Judith Bernstein - I resist to the notion that the fate of my grandparents must serve as a justification for the fight against the Palestinians. Heinz Michael Vilsmeier in conversation with Judith Bernstein

Judith Bernstein's parents left Germany a few years after the Nazis came to power. Since emigration to the USA was denied to them, they fled to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and settled down in Rehavia, a suburb outside Jerusalem, like many German Jews at the time. In the "garden city" of Rehavia, Judith Bernstein was born in 1945 into a world shaped by the culture of its German-born residents, the Jeckes.
Judith Bernstein was socialized into this German-Jewish society - and although her grandparents had been murdered in Auschwitz two years before her birth, she was strongly drawn to her parents' old homeland. When she received a scholarship from the city of Munich, she came to Germany in 1966 to study. She experienced the Six-Day War in 1967 from the Bavarian capital, a conflict that would have far-reaching consequences for the thinking of many Israelis and thus for the policies of Israel.
Judith Bernstein did return to Israel, where she married and in 1973 and 1976 gave birth to her daughters Sharon and Shelly, but eventually, she concluded that Israel had ceased to be appealing to her. At the end of 1976, she returned to Germany, this time permanently. - Judith Bernstein has now been living for decades in Munich, where through her involvement in the Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue Group she advocates for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence between Jews and Palestinians.
Her late husband Reiner Bernstein also supported her in this cause. Judith Bernstein discusses the experiences she and Reiner had to face due to their activism in the following conversation.