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Jews flooding into Germany
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religion Editor
United Press International Thursday, June 5, 2003 / 5:26 PM
WASHINGTONThe turbulent relationship between Jews and
Germany is taking yet another stunning turn. Seventy years after
Hitler's ascendance to power and 60 years after the Holocaust,
more Jews are flooding into Germany than into any other country,
Israel included.
This makes Germany the one nation with the fastest-growing
Jewish community in the world. Ironically, one reason for this
state of affairs is the anti-Semitism in their countries of origin,
chiefly successor states of the former Soviet Union, Julius H.
Schoeps, head of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-
Jewish Studies in Potsdam, told United Press International
Thursday.
"Of course there are other reasons as well, such as economic
considerations and the chance to give their children a better
education," Schoeps allowed. "Moreover, they see Germany
as a 'safe country.' "
As a result of this accelerating migration, the Jewish population
in Germany has swollen from 33,000 in 1990, the year of that
nation's reunification, to 200,000 today, according to Schoeps.
Before World War II more than half a million Jews lived in that
country. At the end of the war there were only 15,000 left.
But in 2002, 19,262 Jews from the former Soviet Commonwealth
of Independent States settled in Germany, compared with 18,878
who went to Israel and fewer than 10,000 who were admitted into
the United States. German consulates in CIS cities report that
70,000 more Jews have already applied for resettlement visas.
In addition, thousands of Israelis, whose parents had fled to
Palestine in the Nazi years, are now claiming German passports
to which they are entitled by German law.
"Thanks to these developments I believe there is a good chance
for the emergence of a new German Jewry," said Schoeps,
a historian who was born in World War II in Stockholm, where
his parents had found exile. "I absolutely welcome this," Rabbi
Carl Feit, a Talmudic scholar and cancer researcher at New York's
Yeshiva University, told UPI in an interview.
Feit interpreted the Jews' return to Germany as "a fulfillment of
a biblical spiritual themethe rebirth and rejuvenation for which
there are many examples in history, where Jewish people in one
part of the world or another have seemed to have been eclipsed
only to reappear against all odds and common expectations."
Feit added, "The biblical paradigm for this rebirth was the return
of the Jews to Israel" from the Babylonian captivity in 516 B.C.
There are many ironies in this sudden rejuvenation of Ashkenazic
Judaism. The very word, Ashkenaz, which defines German and
Eastern European Jews, is the Hebrew term for Germany. This is
so, explained Feit, "because the entire Jewish culture in Eastern
Europe derives from Jewish communities that lived in three
German cities along the Rhine more than 900 years ago."
"The German and Jewish cultures used to fertilize [sic] each other,"
Feit went on. Yiddish, the idiom spoken by 12 million Jews up
until World War II, is essentially a medieval German dialect.
The two languages are so close that Arnold Beichman, the New
York-born writer and political scientist, often quips, "I like to speak
German because it is just Yiddish with a better accent."
According to Feit, Yiddish, too, is currently undergoing rejuvenation
after decades of decline. This is to some extent also true in
Germany, where the ultra-orthodox Lubavichers, coming primarily
from New York and London, are doing mission among the mostly
secularized Russian-speaking immigrants, most of whom "don't
even know the difference between a synagogue and a church,"
Schoeps said.
The Yiddish-speaking Lubavichers are a Hasidic sect. In their
effort to bring immigrants from Eastern Europe to faith, they
compete with assorted other religious movements, including
Messianic Jews.
Only about 60,000 of the 175,000 Jewish immigrants in
Germany are already registered with any of the 84 synagogue
congregations, most of which have sprung up in the past
decade, Schoeps related. "In some eastern German cities,
such as Potsdam, Halle and Rostock, our congregations
are now 100 percent Russian-speaking," he said.
Do they fear that anti-Semitism in Germany might once again
be on the rise? "They are not really worried," replied Schoeps,
who attributed the spate of racist outrages in the early 1990s
primarily to hooligans raised without any values in eastern
Germany's gray Moscow-style housing estates.
As for the rest of the population, "there are now between
200,000 and 300,000 Russians in Berlin alone, and Germans
don't know and don't really care who among them is Jewish
and who is not."
But there is another irony in this influx of Jews from the East:
Although most are highly educatedSchoeps described
the quintessential immigrant as a mathematician from, say,
St. Petersburgthey cost the German taxpayer money.
"Between 60 and 70 percent of them are on welfare because
they cannot find work. They don't speak German yet, and their
Soviet diplomas are not recognized by Germany."
©-free 2003 Adelaide Institute