September 17, 2007 – Jews resident in Berlin are at last starting to reach their pre-World War II numbers.
Berlin’s Jewish population was 173,000 in the 1920s. By the end of the Nazi era, however, it had fallen to just 6,500, the number who somehow escaped roundups in the city.
That number grew slowly to some 20,000 during Berlin’s decades of communist rule. But when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, things began changing quickly. Now, 18 years later, the size of the Jewish community in Berlin is estimated at 120,000 people – 60 percent of the 200,000 registered Jews in Germany overall.
The vast majority are not German by origin, however. They are from the former Soviet Union.
Demographic Push
Experts say the migration is mostly due to an East German law passed in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before reunification. That law allowed Jews from within the Soviet bloc to resettle in Germany solely on the merit of proving Jewish ancestry. The law was kept after reunification and provided an opening into Western Europe for Soviet Jews.
"A lot of laws that the former GDR passed were kept in the process of reunification," explains Rabbi Walter Homolka, executive director of the Abraham Geiger College at the University of Potsdam, "and that actually was the basis [of] how so many Russian immigrants could come. The fact was that the regulation slipped in from East Germany into unified Germany’s regulations. But I think it was more than just that. I think there also was a clear understanding that it would enable a demographic push for the Jewish communities of the whole of Germany, and I think that’s why they kept the regulation."
The government did recognize that it was a politically sensitive move. According to Sergei Lagudinsky, an author and legal scholar at the American Jewish Community in Berlin, the legislative process was not discussed very publicly.
"Since they were looking for a way of regulating this immigration without constructing a special law which would be specially mentioning Jewish immigrants," Lagudinsky says, "they used the law which they created for the so-called ‘boat people’ – refugees from Vietnam in the early 1980s – and applied it, as they say in Germany, ‘in analogy’ to Jewish immigrants."
Nevertheless, the law enabled hundreds of thousands of East European Jews to seek German citizenship. So widespread did the practice become that at points there were more Jewish migrants settling in Germany than in Israel. This is because emigrating to Germany was seen as economically more desirable. Commentators point to the Israeli economy’s shaky performance, but also to the political volatility of the Middle East, which deterred would-be migrants.
Community Blossoming
Today, the Jewish community in Germany is blossoming. In a sign of the resurgence, Germany’s biggest synagogue reopened August 31 after undergoing a three-year restoration. At the reopening ceremony, the 1,200-capacity synagogue hosted many distinguished German Jews, some of them Holocaust survivors.
And yet here, too, the remarkable renaissance can at least partially be attributed to the influx of Jews from the East.
The service was led by Rabbi Chaim Rozwaski, who came from his native Belarus to settle in Berlin in 2000. And Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum historical and cultural foundation, told the crowd to cheers and applause that "you are always welcome here" – in German, but then also in Russian.