Confronting Hatred : Holocaust: A 25-member area contingent of survivors, academicians and clergy will attend a gathering in Berlin to talk formally with Germans about the wartime slaughter of Jews.

Another wall is coming down in Berlin.

Beginning Friday, Germans and Jewish representatives from around the world will meet there for the first time since the end of World War II to talk formally about the Holocaust.

For many Jews, Germany has remained the enemy for decades; they wouldn’t purchase its products or visit its cities.

Phil Blazer, publisher of the Studio City-based International Jewish News, once was stranded for hours in a foggy Amsterdam airport rather than accept a bus ride onto German soil.

Now Blazer is going to Berlin.

“It’s time for us to share our past,” said Blazer, who organized the Berlin International Conference, raising $30,000 from private sources to pay for speakers and transportation.

About 200 will attend the three-day gathering, including scholars, Holocaust survivors and Germans from the business and professional communities. The American delegation will include a 25-member San Fernando Valley contingent of survivors, academicians and clergy.

Conference participants are expected to include Beate Klarsfeld, the Nazi hunter who apprehended war criminal Klaus Barbie, who massacred thousands of Jews in Lyon, France; Professor Franklin Littell, president of the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, and Dennis Prager, publisher of Ultimate Issues, a Los Angeles-based quarterly about religious values in modern society.

Delegates will discuss the various forms of anti-Semitism and how the lessons from the Holocaust might show Jews and non-Jews how to prevent future genocide.

The conference marks the 53rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nov. 9, 1938, night of rioting in Berlin that transformed Hitler’s war against Jews from legal decrees into destruction and death. It is also being held in conjunction with a German-organized effort to build a memorial to the Jews at the site of Hitler’s command post.

“I have wanted Germans and Jews to talk for my entire life,” Prager said before departing for Berlin. “How could Jews see Germans as real people unless they talk to them? And for Germans not to talk to Jews is a way of avoiding looking into their own soul.”

But why now? Because, according to Blazer, the dangerous upsurge of anti-Semitism in the formerly communist Soviet Union and Eastern Europe makes it imperative for Jews and non-Jews to understand the past and seek ways to halt the cycle of hatred.

With newly won freedoms previously prohibited under communism, Blazer contends, non-Jews now sometimes blame the Jews for their hard times. He cited incidents in the past year of vandalism in synagogues and Jewish community centers throughout Europe as evidence of the rising animosity.

Since 1977, Blazer, 47, who moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1947, has hosted a Los Angeles-based television show about Jewish issues. The program airs from 4 to 5 p.m. Sundays on KSCI. Earlier this year, his guest was Renate Friedemann, the information officer for the German Consulate in Los Angeles, who discussed how the reunification of Germany might affect the Jews. Friedemann invited Blazer to visit Germany.

Blazer said he would go if the German people, without direct Jewish involvement, would erect a memorial in Berlin to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Coincidentally, a few weeks later, Blazer discovered such an effort had started at the end of last year. The memorial should be completed in 1992.

Blazer immediately brought together a delegation of international academic specialists in the Jewish and Christian communities. Among them was Zev Garber, professor of Jewish history at Valley College in Van Nuys.

Garber was born in New York in 1941, and did not lose any relatives in the Holocaust. But he said he feels a responsibility to honor the memory of those who died. While he doesn’t blame today’s young Germans for the sins of their ancestors, Garber said they should bear some responsibility for making sure future generations know the full truth about Hitler’s death machine.

Garber said he also fears that the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989, will be celebrated while the memory of the Holocaust will diminish in importance.

“In their euphoria,” Garber said, “I don’t want them to forget the tragedy of the Holocaust.”

Garber, who has mixed feelings about his first trip to Germany, will speak at the conference about its significance.

“My emotions will be worked out when I give my talk there,” he said. “I am sure I will always have the image of the 6 million when I’m there.”

So will Si Frumkin. For 18 months, Frumkin, along with his father, was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp. His father died 20 days before the Allies liberated the camp. Frumkin also lost family members at other camps.

Frumkin, 61, moved to the United States in 1949, and for the past four years has visited high schools and colleges to lecture about the Holocaust.

“I’m sure I’ll feel uncomfortable there,” said Frumkin, who was president of a textile company until he retired three years ago. “I know I won’t run into anyone who killed my father, but I’ll still feel uncomfortable.”

For years, the mere sound of the German language made Frumkin uneasy. Still, he doesn’t endorse the boycott of German products.

“It’s a stupid attitude,” Frumkin said. “The Germans did pay restitution, and there are plenty of Mercedeses in Israel. And if you started to boycott the products of nations, you’ll end up naked in a cave.”

Frumkin is scheduled to lead a discussion group about the role of anti-Semitism in the formation of Nazi policy.

Not all survivors share Frumkin’s willingness to visit Germany and participate in the conference. Roman Rakover, 72, lost most of his family in the Holocaust. Like many other survivors, he opposes the conference. He contends that Germany, by selling military equipment to Iraq, is once again an enemy of the Jewish people.

“Germany has to get its act together first,” Rakover of Van Nuys said. “Germany has an obligation to build up the streets of Israel because that is the only place today where Jews can find safety. There can be no conferences until Germany does that.”

Garber countered that Germany, especially since the reunification, has been a solid Israeli ally.

“Whether it’s out of guilt or not,” Garber said, “the German government has accepted the responsibility of aiding Israel, and survivors ought to recognize that. The German government has a unique relationship with the Jewish people and that can’t ever be forgotten.”

Some survivors are worried that conference participants will forgive Germans for the crimes of their past.

“I’m afraid that the young Germans might get the wrong message that this conference is some kind of acceptance,” Rakover said.

Never, Garber said.

“Survivors are obsessed with the fear that we will forgive what happened,” he said, “and that we will not do.”

Garber also wants Germans to see a different Jew than the passive one who hardly resisted the Nazis.

“I want the Germans to see a living Jew, not as a sorry object or a museum piece,” Garber said, “but as a powerful Jew, an activist.”

For their part, many Germans are also looking forward to the conference. Albrecht Lohrbaecher, a Lutheran minister in a small town near Heidelberg, said Germans, at a time of rising nationalistic fervor, must remember the last time such passions took over their country.

Lohrbaecher, who will be part of the German delegation at the conference, said he realized two decades ago the need to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to future generations.

“The only way is for us, Jew and non-Jew, to remember together,” he said. “We have to find a new role, a new understanding of ourselves.”

Rakover and other survivors know that soon there won’t be any living witnesses to recount Hitler’s war against the Jews. What will happen then, they fear, to the memory of their families and friends?

“They will have to let people like me tell the story,” Garber said.

Blazer and other conference delegates want the future to be more than passing on the memory of a tragedy. They hope to build a future of cooperation between Jews and Germans. Initially they would like to establish a student exchange program.

“What we want to do,” said Hal Sloane of Studio City, the conference’s executive director, “is to make plans for future meetings like this. I predict next year, we’ll have 1,000 people participating.”

Garber knows a new relationship such as this will take time. Admittedly, this first conference will mostly include sympathetic Germans from the academic and professional communities who already understand the need to keep the past alive.

But what about the disillusioned youth who are tired of hearing about 50-year-old history?

“One way is to start right now,” Garber said.