Russian-Speaking Jews in Germany’s Jewish Communities, 1990–2005

By Joseph Cronin

This book explores the transformative impact that the immigration of large numbers of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Germany had on Jewish communities from 1990 to 2005. It focuses on four points of tension and conflict between existing community members and new Russian-speaking arrivals. These raised the fundamental questions: who should count as a Jew, how should Jews in Germany relate to the Holocaust, and who should the communities represent? By analyzing a wide range of source material, including Jewish and German newspapers, Bundestag debates and the opinions of some prominent Jewish commentators, Joseph Cronin investigates how such conflicts arose within Jewish communities and the measures taken to deal with them. This book provides a unique insight into a Jewish population little understood outside Germany, but whose significance in the post-Holocaust world cannot be underestimated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030312732

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© The Author(s) 2019

J. CroninRussian-Speaking Jews in Germany’s Jewish Communities, 1990–2005Palgrave Studies in Migration Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31273-2_1

1. Introduction

Joseph Cronin¹  

(1)

London, UK

Joseph Cronin

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Abstract

In the introduction, the author examines the situation for Jews in Germany prior to the large-scale immigration of Russian-speaking Jews which began in 1990. He explores the atmosphere of insecurity and Jews’ reluctance to identify with the German state or German society. He also investigates the differences between the two groups of Jews that reconstituted Jewish communities after World War II—German Jews and East European Displaced Persons (DPs)—along with the changes brought about by the ‘second generation’ (the children of Holocaust survivors) who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. Members of this younger cohort felt more culturally ‘German’ and were more willing to assert their right to live in Germany than their parents had been.

Keywords

Displaced PersonsGerman JewsHolocaustJewish communitiesSecond generation

Not many Jews lived in Germany between 1945 and 1989. Although around 250,000 Jewish ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs ) ended up in Germany after the war, the vast majority left, as soon as they could, for Israel , the US and other destinations (Grossmann and Lewinsky 2012, 67). Around 15,000 Jewish DPs decided to stay in Germany and, together with an approximately equal number of German Jews who had survived the war in Germany or who returned shortly after, began to re-establish Jewish communities, which had been completely decimated after 12 years of Nazi rule.

Both groups faced stigmatization from the international Jewish community. In 1948, the World Jewish Congress (WJC ) declared that no Jew should ever set foot on Germany’s ‘blood-soaked soil’ again, and in 1949, the Jewish Agency floated the idea of a law forbidding Jews from living in Germany (Richarz 1985, 266). By 1950, the WJC had decided that ‘if Jews in small or larger groups choose to continue to live among the people who are responsible for the slaughter of six million of our brothers, that is their affair. The World Jewish Congress is no longer concerned with these Jews’, adding: ‘If a Jew remains in Germany, he no longer has any portion in world Jewry’ (Grossmann 2007, 263–64).

Such external attitudes, combined with apprehensions about residing in the former Nazi state, created what has frequently been described as a ‘sitting on packed suitcases’ mentality, whereby Jews in Germany consciously avoided ‘settling’—at least mentally—into German society. They would tell Jews from abroad that only practical matters (such as their job, business or an elderly family member) were temporarily keeping them in place, but that they were planning to leave Germany at the earliest available opportunity (Kauders 2007, 51). They may well have believed it.

Although linked by their decision to live in Germany, the two groups that re-established the Jewish communities—the DPs and the German Jews —were quite different in terms of social, cultural and religious outlook. The DPs had grown up in traditional Jewish environments in Eastern Europe and tended to be religious (following Orthodox practice ) and Zionist . German Jews , by contrast, were more assimilated , less religious and more likely to follow Liberal Judaism . These were the results of German Jewry’s unique trajectory in the nineteenth century. As Anthony Kauders (2007, 165) has shown, many of the German Jews who lived in postwar Germany had not even been members of a Jewish community before 1933. Now, however, they saw it as essential to be part of one.

A rapprochement between the two groups was impeded by the stark differences in their geographical distribution. German Jews tended to congregate in northern Germany, while the DPs were sent to the American zone (Germany having been occupied and divided into four zones in 1945) in the south. As an indication, in 1949, DPs comprised 93.7 per cent of the Jewish population in southern Bavaria , while in the northern state of North Rhine-Westphalia they comprised only 13.8 per cent (Brenner and Frei 2012, 164). Therefore, in the early postwar years, Jewish communities were almost always composed of a clear majority and minority group. This led to conflicts about representation not dissimilar to the ones that would emerge between Russian-speaking and ‘long-established’ Jews in the 1990s and 2000s (which will be covered in Chap. 6).

In 1950, leaders of the reconstituted Jewish communities established the Central Council of Jews in Germany—an umbrella organization representing Germany’s Jewish population. The name alone suggested a change in orientation: its pre-Nazi forerunner had been called the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. Yet in other respects, the Central Council continued the tradition of its predecessor: it adopted the ‘unified community’ (Einheitsgemeinde) model, dating back to the nineteenth century, which encompassed all of Germany’s Jewish communities. This provided strength in the face of external threats. The main difference was that now almost all Jewish communities in Germany followed ‘East European’ or Orthodox religious practice, whereas before the Nazi period, the majority had been Liberal (Grady 2017, 11).

Over the next four decades, the Jewish population’s ageing demographic was offset by small migration waves. The first were the German Jews who had failed to adapt to life in Israel and returned—not without controversy—to the ‘land of murderers’. In the 1950s and 1960s, small numbers of Jews from Eastern Bloc states found asylum in West Germany , usually in the wake of an abortive revolution or anti-Jewish action (Brenner and Frei 2012, 171–73), and in the 1970s a trickle of Soviet and Iranian Jews arrived—the former taking advantage of the USSR’s brief relaxation of travel restrictions for Soviet Jews, the latter fleeing the fallout of the Iranian revolution (Goschler and Kauders 2012, 299). Despite these influxes, membership of Jewish communities remained fairly steady until 1990, never exceeding 30,000 (Brenner 2012, 13).

Between their re-establishment after the war and the 1980s, Jewish communities in Germany were socially vigilant but politically tentative. Their only notable political conviction was a strong attachment to the state of Israel , demonstrated mostly through charitable donations. The ‘sitting on packed suitcases’ mentality continued into the 1980s, when it was gradually abandoned. In a purely temporal sense, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Jews living in Germany to maintain, 40 years after the Holocaust , that they were still on the verge of leaving. By this stage, most had stable employment or a business, they had established families and their children attended German schools and universities. These children, the second generation , were instrumental in ending the era of ‘sitting on packed suitcases’ when they came of age, because it was not feasible (or particularly pleasant) for them to live with a constant feeling that they would soon have to uproot themselves and move on. Nor did it make sense: they were German citizens who had spent their whole lives in Germany and were as familiar with German society as their non-Jewish peers.

From its inception, the Federal Republic of Germany unofficially granted its Jewish minority a protected status, a gesture that derived in part from a sense of responsibility, but which also had an eye firmly fixed on Germany’s international reputation. For their part, the leaders of the Central Council—all of them Holocaust survivors —acted as sober ‘admonishers’ (Mahner) to the non-Jewish population, but rarely if ever criticized the West German state. They knew that the very existence of Jewish communities in post-Holocaust Germany bestowed legitimacy on the Federal Republic—something it badly needed. This developed into what Kauders (2007, 129–31) has described as a ‘gift exchange’ relationship: Central Council leaders would appear at public events, flanked by German politicians, and in return the Jewish community received funding and protection. Yet the ‘gifts’ being exchanged were ultimately superficial. For example, while the government was eager to protect Jewish communities from antisemitic attacks by providing them with security personnel, when it came to reparations for individual Jews who had suffered as a result of the Nazi regime, their track record was notably poor (see Brenner and Frei 2012, 242–49).

The German government wanted to deal with Jews as a purely religious minority in order to differentiate themselves from the Nazis’ racial construction of ‘the Jew’ that had proved so destructive. However, in a probably unintentional carry-over from the Nazi regime, the government still treated ‘the Jews’ as a homogeneous entity. Jewish leaders seem to have outwardly complied with this wish, as shown by the importance given to the chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany—a single spokesperson representing all Jews living in Germany. In the 1970s and 1980s, young second generation Jews started to criticize Central Council leaders’ close relationship with the German state and its politicians. In their eyes, these leaders had been far too willing to acquiesce in the state’s co-opting of them as a ‘litmus test’ for the strength of its democracy and, in doing so, had deprived Jews in Germany of an independent and critical voice (Kauders 2007, 157). This change in attitude became clear in October 1985, when members of Frankfurt’s Jewish community demonstrated against the performance of a play they considered to be antisemitic . Widely described as a ‘coming out’ for Jews in Germany, this protest marked the moment when Jews became active participants in German society, which in turn implied that they intended to remain living there (see Cronin 2016).

However, within the space of a decade, such achievements had been overshadowed by the arrival of large numbers of Jews from the former Soviet Union. It soon became clear that this had done something fundamental to change what it meant to be Jewish in Germany. First of all, Jews in Germany were no longer even outwardly homogeneous. The Jewish communities’ common modus operandi and shared religious and political outlook, which had been established to keep Germany’s Jews united and thus stronger in the face of any potential threat, was significantly weakened. By the late 1990s, there was considerable diversity within the Jewish communities in terms of attitudes towards religion, and even conceptions of what a Jewish community should be.

The immigration marked such a caesura in Jewish life in Germany that all Jews who had been living in Germany before 1990 now came to be referred to under the homogenizing sobriquet ‘long-established’ Jews (alteingesessene Juden, or simply Alteingesessenen)—a term so misleading that its use inevitably entails a touch of knowing irony. After all, these ‘long-established’ Jews had only just begun to accept that they would continue living in Germany when a large cohort of Jews who did not speak German, and who often had very different conceptions of what it meant to be Jewish, started to join Jewish communities. Between 1990 and 2005, around 210,000 Jewish ‘quota refugees’ (Kontingentflüchtlinge) from the states of the former Soviet Union migrated to Germany (BAMF 2009, 11). 100,000