Jewish life thrives again in Germany
BERLIN - Every Friday evening, Conny Jarosch and her 6-year-old daughter Alisa each light two candles, raise their hands to their closed eyes and recite an ancient Hebrew prayer to welcome the Sabbath.
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Conny's husband Siegfried, 42, blesses the wine and bread while his father Gerhard, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, sings from his prayer book at the head of the table.
It's an ordinary Sabbath, but celebrated in Germany's unexpectedly vibrant Jewish community, the fastest growing in the world according to the World Jewish Congress. This Passover, German Jews like the Jarosches are displaying new self-confidence about their future in the country that perpetrated the Holocaust.
"Twenty years ago, this would have been impossible in Berlin", said Siegfried Jarosch, a real estate agent born and raised in the German capital. "But today we have an amazing Jewish infrastructure with kosher butchers, bakers, Jewish schools and several synagogues."
The Jarosches -three generations of German Jews living under one roof- are immersed in Berlin's Jewish community life. Siegfried is on the board of a synagogue, his daughter and son Joshua, 4, go to Jewish schools, and his wife Conny, 42, keeps a kosher kitchen at home.
Since the German government relaxed immigration laws for Jews following reunification in 1990, tens of thousands of Jewish migrants have come here, mostly from the former Soviet Union. According to the Central Council of Jews in Germany, an estimated 250,000 Jews now live in the country, with some 110,000 of them registered religious community members.
Before 1990, there were only 23,000 Jewish community members in Germany, according to the Central Council. "In 2005, more Jewish immigrants came to Germany than to Israel", said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council. "Without immigration, most of the Jewish communities would not exist anymore", he said, adding that about 200,000 Jews left the former Soviet Union for Germany after the fall of communism in 1989.
Cosmopolitan, affordable Berlin in particular has become a magnet, home to several thousand young Israeli expatriates and hundreds of American Jews, prompting talk of a "Jewish renaissance" in a place where famous Jews like Albert Einstein and artist Max Liebermann once lived.
Berlin has the biggest Jewish community with 12,000 registered members and eight synagogues, followed by Munich with 9,200 members and a new synagogue, community center and Jewish museum.
In Dresden, the ordination of the first three rabbis since World War II was celebrated in September as a milestone in the rebirth of Jewish life in Germany - 62 years after the end of the Nazi genocide that killed some 6 million Jews, including 200,000 from Germany.
But the numbers are still a far cry from Germany's flourishing Jewish community of 560,000 -and its cultural and intellectual prominence- before the Third Reich. While there were 600 Jewish schools in Germany before the Holocaust, there are only seven now. And in 1933 Berlin's Jewish community had 120,000 members - 10 times bigger than today. (AP)
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