Interview mit Jacqueline Jürgenliemk, Göttingen 2005
“The Göttingen community was laid down in the Shoah. It was then no longer - it no longer had any members, it was shut down and was then revived by some members in 1995, so it did not need to be re-established, but was simply brought back to life with originally around 20 members together celebrated the Shabbat on Friday evening. More was not possible at the time, but this is how Jewish life gradually came back to life. Our church life consists of the Shabbat service on Friday evening. It takes place every Friday. And there are also a lot of parishioners. So if there are many, we are already 45-50 members taking part in the service. If we have a rabbi or a rabbinical student, there is also a chacharit, that is the Saturday morning service, that is the Torah service, which takes place for several hours on Saturday. We celebrate all Jewish holidays here in the Jewish community and in addition to these religious celebrations and festivities, we also have German lessons on offer for our many many contingent refugees who come from Russian-speaking countries. We have a social counseling service where we help these people who are new to us in Germany to find an apartment, to organize their financial affairs, to simply be integrated here in Germany and here in Göttingen. We do integration work, very intensive here in Göttingen. We also have children’s lessons, we also have activities with young people and we have a culture cafe on Sunday afternoons, which is mainly done by our Russian-speaking members, where we always have singers and poets around, so more cultural things. We also have sporting activities from time to time, but they are now even more animated. So - we have a very intense community life in Göttingen. The Shabbat service takes place before the kiddush. It always starts with lighting the candles. Then there is a regular process that runs according to our religious prayer book. We use a certain one. We sing a lot and after the service we go to the dining room together. And then we sing songs that introduce us to eat together now and that we thank God that we have to drink up to the actual bread and bless wine. We start with the wine blessing, which I say with an intermediate song and then I start to bless the bread and then I distribute the bread to the congregation, or we then eat together. This is a very essential part of the worship service: that we eat together so that we not only receive our spiritual nourishment, but also our physical food. And it is important that we do all of this together.