Cover Story: German Jewish Renewal

TOBY AXELROD
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Berlin

PAS

nna Orlowski sits at an out-
door cafe near the Jewish high
school here, sipping a cappuccino.
Bicyclists pass, sending long shadows across the
cobblestone street.
It is a long way from Russia's Ural Mountains,
where Orlowski, 20, with close-cropped blonde curls
and a ready smile, was born — and a long way from
Israel, where she wants CO be.
Across town, Inna Slayskaja, 44, a Yiddish singer
from Birobidzhan, smokes another cigarette. Her hus-
band, Igor, died three years ago and she is raising
alone their son, Genja, now 11. "I see myself as
Jewish," says Slayskaja, a small, dark-haired woman
with sad eyes. But Genja, though born in Ukraine,
feels like a German.
In the evening, Lyonia, an engineer from
Lithuania, sits in a grocery store and watches his wife,
Marina, a slightly plump woman with dyed-blonde
hair, count the pfennigs of another drunkard making
a small purchase. Lyonia, 53, a short man with glasses
and a receding hairline, had wanted to emigrate to
America. For now, the two, who requested that their
last names not be published, live in Germany. These
people are among the tens of thousands of Jews who,

German Jewish life springs
anew from the dustbin
of communism and Nazism.

10,

Inna Orlowski, 20, a member of the first graduating class of Berlin's new Jewish
high school, is part of a back-to-Judaism movement among young people.

4:n

12/24
1999

6

instead of going to Israel, caught the wave of freedom
that swept the former Soviet Union after the fall of
communism and rode it into the land they always
associated with Hitler and death camps.
In the last decade of the century, their arrival has
dramatically changed the Jewish landscape of
Germany, more than doubling Germany's Jewish
population and making Germany the only country in
Europe whose Jewish population is significantly grow-
ing.
In fact, since 1990, Germany's official Jewish pop-
ulation has risen from 35,000 to 75,000. That's near-
ly a fifth of its prewar level.
"Who could have believed in 1945 that the Jewish
community in Germany would become the fastest
growing in the entire world? For me, it is a miracle,"
said Paul Spiegel, member of the Central Council of
Jews in Germany.
With Germany settling its immigrants on a per-
state quota basis, new Jewish communities are being
established virtually overnight in towns and cities
where no Jews have lived since World War II. In the
cities of Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt, the Jewish
population has soared.
"I believe in the year 2004, we will have 100,000
Jews in Germany, making one of the largest Jewish
communities in Europe," said Frankfurt attorney
Michel Friedman, a member of the board of the

