Jews Flooding Into Germany

As a result of this accelerating migration, the Jewish population in Germany has swollen from 33,000 in 1990, the year of that nation's reunification, to 200,000 today, according to Schoeps. Before World War II more than half a million Jews lived in that country. At the end of the war there were only 15,000 left.

But in 2002, 19,262 Jews from the former Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States settled in Germany, compared with 18,878 who went to Israel and fewer than 10,000 who were admitted into the United States. German consulates in CIS cities report that 70,000 more Jews have already applied for resettlement visas. In addition, thousands of Israelis, whose parents had fled to Palestine in the Nazi years, are now claiming German passports to which they are entitled by German law.

"Thanks to these developments I believe there is a good chance for the emergence of a new German Jewry," said Schoeps, a historian who was born in World War II in Stockholm, where his parents had found exile. "I absolutely welcome this," Rabbi Carl Feit, a Talmudic scholar and cancer researcher at New York's Yeshiva University, told UPI in an interview.

Feit interpreted the Jews' return to Germany as "a fulfillment of a biblical spiritual theme -- the rebirth and rejuvenation for which there are many examples in history, where Jewish people in one part of the world or another have seemed to have been eclipsed only to reappear against all odds and common expectations."

Feit added, "The biblical paradigm for this rebirth was the return of the Jews to Israel" from the Babylonian captivity in 516 B.C.

There are many ironies in this sudden rejuvenation of Ashkenazic Judaism. The very word, Ashkenaz, which defines German and Eastern European Jews, is the Hebrew term for Germany. This is so, explained Feit, "because the entire Jewish culture in Eastern Europe derives from Jewish communities that lived in three German cities along the Rhine more than 900 years ago."

"The German and Jewish cultures used to fertilize each other," Feit went on. Yiddish, the idiom spoken by 12 million Jews up until World War II, is essentially a medieval German dialect. The two languages are so close that Arnold Beichman, the New York-born writer and political scientist, often quips, "I like to speak German because it is just Yiddish with a better accent."

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http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030605-051223-2097r