Germany’s Jews : Remnant of a Dynamic Community

EAST BERLIN —  On the buff facade of what was once Germany’s greatest synagogue, gutted on “Crystal Night” in 1938 when Nazi mobs burned Jewish shops and dwellings, there is a black marble plaque that bears the words: “What Is Left of This House of God Should Stay as a Reminder and Warning. Never Forget.”

The Jews of Germany have not forgotten.

But today there are scarcely 30,000 of them in East Germany and West Germany combined. In 1933, on the eve of Adolf Hitler’s takeover, there were about 530,000 Jews in Germany. Many were doctors, scientists, teachers, musicians, artists, writers, bankers, theater people--men and women of position and prestige in the community.

Protected, Well Off

The Jewish community is protected and generally well off now, but in the view of its leaders, it will never again play an influential role in German life. Indeed, Jews here no longer refer to themselves as German Jews but as Jews in Germany. Almost all the German Jews who survived the Holocaust made their way to Israel or the United States or some other country.

Before the war, the New Synagogue--it was built in 1866, its predecessor more than a century earlier--had the largest Jewish congregation in Germany. Most of what survived “Crystal Night”--the name comes from the shattering of windows at Jewish shops and houses by Nazi thugs--was destroyed in 1943 by Allied bombers. The ruins have been left standing in East Berlin as a reminder of the horrors of war.

A few doors away is the office of the East German Jewish Community. The community leader, Dr. Peter Kirchner, a 50-year-old neurologist and native Berliner, said in an interview at his desk there the other day, “There are only 200 Jews in our Berlin community--and another 250 or so scattered in East German cities: Leipzig, Dresden, Magdeburg.

Outside the Community

“I believe there are at least 10 times that many Jews in the country--but they are not members of a community. They have no contact with our Jewish organization as such.”

On the other side of the wall that separates the two sectors of the city, West Berlin has the largest of West Germany’s Jewish communities--6,500 people. But even here, most are immigrants from east of the Iron Curtain--Poles and Russians for the most part.

In his book “The Last Jews In Berlin,” Los Angeles-based author Leonard Gross estimates that there were 160,000 Jews in the German capital in 1933, and that as many as half of them were there when World War II started in September, 1939. For the Jews of Berlin, Gross writes, Berlin “was a state of mind--more civilized and sophisticated, and less swayed by the Nazis than any other municipality.”

He says that estimates of the number of Jews who managed to survive the war in Berlin run from a few hundred to a few thousand. Whatever the number, most of them left Germany in the years immediately after the war.

One of the immigrants from the East is Heinz Galinski, 72, who was born in what is now a part of Poland. A survivor of Auschwitz, he heads West Berlin’s Jewish community and is known for his outspoken criticism of neo-Nazism in Germany.

Galinski is more optimistic than some Jewish leaders about the future of Jews in Germany, and he is also optimistic about his synagogue and the community center just off the busy Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s main thoroughfare.

“Berlin is a center for cultural and religious activities,” he said in an interview. “We do the public relations work here. We fight against extremism from the right and left.”

Strong Views

Galinski takes a strong stand on controversial issues such as President Reagan’s visit in June to the German military cemetery at Bitburg, which he opposed.

“It is my view that a Jewish community cannot be unpolitical,” he said. “I am a man to express my views, and in a democracy I take it as my democratic right to speak up. That’s why you often hear more about me than other Jewish leaders.

“On occasions like the visit to Bitburg (where several members of the elite Nazi SS force are buried) or the Bergen-Belsen camp (where many Jews were detained, and many died), we Jews have to lay our colors on the table.”

Galinski suggests that the key to the future of the Jewish community in Germany is with the young people.

Youth Shun Isolation

“We are increasing education to maintain their Jewish identity,” he said. “Older people have more problems with integration in this society, and for them, it is more difficult to live with the problems of the past. Younger people don’t want the same kind of isolation their elders sought, but it is not easy for a small community to hold on to the young.”

Galinski’s concerns about the young are shared by most other Jewish leaders in Germany, among them Alexander Ginsburg, general secretary of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany. Ginsburg, interviewed in his office on Elysee Street in the diplomatic quarter of Bad Godesburg, just south of Bonn, said:

“We are worried about the education of the young. We need to instruct young Jews more about Judaism in general, and to rekindle their roots.”

Ginsburg suggested that some younger Jews may have been upset by the fact that for years their parents kept suitcases packed and told their children that the family was moving to Israel.

“Over the years,” Ginsburg said, “they were told they were going to Israel, and that Germany was just a transit place. Then, when they realized they were staying here, they were unsettled.”

He also pointed to the problem of mixed marriages in the Jewish communities, and said that in some cases these have led to the Jewish spouse drawing away from his or her religion.

“We also have what we call ‘three-day Jews,’ ” he said, “that is, those who come to the synagogue only on the high holy days, and the rest of the year are not observant.”

Ginsburg survived the death camps and became a leader of the Jewish community in Cologne before taking on his present post with the Central Committee of Jews in Germany. The committee, an umbrella organization for about 65 Jewish congregations, receives funds from the state for official activities, as do other recognized religious groups in Germany.

“The Central Committee was established to see that the Jews are cared for and to fight prejudice wherever we find it,” Ginsburg said. “The Jews are the salt of every democratic society; when Jews leave, democracy must be diminished.”

Anti-Semitism Fades

Ginsburg believes that anti-Semitism is no longer a real problem in Germany.

“The occasional swastika that turns up is not a serious concern,” he said. “It’s a rare, individual thing. The government is very helpful in discouraging any kind of anti-Semitism.”

As another West German Jew put it, “It’s difficult to be anti-Semitic in a country of 60 million people with only a handful of Jews.”

In Karlsruhe, about 80 miles south of Frankfurt, Werner Nachmann presides over a Jewish community center. He is also chairman of the Jewish Central Committee in Germany. Nachmann, a businessman, suggests that the Jews’ main problem in Germany is holding on to their young people.

“We have a healthy community but we do have the problem of mixed marriages,” Nachmann said in an interview. He added that only half of the Jews who marry in West Germany marry within the Jewish community.

Lack of Young Rabbis

And he said that many of the rabbis, an aging group, are ill-equipped to deal with young people.

“We don’t have the young rabbis coming in who can talk to and instruct the young people,” he said. “The older rabbis do not always have the ability to talk and instruct the young.”

Another Jew, who preferred to remain anonymous, commented: “It is a difficult problem. How do you tell a rabbi of 70 that he is over the hill, and that the congregation needs a younger man who can get through to the young people?”

Unlike the controversial Galinski, Nachmann, 60, is regarded as a member of the Establishment. At age 13 he was sent to school in France. When the war started, he joined the French army, and after the war he returned to Karlsruhe and reopened the family textile business.

“We were unsure of the future at first,” he recalled, “but now we are more confident. In Karlsruhe, we are seeing more births than deaths in the Jewish community. The community is growing, little by little.”

Last November, Nachmann told a conference of young Jews in Mannheim: “It is important to rebuild religious communities in Germany. Otherwise the wishes of the Nazi tyranny will be fulfilled--to make the country free of Jews.”

He said in the interview that he is “a Jew, with loyalty to Israel, and not just Israel but to the Jews of the world--as all Jews should.”

Loyalty to Israel has prompted some Germans to confuse Jews living in Germany with Israeli citizens. Ignatz Bubis, who is the leader of Frankfurt’s Jewish community of about 5,000, said: “I think most Germans, if they think about it, assume that I am an Israeli. I am sure they think every Jew has an Israeli passport, but I was born in Germany. I feel German. I have a certain loyalty to Israel as a Jew, but I have loyalty to the country where I live.”

Built New Center

Bubis, who was born in Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclaw, came to Frankfurt after being confined in a concentration camp in Poland. He has done well in the construction business and has built a new Jewish community center in the comfortable west end of the city.

Frankfurt’s main synagogue also was destroyed on “Crystal Night” in 1938. The synagogue has been rebuilt on the main street, of gray stone with a distinctive red-tile dome.

Bubis said Frankfurt is the home of many of the 4,000 to 5,000 Israelis who have immigrated to West Germany, “attracted by the business opportunities.”

He suggested that at least half of the married Jews in Frankfurt are married to non-Jews.

Opposes Assimilation

“I am for integration but not assimilation for Jews,” he said. “I feel the future of Jews in Germany is not whether we feel German, but how the Germans feel about us.”

Uri Sigal is the legal adviser to the Bavarian Jewish community of about 4,000. He was born in Munich, emigrated to Israel, and has returned. He served in the British army in World War II and in the Israeli army in Israel’s war of independence, then became a lawyer in Tel Aviv, where he changed his name from Ulrich to Uri.

It was his work in German indemnification cases that brought him back to Munich. “At first it was temporary,” he said, “but I just stayed on.”

Most of Bavaria’s Jews, Sigal said, live in Munich, though there are smaller communities in Augsburg, Nuremberg and Wurzburg.

Many Mixed Marriages

In Bavaria as elsewhere, young Jews have had difficulty finding suitable mates, a situation that has led to mixed marriages that in many cases have not worked out.

“Take a non-Jewish girl who marries a Jew,” Sigal said. “She might convert to Judaism, but then she has to adapt to Jewish ways, and an Orthodox rabbi might frown on her. Remember that what you might consider conservative Judaism in the United States would be considered liberal here. So she has to adapt to Jewish ways and that means, for one thing, learning how to cook kosher meals. So it is not easy, and some marriages fail, or the couple do not remain observant Jews.”

Sigal pointed out that many of the brightest of the German Jews left the country before Hitler began rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps and that most of those who stayed on and survived the war left immediately afterward for some other country.

“I’m afraid that we will not see the Jewish community in Germany expand,” he said, “and I don’t see much future for Jews--except in the major cities.”

Some Jewish leaders look to the four-year-old School of Jewish Studies at the ancient University of Heidelberg as something of a beacon for the future. The founders of the school hoped it could solve the painful identity crisis of German Jews and re-establish Judaic culture in the birthplace of Nazism.

The school’s present rector is an Israeli, Dr. Moshe Elat, on loan from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Although the school was designed for 200 students, it has only 75, and about 50 of those are Christians. The course involves 4 1/2 years of study, but it is difficult, Elat said, to get faculty members to sign on for more than a year or two.

Elat said a a wealth of manuscripts that survived the Nazi book-burning period are being uncovered and that these could serve as the basis for a history of the Jews in Germany, who trace their origins here back to Roman settlements on the Rhine.

Elat was born in Vienna, and managed to leave in 1939 for Palestine, portions of which later became Israel. He refused for 20 years to speak his native German. Sitting in his office overlooking a small park, Elat seemed to have mixed feelings about Jews who have stayed on in Germany.

“A Special Psychology”

“I want German Jews to go to Israel,” he said. “But some of this generation of Jews decided to stay with the murderers. There’s a special psychology involved here: Some people can’t go too far away from the place where they suffered. It’s hard to understand why.”

The school aims, among other things, at bolstering the continuing presence of Jews in Germany, yet Elat said: “I don’t believe normal relations between Jews and the Germans are possible in our generation, because there is a deep historic gap. I don’t see any integration with the German nation. The past has done too much.”

Ginsburg thinks it is still too early to make any forecast about the future of Germany’s Jewish communities, but Galinski takes an optimistic view. Galinski banks on an influx of Russian Jews to add to the Jewish community in West Berlin.

“The advent of Russian Jews has had a positive influence on the community,” he said. “There has been a rejuvenation in the Berlin Jewish community with the arrival of Russians, and the birth rate is up. Most of the Russians have had a good education, and that is a positive thing here. If the Soviets allow more Jews to emigrate, our community could expand rapidly.”

Glum About Future

On the other side of the wall, in East Berlin, Kirchner, who stayed on after the Nazis came to power and was hidden by the anti-Nazi underground all through the war, is glum about the future of his Jewish community.

“I don’t have any contact with Mr. Galinski,” he said. “Over there, they consider the Jews here to be almost Communist. We have no rabbis here. They come over on special occasions, and for the high holy days we will have a visiting rabbi from Skokie, Ill., Ernst Lorge.

“Ten years ago, I was more optimistic that we would increase our community here. But I must admit that it will never be as big as I had hoped. We have very old people, and the younger couples have only one child. So it’s very difficult to find someone in the faith to marry. In the future, I’m afraid our congregation will dwindle. In 10 years, there may be only 100 Jews here in East Berlin.”