A Butler connection spanned the miles and the years and brought a former German official to speak at the B'nai Abraham synagogue, 519 N. Main St., Wednesday night

Tjark Bartels is the former county commissioner of Hameln, a county in northern Germany.

Bartels has a connection to the synagogue, said Cantor Michal Gray-Schaffer.

In his former position as county commissioner, Bartels was a strong supporter of the Jewish community, especially of Rachel Arnovitz Dohme, a Butler native who founded the first newly constructed Reform synagogue in postwar Germany. Due to Bartels' support, the county agreed to pay the salary of the synagogue's rabbi.

Gray-Schaffer said Dohme had been a member of B'nai Abraham and is still in contact with the synagogue.

“She contacted us and said he's coming to America to talk to Jewish congregations,” she said. “He's a passionate person who puts his heart into things.”

Bartels spoke on current Jewish/German relations and the migrant resettlement in Germany.

Bartels said he was passionate about bringing diverse people together and the resettlement of refugees in Germany, but recent events have proved troubling.

“There have been right-wing attacks on people who don't look the same, for not looking German,” said Bartels.

“Because things are changing, more people are becoming populist. Right-wing ideas are becoming more and more normal,” said Bartels, citing the rise of a populist government in neighboring Austria and the rise of Alternative for Germany, or the AFD movement, in Germany.

The rise in populist and right-wing sentiment has soured the welcome that Germany once had for the refugees it accepted starting in 2015. He cited figures showing 50 percent of the refugees were paying taxes five years after arriving in Germany.

Bartels said, “I thought it was the right thing to do, but the mood changed rapidly.”

“We must pay a lot of attention to this,” he said. “We must be very careful. Something like that grows rapidly. It is very dangerous, I think.”

That past still makes itself felt in many ways.

For example, the Reform synagogue built in Hameln has a congregation largely of Russian immigrants because “Jewish life was erased more or less” during the Nazi rule, said Bartels.

Bartels spoke of another project he had hoped to see to completion before illness forced him to resign in 2019.

One of the sites of mass Nazi rallies numbering a million people at the time was in Hameln at a hill called the Bückeberg.

The Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival held by the Nazis took place on a large, artificially-levelled field on the western side of the Bückeberg.

Between 1932 and 1939, there were annual rallies meant to indoctrinate the rural population of Germany, rallies that were broadcast to the rest of the country by radio.

“I've supported plans to build a place, a kind of school, not a place to remember the victims, but to have a place to bring people to study Nazism,” said Bartels, noting he wants to prevent it from happening again.

The money has been set aside for its construction, he added.

Bartels said he had wanted to visit the United States and arrived recently in New York.

“I'm trying to get a picture of the United States, but that's impossible in New York,” he said.

Dohme put him in contact with the Butler synagogue.

He hopes to visit several other cities in the northeast before returning home.