Gottschalk was born in Oberwesel , Germany on March 7 , 1930 , the only son of Max and Erna ( Trum ) Gottschalk . He was born to a family that had lived in the Rhineland for four centuries . As a child in 1937 , he was admonished by his mother for leaving the house to watch Adolf Hitler pass by in a motorcade , telling him that : " A Jew risks a lot doing that " . He would lose dozens of family members in The Holocaust , and maintained a commitment to the preservation of the Jewish religion and identity exemplified by his grandfather 's having given him shreds of a Torah scroll the day after the November 1938 Kristallnacht that had been desecrated and thrown into a river during the anti-Jewish pogrom and telling Gottschalk that " one day we will put them together again "
The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Alfred Gottschalk (rabbi)