Theirs might have seemed an unlikely romance. Hollister (Holly) Mathis, 38, is a secular descendant on her mother’s side of some of America’s most famous colonial families.  Among her Quaker ancestors was John Bowne, whose stand for religious freedom rocked the Nieuw Amsterdam colony governed by Peter Stuyvesant in the mid-17^th century.  Her paternal grandfather founded the Krispy Krème doughnut empire.

Avshalom Masury, 37, is the child of Yemenite Jewish immigrants to Israel, who proudly count rabbis and other scholars in his lineage.  What the family lacked in money it made up in willingness to do hard work.  His mother labored as a hospital orderly; his father as a security guard.  As a teenager, Avi worked on the kibbutz Lehavot Habashan in exchange for his tuition at a boarding school.

Both found their way to the University of Tuebingen in Germany, where neither had the luxury of simply studying. Holly had gone from high school and dancing in her native Louisville, Kentucky, to the study of fashion at the University of Cincinnati, and on to a degree program in cross-cultural and environmental studies at  Yellow Springs, Ohio’s ultra-liberal Antioch College.  Meanwhile, she explored a succession of alternative life styles including vegetarianism, Hare Krishna, and the Unitarian Church. 

In 1990, she became an exchange student from Antioch College at the University of Tuebingen. She enjoyed the experience so much that after graduation she returned to Tuebingen, where she founded Tanz Produktion Tuebingen, whose performers for the most part, like her, had come to Germany from other countries. To support her post-graduate studies at the university, she found many jobs. She taught English, painted houses, tagged clothing at a department store, and taught ballet classes. Eventually, the latter grew from three to twelve classes a week, plus workshops.

Avi followed a girlfriend from Israel to Germany.  Although that long-term romance ended, he stayed on, earning a master’s degree in physical education and a doctorate in empirical cultural studies.

Like Holly, Avi needed to work continuously to pay for his university studies. At any given time he held several part-time jobs, becoming a ubiquitous and popular presence in the university town. He delivered books for the Heckenhauer book store, which is a Tuebingen tourist attraction because it once was a hangout of Hermann Hesse, the author of Steppenwolf, the book which inspired the name of an internationally known rock band. 

The muscular Avi also served as a lifeguard at the Freibad, the outdoor public pool.  He served as a “boy Friday” at the Zimmertheater, appearing occasionally on stage, serving food at catered events, and otherwise helping out.  He also worked at the Bierkeller (a student bar near the university), cleaning toilets at 3 in the morning.  And he served as a personal trainer at Praevis, a preventative medicine clinic created by cardiologist Dieter Heitkamp.

His toughest job, however, came in the wake of his first time watching Holly perform at the Landestheater Tuebingen— in what ironically was her company’s final production. He decided to persuade her to date him after seeing her perform in Orly I and II, an abstract interpretation of Orlando, a novel by Virginia Woolf about an immortal human whose incarnations were alternately male and female.

Taken by the tall, alabaster-skinned dancer, the compact, swarthy gymnast tried to find her backstage after the performance, but she already had left.  However, through a series of seeming coincidences, Avi conspired to keep meeting her after that, and eventually she agreed to a date.

The couple was married by a justice of the peace Dec. 29, 2000, at her mother’s home in Louisville, Kentucky. They decided to adopt each other’s last names, so today they are called Holly and Avi Mathis-Masury.  The latter is the name that Avi used on his doctoral thesis, which examined the attitudes of Orthodox Jews toward their bodies. Later, Avi joined the faculty in the department of ecumenical theology, led by Prof. Hans Kueng, whose early work disputing the “infallibility” of the Pope had resulted in his being removed, at the church’s insistence, as a professor of Catholic theology and instead being given a chair in a new department of ecumenical theology.

Today Holly is completing her doctoral program in cultural studies, while continuing to teach dance.  Her thesis, which she expects to complete in 2005, will deal with how the Stuttgart Ballet, comprised mostly of foreigners, helped Germany to present a better face to the world in the decades following the nazi era.

Like many a German city, Tuebingen struggles with the legacy of nazism.  In one controversy, the medical school had to decide what to do with body parts that had been gathered from nazi victims and used as specimens for anatomy classes.  The body remnants were given burials.  In another controversy, the discovery of the foundation of a synagogue destroyed by the nazis on Krystallnacht prompted city officials to require a building contractor to leave some of the old foundation intact as a monument to the Jewish victims.

Avi says that he never felt uncomfortable as a Jew in Tuebingen, despite its nazi past.  In fact, as a Yemenite Jew, he at times felt more uncomfortable among Israelis of Ashkenzaic background. While he said there is among some Germans a sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and a tendency to discuss Israel in clichés, such hostility does not seem to extend to the personal realm.

There is another dimension to the couple’s life. In the expectation that someday she will have a child, Holly has decided to study for conversion to Judaism. A strong motivation for this decision is her desire for Avi’s extended family in Israel, who are Orthodox, to accept any children they might have.

Completing her doctorate and living in Tuebingen, far from any Jewish center, Holly knows that sufficient study for conversion may have to be spread over years, but she has begun.  While in San Diego over the winter holidays to visit with the family of Avi’s brother, Shahar , Holly met with Conservative Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal of Tifereth Israel Synagogue to discuss what books on Judaism might aid her to learn more about the religion. — Donald H. Harrison