Traveling to Neustadt – a German town with a population of just over fifty-three thousand, located about an hour-long drive from Frankfurt – Jack Goldfrank was uneasy at the thought of setting foot on the same land his father had been forced to leave in 1933 for fear of Nazi persecution. The son of two Jewish German refugees, Jack remains unsure whether his parents would be proud of his pilgrimage to their homeland.
Upon arriving in Neustadt, he and his wife, Jane, were greeted by the Mayor, who welcomed them into his office and revealed what he called “The Book of Remembrances.” Included in this book is the name of every Jewish person who had fled Nazi persecution in Neustadt from 1933 onwards. As the couple looked through the artifact, the mayor announced that they were the second Jewish Americans to return to Neustadt in connection with their family’s history.
The Mayor then accompanied Jack and Jane to the town’s Jewish cemetery – a burial ground Jack called “not in pristine shape,” but “decent.” “There were a lot of Goldfranks in the cemetery,” Jack tells me. “But the last burial there was in 1937. No Jews had ever gone back to that town.”
Jane adds, “The mayor was very nice. But, in my mind, I’m always remembering that these people, or their parents, were Nazis. It was always like, do they really feel this, or are they doing what they think is right? Does it matter? For me, it was confusing.”
“My big feeling was discomfort,” Jack says.
This trip was the first Jack Goldfrank took on his new German passport after reclaiming his German citizenship in the first months of 2025. This encounter with the mayor of Neustadt would fade in his recollection of the visit, overshadowed by lively memories of Berlin light festivals and museum tours. It wasn’t until sitting with me, his granddaughter, that he and his wife began to revisit the feelings of unease they experienced in Neustadt.
My family is just one of the many American Jewish families that have reclaimed their German citizenship in recent years, coinciding with President Donald Trump’s rise to power. Between 2016 and 2024, the German Consulate in New York City reported a more than 300% increase in applications for citizenship reclamation. Yet for some Jews who return to Germany generations after their ancestors fled Nazi persecution, the reality reveals that the nation has not moved as far from its past as they once imagined – encountering an overextension of Germany’s “memory culture” around the Holocaust that can manifest in instances of Jewish fetishization and an overperformance of repentance.
