Russian Jews in Berlin, Germany

In Germany, Jewish pride and growing pains

By Colin Nickerson, International Herald Tribune [1, 2, 3]

BERLIN: Shelly Kupferberg, 31, is the granddaughter of Jews who fled the Nazi terror in the 1930s for the land that would become Israel. Her parents returned to Berlin in the early 1970s, weary of Israel’s wars and yearning for their German heritage. She was raised both as a Jew and a German, and takes pride in both identities.

“It’s great to be a Jew in Germany,” said Kupferberg, a journalist and adviser to Berlin’s Jewish Festival. “There’s this feeling of a unique culture being reborn – with more people in the synagogues, more Jewish artists, a sense, at last, that it’s completely normal for Jewish people to be living and working here. That’s something you couldn’t say until recently.”

In a turnaround few would have imagined, Germany today boasts the fastest-growing Jewish population in the world.

While Germany’s Jewish community is full of hope for the future, its rapid expansion has brought new tensions- with animosity festering between longtime German-speaking Jews and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom had lost their Jewish traditions, if not their identity, under decades of Communist rule.

“This is a time of difficult transition for a community that was once tiny and insular, but has suddenly grown large,” said Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the nation’s umbrella organization for Jewish groups. “There is friction, there is anger, there is distrust, there is fear. We have started to lay the foundation for a dynamic Jewish culture in Germany. But we are far from completing the house.”

Most newcomers are from Russia – Jews seeking a better life in a more prosperous place, but also escaping the anti-Semitism that seethes in many parts of the former Soviet Union.

The “Russian Jews” – the term embraces the thousands arriving from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states – are joined by a small but significant number of young Jews from Israel, the United States, Canada and Australia.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, Germany’s Jewish population stood at 530,000. Berlin, famed for tolerance, was home to some of the world’s foremost Jewish writers, philosophers and scientists. By 1943, however, the Nazis had declared Germany “Judenrein,” or cleansed of Jews. In fact, several thousand remained hidden in Germany or returned from concentration camps after the Holocaust, which killed six million European Jews.

Before the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall, Germany’s Jewish population stood at barely 25,000, mostly survivors of World War II and their offspring. Since then, encouraged by liberal immigration laws, the number has swelled to more than 200,000, according to estimates by the government and Jewish groups. Last year, twice as many Jews, 20,000, settled in Germany as in Israel, according to Jewish groups.

Partly to atone for the Holocaust, Germany offers resettlement programs for Jews from Eastern Europe. It is much easier for Jews to win legal entry to Germany than to other parts of Western Europe or the United States.

Israel also keeps its open doors, but many Jews from the former Soviet Union see Israel as either too dangerous because of the struggle with Palestinians, or as too alien because of its Middle Eastern culture and desert climate.

“Germany is Europe, and I am European as much as I am a Jew,” said Frida Scheinberg, a veterinarian who recently arrived in Germany from Ukraine. “Germany was a good place for Jews before Hitler. It feels safe and prosperous. Its cities, its climate, its customs all seem familiar. Israel seems strange to me, with the hot sun and the hot tempers.”

Still, unease and bickering pervade Germany’s Jewish community.

Some question whether all the newcomers can legitimately call themselves Jews; until this year, when Germany tightened the rules to weed out impostors, almost any former Soviet citizen with a Jewish ancestor could qualify.

Traditional law defines a Jew as an individual with a Jewish mother or someone who has undergone conversion to Judaism; Germany now requires that prospective Jewish immigrants have at least one Jewish parent, as well as some command of German and marketable skills.

Integration has been complicated by Germany’s recent unemployment woes, with many Russian Jews drawing welfare, and resentment.

But many Jews are confident that once the economy rebounds, differences among Jews will inevitably heal.

“Many problems, yes, but most former Soviet Jews in Germany feel ourselves to be in a much safer situation,” said Mykhaylo Tkach, an engineer from Ukraine. “The anti-Semitism here is minor compared to what we experienced in the places from which we came.”

“In the old Russia, nothing changes – when things go wrong, blame the Jew. Germans understand such things must never happen here again,” Tkach added.

Some Jewish immigrants admit to ambivalence about their choice of a new country, even as they defend it.

“There is a twinge of guilt, some secret shame, I think, in the heart of every Jew who calls Germany home,” said Josef Eljaschewitsch, a physician from Latvia. “And yet, for Jews not to come here – to surrender our stolen heritage in this country – would be to give the Nazis a sort of final victory: a Jew-free Germany.”

“Most of us come for bread-and-butter reasons, to make money, to ensure our children’s futures are secure,” he said. “But our dream is also to make Germany a place where Jews and Jewishness can once again flourish. Against all odds, I believe that’s starting to happen.”

The signs of a Jewish renaissance can be caught in small glints across Germany.

In Leipzig, Rabbi Joshua Spinner, a Canadian-American who has brought a missionary zeal to keeping Orthodox customs alive in Germany, recently presided at the first Jewish wedding recorded in the city since 1938, according to the Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

In Potsdam, Ukrainian immigrants, after years of holding worship services in a cramped, fluorescent-lit meeting room of a civic building, have won a patch of land from the government and are raising money to build a synagogue.

In Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, small but well-attended Jewish schools and kindergartens have opened over the past several years, intended to expose children to the Hebrew language, Torah studies and the spiritual ideas behind ritual practices. For many Jewish youngsters from Eastern Europe, this is their first formal religious instruction. A Jewish academy in Frankfurt trains girls and young women in ancient texts.

But it is in Berlin, above all, where a new German-Jewish identity is being forged. “Berlin is coming back as a center for rich Jewish life,” said Irene Runge, a New Yorker who heads Berlin’s Jewish Cultural Association. “It’s an exciting place to be right now.”

For the Orthodox, there is a new yeshiva, or religious school, sponsored by the U.S.-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. On more secular fronts, there are Yiddish theater groups, Jewish bookshops, exhibits of Jewish art and readings of Jewish poetry. Berlin’s new Jewish Museum, finished in 2001, focuses on the prominence of Berlin’s Jewish community from the 18th century to the early 1930s, when the city ranked as one of the most important Jewish centers in the world.

The refurbished golden dome and Moorish exterior of Berlin’s old “New Synagogue” is once again a proud city landmark. Pilgrims leave small pebbles as tokens at the grave of Moses Mendelssohn, philosopher of the German Enlightenment.There is a sprinkling of kosher shops that do brisk business in matzohs, gefilte fish and sweet Israeli wine. There are two rival Jewish newspapers, both published in German. And most tourist stands display colorful guides and maps to “Jewish Berlin” -a term that no longer connotes horror.

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Russian Jews in Germany

Russian Immigrants Struggle in Small German Towns [1]
By Nathaniel Popper
Forward

HAMELN, Germany — Sounds of hammering and sawing came from the back of the six-year-old Jewish community center in this Lower Saxony town. Three older men, all volunteers, were at work on a stage for the new prayer room.

Surrounded by sawdust and pine planks, the men took a break to debate, in Russian, the proper way to affix a mezuza to the door frame. After about 20 minutes of discussion the men admitted that none had ever seen a mezuza on a door before, and they decided to wait on any decision until the next of the infrequent visits to their town by a rabbi.

The energy and commitment of these men gives reason for the high hopes that have been pinned to Germany’s burgeoning Jewish community — the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, thanks to the steady flow of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. But hopeful discussions about a Jewish renaissance in Germany often overlook the difficulties many of these new immigrants have had both integrating into German society and reconnecting with a Jewish faith that was lost to them in the atheistic Soviet Union.

“We can’t say now that Judaism is seeing a rebirth,” said Paul Harris, an expert on Russian Jewish immigrants at Georgia’s Augusta State University. “It’s far from being there.”

Since 1991, when Germany opened its borders to Jews from the former Soviet Union, more than 170,000 Jewish immigrants have arrived. Last year, for the first time ever, more Jews fleeing the ravaged economies of the former Soviet Union came to Germany than either Israel or the United States.

As part of the policy of accepting Jewish immigrants, which is seen in Germany as an act of repentance for the Holocaust, each new family is assigned to one of Germany’s 16 states by a strict formula. As a result, Jewish communities have sprung up almost overnight in cities and towns such as Hameln, population 59,000, that had no Jewish community before.

The distribution program was designed to spread the financial burden of the immigrants among the German states as well as to avoid creating Jewish ghettos in the large cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt, toward which immigrants would otherwise be drawn.

But in cities and towns such as Hameln, with its 450 Russian Jewish immigrants, the effort to disperse immigrant settlement has created isolated pockets of immigrants with few social or religious resources at their disposal.

A majority of the Jewish immigrants are living in places that until recently did not have Jewish communities, experts say. A full 72 of the 85 Jewish congregations officially recognized by the Central Council of German Jews were founded since 1991. Most are composed exclusively of immigrants in areas with no previously established Jewish community.

One of the three volunteers working on the community center’s prayer room, 65-year-old Vilen Kogan arrived in Germany six years ago and spends all his days at the synagogue speaking Russian. Discussing his work at the synagogue in broken German, Kogan, who has a cross tattooed on his bicep, makes no mention of any particular devotion to Judaism. Unemployed, he simply has nowhere else to go during the day.

Kogan’s 28-year-old son, Boris, came to Germany at the same time as his father. He spends all his time with the other young Russians in town. Like his father, he has not found steady work since arriving in Germany, with its rigid labor market.

In Israel and America, where Russian immigrants have been settled in places with already established Jewish communities, the unemployment rates for the newcomers have dropped close to that of the larger population after three years. In Germany, the unemployment rate for Russian Jewish immigrants has remained at 40%, and it is even higher in small and midsized cities such as Hameln.

But Boris Kogan is not resigned to volunteering his time at the synagogue. While his father helps build the prayer room, he and a friend are across town setting up a beer garden they plan to open during the fall.

This leaves him little time for Jewish activities. He has never been to the community center and said, “Only the old people have time for that.”

“I know I am Jewish — it said so on my passport in the Ukraine — but it is not important to me,” Boris said.

This is a typical attitude among younger and middle-aged immigrants, said Olaf Gloeckner, who researches Russian Jewish immigrants at the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam, Germany.

“Among the middle generations coming to Germany, there has been almost no inclination to turn to Jewish religion,” Gloeckner said.

The energetic leader of the Hameln community, Jakov Bondar, recognizes the lack of engagement among the younger immigrants with exasperation.

“It’s so important for us to have Judaism here. It’s what sets us apart,” Bondar said. “I’m glad that I was discriminated against in Russia for being a Jew. Otherwise I would have forgotten I was Jewish.”

But without any established Jewish community nearby, he has struggled to transmit his enthusiasm for Judaism to the younger generation. He has set up a Sunday school to get the youngest generation involved, but he has not found anyone who knows Hebrew, and as a result, the lessons consist mostly of efforts to transmit the Russian language, along with a few biblical stories from a Russian book of Jewish tales.

A rabbi — there are only 34 in Germany, according to the Central Council — visits the congregation every few months, and emissaries from the chasidic Chabad outreach organization make occasional stops, but for the most part, the congregation’s Russian immigrants are on their own when it comes to building a Jewish community.

Consequently, the congregation is not particularly observant. A yarmulke is not required in the prayer room, and breakfast with Bondar and Kogan is fried shrimp. Nevertheless, when Bondar is asked the denomination of his congregation, he quickly answers: “Orthodox.”

The answer is less a statement of doctrinal belief than a response to the complex religious politics of Germany.

The Central Council for German Jews, which oversees the government funding for local congregations, has frequently voiced its preference for congregations that observe matrilineal descent and its reluctance to fund Reform Judaism, which was founded in Germany.

Soon after Bondar founded his congregation, an American-German Jew set up a Reform congregation for Russian immigrants in Hameln with support from the Appleseed Foundation, an American philanthropy. In order to differentiate his congregation, and retain the support of the Central Council, Bondar is forthright in declaring his commitment to traditional Judaism.

While Bondar’s congregation is funded by the Central Council, he complains that even the approximately $30,000 it receives each year is not enough to purchase the prayer books and kosher food needed to establish a functioning congregation.

The Central Council’s executive director, Stephan Kramer, said that he commiserates with Bondar.

“The financial support for the existing communities is by far not enough for the quick establishment of the necessary infrastructure for the still-growing economic, social and religious demands of the communities and their members,” Kramer said.

But Bondar insists that the larger problem is that Russian immigrants have little pull in Central Council debates over questions such as where the available money goes and how quickly it flows to the Russian communities.

While new immigrants make up 70% of the registered Jews in Germany, they are not represented on the executive board of the Central Council, and only two of the 16 chairmen of the individual Jewish state federations are Russian immigrants.

Without a grasp of the German language and removed from the established urban centers of Jewish power in Berlin and Frankfurt, the immigrants have struggled to get a foothold in the Jewish establishment.

The distance between the new and old communities has been accentuated by a skepticism toward the new immigrants among the existing Jewish community.

“The Jews who were in Germany were already very concerned with being accepted,” said Andrei Markovits, a professor of German politics at the University of Michigan, “and then in come these new guys from the East — the Ostjueden — who the Western Jews have always looked down on, long before World War II.”

Bondar said that this attitude comes across very clearly. When he has asked for more help from the existing Jewish community, he said he frequently receives the same answer: “You Russians come and expect everything. Have patience. We were patient when we returned after the war.”

But Bondar warns that without more resources to build a Jewish community in Hameln, the younger generation will be lost to Judaism.

“We have no teacher for Hebrew and no rabbi,” Bondar said. “Slowly the congregation will turn into a hobby club or a social help center. Instead of integration, this is the way to assimilation.”

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