Eight years ago the 23-year-old left his home in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved with his family to Leipzig. They were hardly pioneers; thanks to immigration from abroad, the city’s Jewish community has now swelled to more than 600, from fewer than a dozen in 1989. Ariel has since moved on to the capital, where he studies each evening at the new Judisches Lehrhaus, the first yeshiva to be established in Germany since the Nazis shut down all such institutions in the 1930s. In August he plans to marry a nice Jewish girl, also from Ukraine, at the neighboring synagogue. “There still aren’t enough kosher restaurants,” he says. “But of course our children can grow up Jewish in Germany.”
The quiet but steady growth of the country’s Jewish community has been underway for some years now, but lately it’s turned into a full-fledged renaissance. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, East European Jews have flocked to Germany in fast-growing numbers, both to escape anti-Semitism at home and to find a better future for their children in the West. Lately, the numbers have become genuinely eye-popping. Germany’s pre-war Jewish community of 500,000 was just 15,000 after the war. Today it’s 200,000, with another 70,000 applicants waiting for their papers in the former Soviet territories. (By a 1989 law, Germany grants all former Soviet Jews citizenship and automatic government benefits as a gesture of atonement.) Last year Germany passed Israel as the leading destination for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union: 19,262 admissions compared with 18,878 for Israel and fewer than 10,000 for the United States. “We never thought it could happen,” says Michael May, executive director of Berlin’s Jewish Community. “Jewish life is thriving here again, 60 years after the Holocaust.”
The massive influx has the country’s Jewish communities bursting at the seams. More than 60 new synagogues have been built or refurbished in just the past few years, many in cities where Jewish life had been all but extinguished for half a century. Jewish neighborhoods have reappeared, along with an increasingly vibrant cultural life. Berlin, which has about 20,000 Jewish citizens, boasts postwar Germany’s first Jewish high school. The golden-domed, 19th-century Neue Synagoge has become, since its restoration in 1995, a familiar part of the city’s skyline and the center of a re-established Jewish neighborhood complete with kosher shops and cafes. New yeshivas in Frankfurt and Berlin help fill the surging demand for religious instruction, while Potsdam University has set up a rabbinical college. Community phone books are again filled with listings from Jewish women’s clubs to sports teams to student groups.
Germany’s small, previously established Jewish institutions are feeling the strain. Help centers are crammed with new arrivals learning German or asking for help getting settled. Often they are Jewish in name only, their religion long suppressed or abandoned during the Soviets’ aggressively atheist rule. They have to be taught everything from Jewish history to how to celebrate the Sabbath. Many are eager to use their new congregations’ social services, while their interest in religion is limited. As many as 30 percent of the immigrants aren’t even recognized as Jews because their mother wasn’t Jewish. Those who wish to convert find it tough, since the Chief Rabbinate in Israel does not allow conversions by German rabbis.
Yet for all these problems, Jewish leaders like Ronald Lauder, whose U.S.-based foundation has set up yeshivas and schools in Germany, are calling it “a miracle.” “It is a vote of confidence in German democracy,” says Deirdre Berger, head of the new American Jewish Committee office in Berlin. “What better revenge against Hitler than when I take 100 happy Jewish children from summer camp and walk with them through the old streets of Berlin?” says Rabbi Yehudi Teichtal, director of Chabad Lubovitch Berlin. Whatever its meaning–a chance for atonement, or victims’ revenge–Germany is a home to Jews once more.
