Germany: A belated victory against the Nazis

A belated victory against the Nazis

Germany's Jewish population is the fastest growing in Europe and rabbis are being ordained there for the first time since 1942. How has it happened? Jess Smee reports

Friday November 3, 2006
The Guardian


When Luba packed her suitcases to move to Berlin from St Petersburg, her friends and relatives couldn't see the attraction of settling in a country that had once tried to exterminate all its Jews. "My parents didn't want me to come here," says the 55-year-old Jewish woman, who moved to the city with her children 15 years ago. "When I first came to Berlin, I would sometimes walk past old German men and wonder what they did during the war. Now that feeling has passed. This is my home."

The former telecoms engineer lives in a block of flats in the Berlin district called Wedding. Sitting in her well-ordered living room, she recalls how she left Russia during the upheaval of Gorbachev's reforms. "Prices were rising, everything was uncertain and I was worried about losing my job. Then the press started blaming Jews for what had happened. We were worried about the future," she says, pausing occasionally to find the right German words.
She now plans to stay put, despite struggling to find work in Germany - a country where unemployment is high, especially among older people. Her daughter is at university there and even her father overcame his initial scepticism to spend his last years in the country: "He realised that in Germany today it makes no difference whether you are Jewish or not," she says.

Luba - who prefers not to give her surname - is one of approximately 200,000 Jewish people who have moved to Germany since the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s. Thanks to them, Germany's Jewish population is now Europe's fastest growing. In September, three rabbis were ordained in the eastern city of Potsdam - the first such ceremony in the country since Hitler's men closed down the last Jewish seminary in 1942. Malcolm Mattitiani, one of the trio of newly graduated rabbis, described the ceremony as a "a belated victory against the Nazis", and national politicians echoed his delight. "After the Holocaust, many people could never have imagined that Jewish life in Germany could blossom again," said President Horst Koehler. "That is why the first ordination of rabbis in Germany is a very special event indeed."

According to community leaders, many more rabbis are needed. Rabbi Walter Rotschild, who is based in Berlin, for example, serves 10 communities scattered across the country - a job that means a lot of travel and a constantly buzzing mobile phone.

The irony of the situation is not lost on Rotschild, a Briton who was born in Bradford but has lived in Germany for eight years. His German father fled the Nazis in 1939, seeking refuge in England."It's a huge historical paradox," he says. "In the 30s and 40s the Germans wanted to get rid of Jews, during the cold war they wanted to keep the Russians at bay - now they are importing Russian Jews."

The new arrivals have boosted the community and Berlin now has a new Jewish childcare centre and school. But the influx has also brought problems. Rotschild and other rabbis make no secret of the divisions in the expanded Jewish community.

There is a culture clash between the established and often socially conservative German Jewish community and their mainly secular Russian counterparts. In the Soviet Union, Jews suffered discrimination and, in extreme cases, violence or murder. In self-defence, some hid their religion and many fell out of touch with Jewish traditions. Eventually, being a Jew in Russia often amounted to little more than an awkward passport stamp, "Nationality: Jewish".

After the Berlin wall fell, that stamp metamorphosed into an entry ticket to Germany. And many leaped at the opportunity, sparking a lively black market in Jewish-Russian passports. "In the 30s and 40s people were forging papers not to be Jews," says Rotschild. "Now they are forging papers to be Jews. For the first time in 2,000 years it is an advantage to be Jewish."

Despite the 200,000 new arrivals, however, Germany's Jews officially number just 105,000, because many of the immigrants do not practise. While for some this is a matter of preference, others are rejected because they have a Jewish father but a non-Jewish mother.

Only a minority of the older migrants speak Yiddish and few have cultural and religious knowledge of Judaism. Many of those living in Berlin are married to non-Jews. This distance from tradition worries some of the established community who shun the immigrants as "non-Jewish".

Johann Colden, of the Jewish Cultural Centre, hopes the swift expansion of the community will spark a rethink of what it means to be Jewish in Germany. "German attitudes towards Jews still include lots of cliches. They just don't understand it when someone says they are a Jew but are not religious," said Colden, who is a secular Jew himself. "It's different in the US, Britain or Israel - there being a Jew is also about ethnicity."

Making the switch may be difficult in Germany, however, given that the notion of a Jewish race was a cornerstone of Nazi ideology.

Colden's sunlit office is sited near the former Scheunenviertel, literally "barn quarter", which was a slum that was home to a substantial chunk of Berlin's Jewish population until the war. The Jewish Cultural Centre, which has its roots in the former East Germany, was one of the first groups to push for the Russian Jews to be allowed into Germany.

But the government recently decided to stem the numbers of non-religious Jews moving to Germany. Whereas previously it was enough to show a passport or birth certificate, now a so-called "point system" is used to control who is allowed into the country. This system takes into account the age and qualifications of the immigrants, which means many families are separated and only the younger, more easily integrated members allowed in.