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Return of the Jews.
Each evening, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., Ariel Gorelik studies the Talmud in a room with 30 other young men. What's strange is that he's doing it not in New York or Tel Aviv but in Berlin.
Eight years ago the 23-year-old left his home in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved with his family to Leipzig. They were hardly pioneers; thanks to immigration from abroad, the city's Jewish community has now swelled to more than 600, from fewer than a dozen in 1989. Ariel has since moved on to the capital, where he studies each evening at the new Judisches Lehrhaus, the first yeshiva to be established in Germany since the Nazis shut down all such institutions in the 1930s. In August he plans to marry a nice Jewish girl, also from Ukraine, at the neighboring synagogue. "There still aren't enough kosher restaurants," he says. "But of course our children can grow up Jewish in Germany."
The quiet but steady growth of the country's Jewish community has been underway for some years now, but lately it's turned into a full-fledged renaissance. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, East European Jews have flocked to Germany in fast-growing numbers, both to escape anti- Semitism at home and to find a better future for their children in the West. Lately, the numbers have become genuinely eye-popping. Germany's pre-war Jewish community of 500,000 was just 15,000 after the war. Today it's 200,000, with another 70,000 applicants waiting for their papers in the former Soviet territories. (By a 1989 law, Germany grants all former Soviet Jews citizenship and automatic government benefits as a gesture of atonement.) Last year Germany passed Israel as the leading destination for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union: 19,262 admissions compared with 18,878 for Israel and fewer than 10,000 for the United States. "We never thought it could happen," says Michael May, executive director of Berlin's Jewish Community. "Jewish life is thriving here again, 60 years after the Holocaust."
The massive influx has the country's Jewish communities bursting at the seams. More than 60 new synagogues have been built or refurbished in just the past few years, many in cities where Jewish life had ...
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...The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945...acceptance of West Germany as an ally and...The American Jewish community may have been...relations between Germany and the American Jewish community suggests that...
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...09-11-1995 Germany returns property to Berlin Jewish community. The German government...000-strong Jewish community. Kanal received...defeat of Nazi Germany, sits on one...returned to the Jewish community. All the returned...
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...recently signed in Germany by officials of the government and the growing Jewish community. Yes, it has been...time of liberation, Germany's Jewish population...and politics _ the Jewish community was shattered by the...renaissance of Jewry in Germany." But not all the...
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- Magazine article from: Israel Business Today January 1, 2000 700+ words
...other countries of the world and in Germany itself look upon the economic and cultural revival of Germany's Jewish community as a miracle. As incredible as...along with most of European Jewry, Germany now (after Israel) has the world...
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...Schroeder and Paul Spiegel, Germany's principal Jewish leader...the nation's burgeoning Jewish community legally equal to Germany's main Christian churches...between the government and the Jewish community since World War II. It resembles...
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- Newspaper article from: IPR Strategic Business Information Database October 16, 2000 700+ words
...October that the association has sued Germany for the return to Slovak Jewish communities...Slovakia is the only country that paid Nazi-Germany to deport its Jews, nearly all of whom...agreement signed by the governments of Nazi Germany and the Slovak puppet state, Slovakia...
- Leipzig Jewish community at odds with Claims Conference over
- News wire article from: Jewish Telegraphic Agency Gil Sedan January 22, 1995 700+ words
...the local Jewish community and the Conference...Claims Against Germany are at odds...collapse of East Germany, under orders...government, the Jewish community was forced...reunification of Germany in 1989, the local Jewish community claimed that...
- Bioethics and the contemporary Jewish community. (Theology, Religious...
- Magazine article from: The Hastings Center Report Novak, David July 1, 1990 700+ words
...to the traditional Jewish community as the mediating social...present. Within the Jewish community, the most secularist...worldly orthodoxy in Germany, Samson Raphael Hirsch...religious elements in the Jewish community, usually from the...
Source: HighBeam Research, Return of the Jews.