsibility.

God famously provides a huge fish (which some have translated as a whale) to swallow Jonah. Over the course of Jonah’s three-day time out from life, he comes to terms with the fact that he cannot flee from his mission.

Fast forward twenty-three hundred years to my family’s story.

This past February, my family received an invitation from the City of Munich. They had begun a project of remembrance placing plaques on the homes of Holocaust victims. The city was going to place plaques on the home of my great-grandparents — Necha and Abraham Schindler – and their daughter, Judith (my namesake), her husband Eli, and two of their children, Kela and Issachar Dov, who had lived in that apartment building in Munich prior to Judy’s family moving to Berlin and growing far larger.  Down the street, plaques for more murdered relatives were also to be placed.

Forty-five Schindlers planned to return to the home of our family’s past.

My husband, Chip, and I went to represent my father’s branch. Our Israeli cousins were particularly enthusiastic – laboring over our extensive family trees, making Schindler baseball caps for everyone, and name tags identifying each family member and their generation.

But the day before their departure, the Iran-Israel 12-day war broke out. Twenty-one Israeli family members had to stay behind. Still, twenty-four of us made it to honor our past.

Act IV: The Return

“And the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time…” (Jonah 3:1)

Again, Jonah was called to travel to Nineveh. And this time he goes. He speaks. The people of Nineveh listen. They fast. They repent. They change. What seemed impossible… happens.

Fast forward to 2025 in Munich. My family returned. Two non-Jewish municipal historians guided us. They had found every source possible about my family’s history and took us on a tour of my great-grandparents’ lives – their kosher store, their home, their synagogue, the Gestapo, their deportations, their lives, and their deaths.

A formal ceremony was held at the Jewish Community Center with city officials, music, and a lecture given by a third non-Jewish historian who had studied the writings of my grandfather who was a poet, an activist, a Jewish thought leader who, in 1933, had the forethought to bring his papers to the Munich library before fleeing.

The Germans of Munich today were not indifferent. They were repentant. Their efforts were sincere.

Act 5: The Contrast

Jonah, upon witnessing Nineveh’s repentance, becomes despondent.

He tells God he’d rather die than see these people forgiven. He finds shelter under a sukkah and God provides for Jonah a plant giving him shade from the blazing sun. Yet, when the plant withers, Jonah is furious.

God responds: “You care about this plant that you did not even create. Should I not care about the 120,000 people in Nineveh who do not know right from wrong?” (Jonah 4:11)

Jonah could not forgive. He couldn’t let go of his pain.

But we, my father’s descendants, could.

Afterword

At the municipal ceremony in Munich, I shared these words to my family members who were present and those watching on Zoom in Israel and in the US:

“We are each links in the chain of our family.

We carry the names of those who came before us.

We hold their stories – of labor and love, of celebration and tragedy.

From Abraham and Necha, came 7 children, 13 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren, 48 great-great-grandchildren, and 48 great-great-great grandchildren – with three more on the way.”

We offered thanks to the historians, to the city and prayers for peace – especially for our Israeli family unable to attend.

The Legacy and the Future

Here I stand on Yom Kippur of the new year 5786.

Yesterday morning, my nephew Max and his wife Barbara welcomed their first child into the world – the 49^th great-great-great grandchild of Abraham and Necha. This morning they shared her name, Alexandra Keila Schindler. This past June in Munich, we had placed a plaque for her namesake Kela, who was killed at the age of 10.

God willing, in six weeks, on Friday night November 14th, the 25th anniversary of my father’s death, we will welcome her into the covenant with a brit bat on the Central Synagogue bimah where Barbara converted and where Max and Barbara were married.

Shortly after Barbara got pregnant, she learned from a friend who had just obtained German citizenship, that the German government had created that opportunity for descendants of Holocaust victims.  Barbara was contemplating it for her own future child and asked me to help obtain the required records.

We put the idea out to the other members of my immediate family and there were several of my siblings, nieces and nephews who are considering joining an effort to obtain German citizenship – in addition to their cherished American citizenship.

My family is not forgetting. We are not excusing. But we are forgiving of German citizens themselves. They have changed.

Jonah never wanted the Ninevites to be forgiven – not because he didn’t know God would forgive them, but because he did.

He said:

“Ki yadati, for I know

 el chanun v’rachum atah, You are a gracious and compassionate God

erech apayim, slow to anger

v’rav chesed, abounding in kindness…” (Jonah 4:11)

As Jonah struggled with God’s mercy, we are reminded that even in nations that do evil, there are good people. People who remember, repent and repair.

On this holiest of days, as the gates begin to close, may we — like Jonah eventually did — accept the call.

May we offer forgiveness when it’s deserved. May we receive it when we ask for it.
And may that forgiveness bring healing — to us, to our families, to our future, and to the world. Amen.