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A renaissance and paradox

German Jewry was decimated by the Holocaust. In fact, Jewry throughout Europe suffered a staggering 6 million lost souls. Meanwhile, Soviet Jewry was under constant attack by and from the authorities. Now, The Economist reports, Germany's Jewish population, once so small post WW2, is growing steadily, thanks to immigration from the Soviet Union. What a paradox!.....

"By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants—usually referred to as “the Russians”—make up 90% of the local Jewish population."

Read about life in a revitalised German-Jewish community here.

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