Berlin – German Jews See Cultural Revival as Proof ‘Hitler Didn’t Win’

Berlin – A country once booming with Jewish life and culture is finally seeing a renaissance after decades of post-war fear.

Munich’s new synagogue, museum and community center, unveiled in the heart of the city in March 2007, is a prime example of the resurgence of Jewish centers of life and worship across Germany.

The cities of Ulm, Potsdam and Cologne are all due to open new Jewish centers, while the town of Erfurt is currently renovating a synagogue dating back to the year 1100.

At the same time, these German centers of Jewish life are protected by bollards and permanently guarded by policemen, for fear of neo-Nazi attacks, exemplifying the delicate status of Germany’s Jewish revival.

After 1945, some 12,000 Jews lived in Germany, a mere 2 per cent of the 600,000 living in the country before World War II.

Charlotte Knobloch, the President of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, is one of the few who survived the war and stayed. Born in Munich in 1932, the lawyer’s daughter was hidden on a farm where she was passed off as the illegitimate child of a Catholic woman.

“I didn’t want to return to Munich. I wanted to leave this country immediately because I couldn’t imagine the times would change,” Knobloch said in an interview with DPA.

After the war, a small number of other survivors returned from the concentration camps and from exile abroad.

For years, Germany’s Jewish community remained small, visible only in cities such as Munich, when tight-knit groups of men in top hats and black coats could be glimpsed on their way to Friday evening prayers.

Knobloch said there was a general lack of information. “People asked me, ‘we know that Jews live in Munich, but where are they?’ Certain prejudices arose,” she added.

With the collapse of Communism after 1989, all that changed. Germany opened its doors to Jews living in the former Soviet Union, in a bid to revive Jewish life in Germany whilst offering refuge from growing Russian anti-Semitism.

A special ruling enabled 190,000 Jewish immigrants to reach Germany between 1989 and 2005, of whom more than 80,000 were integrated into Germany’s Jewish communities. These now make up the vast majority of around 106,000 Jews living in these communities.

This wave of immigration, which injected new life and turned Germany’s Jewish population into one of the fastest-growing in the world, has not been without difficulty.

While the eastern immigrants arrived with skills and education, few could speak German and also had to relearn Jewish religious expression and customs suppressed under communism.

Having witnessed the process after 1945 by which people had gingerly sought out a new, common identity, Knobloch is convinced the recent wave of immigrants can be successfully integrated.

“It is important, however, not to force anyone into a religious identity, rather they must accept it with enthusiasm – then we have succeeded,” Knobloch said.

The 76-year-old with an unmistakeable Bavarian lilt insists that, as elected head of Germany’s Jews, she is able to speak for the community with one voice, although her views are more outspoken than some of her predecessors’.

Although Germany’s Jews are one minority amongst many, Knobloch says they mustn’t forget the shadows of the Holocaust.

“Because of the history, the fact that Jews are living in this country at all has a special status,” Knobloch said.

“Such a crime against people who simply had a religion and were murdered for it, excluded, humiliated, driven away, just because they were Jews, has to stay in the memory of generations,” Knobloch added.

Echoes of the past are still contained in the neo-Nazi threats which flare up in Germany from time to time. Although this is a tiny extremist fringe, reports of desecrated Jewish cemeteries and anti- Semitic paroles often catch international attention.

“It’s a shame for this country, which has made so many efforts over the decades, if the appearance from abroad is that Germany could be dominated again by neo-Nazis,” Knobloch said.

“There are problems that still need to be solved,” she said. “In
light of the current economic crisis we need to make sure these Nazi
gangs don’t reach a status that can’t be revoked,” Knobloch added.

Nevertheless the leader of the Jewish Council warns against exaggerating the threat, as modern-day Germany is a different country to the 1930s.

“We are a solid democracy. Weimar didn’t collapse because of the Nazis but because there were too few democrats,” Knobloch says of the regime which brought Hitler to power.

Knobloch believes that Germany’s Jewish community plays a crucial role in the country, simply by showing, with developments such as Munich’s Jewish cultural center, that Hitler didn’t win.