FOR Rilli Willow, as for many others in Berlin this week, a “circle is closing”. Her great-aunt Dora was once a Jewish opera singer in Berlin. Deported at 33 to Auschwitz, Dora was forced to sing for its guards until she perished. Now Rilli, 32 and born in Israel, is also a singer and lives in Berlin, married to a German. And on July 28th she proudly sang the German anthem at the opening of the 14th Maccabi Games, Europe’s largest Jewish sporting event, which for the first time is taking place in Germany. Eleven motorcyclists (pictured) rode to the contest from Israel, taking a detour through Poland to stop by the Auschwitz death camp.
The Maccabi Games are a sort of Zionist mini-Olympics (though Gentiles can compete). The movement began in the late Ottoman empire, where Jews who were barred from sports clubs began their own. In the 1920s a Maccabi youth movement was born in Europe.
The rise of Hitler seemed to quash it. A bitter foretaste of what was to follow came in 1936, when Hitler staged the Olympic Games in a purpose-built and grandiose stadium in Berlin. Many of the Jewish athletes who turned up were sent away hours before…