Posted on 04/02/2007 7:20:25 PM PDT by blam
Jews flock to Germany
By Harry de Quetteville in Berlin
Last Updated: 2:36am BST 03/04/2007
Almost 70 years after the Nazis plotted the Holocaust, German Jews yesterday celebrated the Passover holiday with the news that their community has become the fastest growing in the world.
This extraordinary reversal of fortune has even seen Jewish immigration to Germany outstrip that to Israel.
Orthodox Jewes making Matzah, an unleavened bread for the Jewish holiday of Passover
According to one rabbi, Israelis are flocking to Berlin, rather than German Jews making their aliya, or emigration, to Israel.
"Berlin is the place to be," Rabbi Walter Homolka, the principal of the Rabbinical Seminary in the German capital, said. Like Jews across the world, Rabbi Homolka was yesterday preparing for the Passover holiday, which celebrates the freeing of the Israelites from ancient Egypt.
But he is doing so amid a congregation that has been transformed in recent years.
Across Germany the number of Jews has swollen tenfold from the 23,000 members it counted in 1990.
"The revival of the German Jewish community is a fact," said Rabbi Homolka. He said Berlin is now host to 10 synagogues, with Jewish community centres and schools, and kosher restaurants and shops.
For the first time since the Second World War, three new rabbis were ordained in the city of Dresden last September. Since then, seven more candidates have applied for the five-year training programme, Rabbi Homolka said, with the next ordination due in spring 2008.
According to Stephan Kramer, general secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews, the country's renaissance has drawn more Jewish immigration than Israel.
Most of the newcomers have come from the former Soviet Union, drawn by lenient immigration rules.
Until recently, a single Jewish parent was enough to guarantee them entry citizenship in Germany. But as numbers arriving from the east spiralled into the hundreds of thousands, German authorities tightened up regulations. "The laws of immigration were very lenient after re-unification but that has changed," said Rabbi Homolka.
However, the Jewish community in Germany is not immune from modern acts of anti-Semitism.
Last year the country recorded a record number of far-Right extremist crimes, and a month ago a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin was attacked with a smoke bomb and daubed with graffiti.
But community leaders say the majority of news is good. Last week, a Jewish museum was opened in Munich yards from the site where Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the destruction of the city's main synagogue on Kristallnacht in 1938.
It adds to Berlin's Jewish museum as a major site marking the enduring existence of a Jewish community in the land that plotted its extermination. As in Israel, the influx of many largely secular Jews from Russia and its former satellites has led to some assimilation problems, but it has also helped resuscitate the community.
"The community is growing with so many people that some need help finding their Jewish identity - and that has led to some infighting," said Rabbi Homolka. "But it's always a sign of healing when Jews fight with each other because it means there is no outside enemy to unite against."
Is this from the ‘ONION” or Iowahawk? Hohoho.
Ping
I realize it been a long time in human life terms, but not long in the history of the world. We still fighting over land in the Mideast with the same people from ancient times. Maybe it is me, I have a psychological hangup about wanting to live in Germany. I am still seeing the annual black and white PBS documentaries of the people going to death camps, bodies piled up etc.
This is not to say I have absolutely anything against the current German people, whom many I am sure are decent honest law abiding people. It is the memories generated from meeting people who been in the camps and seeing the numbers tattooed on the arms. The country is haunted, bad vibes.
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You're right, there is something haunted about Germany, a kind of great sadness there I think. I've felt it, its almost tangible.
Having been there a few times, and gotten acquainted with some Germans though, I have to say the attitudes of the current generation reflect probably about the most anti-anti-Semitic Gentile people on earth. (PLEASE NOTE THE DOUBLE NEGATIVE) There really is genuine, no excuse-making sorrow about the sins of their grandparents among post WWII Germans. Even given the 10% or so neo-Nazi types (and there may be that many with such attitudes even in the USA--10% of practically any country are nuts) the other 90% despise that era of their history--and are ashamed to the core of the Holocaust. So you have that.
Then also, look where these Jewish immigrants are coming from....eastern Europe and Russia--where also, historically, from the Czars up through the communist era, Jews have faced severe persecution. Now that quasi-democracy reigns (quasi, in Russia at least) religious intolerance is still high or higher than in the communist days--if you're not Russian Orthodox (or atheist). So definitely (real) democratic Germany, and its remorseful majority, is a better place to be for Jews than points East.
Vee velcum der Jew.
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