German jews

German Jews who survived in Germany, or in exile, had a deeply ambivalent relationship with their homeland. Apart from guilt?-that they had survived, and even stayed in the killers' country?-many felt an almost physical revulsion when they came into close contact with Germans. So they retreated to live in yet another form of ghetto.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants?-usually referred to as "the Russians"?-make up 90% of the local Jewish population.

A few of the so-called established Jews?-those who lived in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall?-are enthusiastic about the new arrivals. Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum, a museum and research centre in Berlin, was born in 1949 of German parents, and grew up in East Berlin. He says that without the immigration of Russian Jews, the future for Germany's Jews would be dark.

Yet most established Jews disagree. The dapper Mr Schoeps, now director of the Moses-Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam, near Berlin, argues that Germany's old Jewish heritage is gone. Its so-called "memory landscape"?-memorial sites, commemorative plaques, cultural centres and museums?-is now being guarded by gentiles who are merely interested in things Jewish; the sort of people who crowd to the Chanukkah market at Berlin's Jewish Museum to sample latkes and sufganiot (doughnuts) and to sip kosher mulled wine.

As for the immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most neither know nor care about Jewish rituals and traditions. Few of the newcomers keep a kosher home. Many men are not circumcised. When they arrive in Germany, they focus on the practicalities of life?-jobs, flats, social security and health insurance. They play chess rather than Skat, a popular card game in Germany. Their cultural icons are Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky, not Goethe and Beethoven, let alone Mendelssohn or Heine, who were German Jews.

Established Jews find the newcomers anders (different from us), suspect that they are not "real" Jews and think they are mainly coming in search of prosperity and material help from the state and the community. "They take whatever they can get," sniffs one.

There is also an argument over identity. For decades, Jews in the former Soviet Union did their utmost to hide from Soviet authorities and even to destroy proof of their origins. So when Germany started to admit Jews in 1991 under the "quota refugee law" (which granted them special refugee status), many could not assemble the papers required to prove their Jewishness. Thousands are reckoned to have got into Germany with false documents.

The strictly orthodox faction in the German community, which is by far the strongest, does not accept even the majority of those who came with proper identification. According to halakha, or religious law, only a convert or a child born to a Jewish mother is Jewish. Jeffrey Peck, a professor at Georgetown University and author of "Being Jewish in the New Germany", a book exploring the diversity of contemporary Jewish life in Germany, says that about 80% of the newcomers are not halakhically Jewish. Yet they are the future of Judaism in Germany.
Judenrein no more

It is an irony of history that the country that Hitler wanted to make judenrein (clean of Jews) now has the fastest-growing Jewish community in western Europe. Before the Nazis came to power, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany. At the end of the war some 1,500 survived in hiding; 9,000 were in concentration camps; and 15,000 survived by marrying non-Jews. A few hundred emigrants returned from exile in Shanghai and other cities.

Between 1945 and 1952 some 200,000 Jewish displaced persons lived in camps (often disused concentration camps) and urban centres in Germany. Most were zealous Zionists. Keen to leave the camps and build a new life, they became an influential force in the political debate about the creation of a Jewish state. Most of them emigrated to Israel as soon as they could after the state's creation in 1948.

By 1950 only some 20,000 Jews remained in Germany. About 8,000 of these were native German Jews; 12,000 came from eastern Europe, mostly from Poland. They were ostracised by international Jewish organisations because they had decided to stay in the land of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Most of them considered their sojourn in Germany to be only temporary; they were "sitting on packed suitcases", as they put it, and travelled to Israel at regular intervals.
German Jews complain that the newcomers have only the faintest notion of Judaism and Jewish traditions. In April Mr Schoeps threatened to establish a new group of Jews in Berlin, made up of those who feel alienated by "the Russians". The immigrant community, he complained, "resembles a Russian-speaking cultural club rather than a religious association." Albert Meyer, a former head of Berlin's Jews who supported Mr Schoeps, accused the Russians of using "Stalinist methods" to influence other Jews and said they had no interest in faith.

Berlin's Jewish community is now troubled, not just by its cultural divide but also by mismanagement and corruption, involving both Russians and Germans, which have tainted its reputation. It has a whopping yearly budget of €25m ($37m), more than 80% of which is paid by the city of Berlin. Most of the running costs of Jewish synagogues, schools, cemeteries, libraries, hospitals and nursing homes are met by the German state as an atonement for the past. "The community has too much money," comments Mr Schoeps. He believes this encourages misuse of the funds by Jews, both old and new.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10424406