One frigid January night off Oranienburger Strasse, in the heart of old Jewish Berlin, 30 immigrants from the former Soviet Union clustered into a small room to hear stand-up poetry and folk music in their native tongue. Almost all of them were middle-aged or elderly and, as they drank tea and smoked pipes in the crowded kitchen afterwards, they reminisced about the world they’d left behind – and the alien one that, today, they only partly inhabit.
“I don’t live here – I find myself here,” Leonid Lejkach from Odessa, Ukraine, explained. Lejkach, 58, said he would have moved to Israel, but a one-room apartment in Tel Aviv was too expensive to rent. So he came 12 years ago to Berlin to live close to his daughter, who emigrated from Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Lejkach doesn’t have much to do with Germans or German culture. Most of his friends, like the Russian-speakers gathered around the kitchen at this community center, are Jews. But few of them call themselves religious. He himself claims to be a pantheist.
“I’m not waiting for any Messiah,” he said, patting his chest. “But the homesickness I feel is for Israel.”
Standing beside Lejkach, Nora Gaydudoka, a journalist and doctor of sociology who left St. Petersburg in 1997, said moving to Germany had given her an opportunity she never had in Russia: to live a full Jewish life. In the Soviet Union, Judaism was “foreign” to her and her ethnicity only hindered her career prospects. Now, Gaydukova attends synagogue regularly and, like many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, is learning about Judaism virtually from scratch.
For the almost 200,000 former Soviet Jews who’ve flooded into Germany in the past 15 years – outpacing Russian immigration to Israel last year for the first time – these kinds of cultural and religious ambiguities are typical. Forbidden under Communist state policy to practice Judaism, many immigrants came here with little or no grasp of the religion. Very few brought professional, marketable skills like Gaydukova. Most of them, like Lejkach, haven’t integrated into German culture. They get by reading the Russian dailies, listening to Russian radio, watching Russian television, buying food from Russian stores and forming friendships, almost exclusively, with other Russians.
In a modern spin on the age-old Diaspora, today’s Jews in Germany – 80 percent of whom come from the former U.S.S.R. – are creating a new ghetto culture. The irony, of course, is the place where they’re doing it: in the shadow of the Reichstag, on this monumental graveyard that was once ground zero for the Holocaust. Two decades ago this community was unimaginable, when Jews living abroad, from Moscow to Manhattan and Jerusalem, still shuddered at the thought of Germany ever being called home.
But now, as economic and security concerns dissuade many Jews from Israel, and the limited access to U.S. green cards impose a barrier to Russian Jews, a rebirth here of Jewish life is exactly what’s happening. The feeling among former Soviet Jews is that Germany, transformed by its experience, now offers them and their families the safest, broadest opportunities for the future. The problem is: many of them don’t know where to begin.
“They live in a world that’s not Germany. It’s half Russia and the rest – I don’t know, it’s a dream,” said Irene Runge, chair of Berlin’s Jewish Cultural Association, an organization that helps Jews integrate into their new home. “They came to live a quieter life, with less danger and less antisemitism and a guarantee that they won’t starve. But they’re not motivated and many of them don’t have goals.”
Runge added that many of the Russian Jews rely on the state welfare system to support them with housing subsidies, health insurance and a monthly stipend. “The state pays, and they expect it to.”
“It was a historic misunderstanding – a farce for both sides,” explained Yuri Ginsburg, a freelance journalist who came to Berlin from Moscow in 1990. “The Russians thought they’d find paradise here and they didn’t. The Germans thought they were welcoming successful, accomplished Jews and they weren’t.”
Starting in 1990, Germany’s open-door immigration policy granted anyone with a Jewish mother or father German citizenship. Less than 20,000 Jews lived here then, and the ten-fold increase since – mostly in the form of pensioners, who came to be close to relatives that immigrated before them – has made this the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world. The number that moved here from the former U.S.S.R. is still just a fraction of the one million who entered Israel during that time, boosting that country’s population by 20 percent.
The emigration boom to Germany, however, marks a radical turnaround – not only from the days when Jews were rounded up off the Berlin streets and sent to concentration camps, but when the word “Jew,” stamped in every Soviet Jew’s passport, was linked only to disadvantages.
“Sixty years ago people were faking papers to prove they weren’t Jewish,” said Rabbi Walter Rothschild, a liberal British rabbi in Berlin. “Now they’re faking papers to prove they are. For the first time in the last 2,000 years, being Jewish brings with it some civil advantages.”
Guarding the Gates
But now that could be changing. Germany’s Interior Ministry is currently debating a measure that will severely crack down on Jewish immigration from the east. In the future applicants may be required to speak German before they arrive; show a formal invitation from a Jewish community agreeing to accept them as a member; and declare their professional goals and how they intend to earn a living.
At the same time, Germany’s own Jewish community imposes stiff requirements on eastern immigrants before it officially approves them to join. Ironically, it was the Russian Jews pouring west out of the shtetls in the 19th century who brought a devout brand of Judaism to their secular, assimilated counterparts in Germany. Now, more or less the opposite is happening as Germany’s rigid Orthodox leaders demand to see official papers – proving one’s mother was Jewish, for example – before admitting Russians as members of the community.
This conflict – between a Russian political system that punished you if any family member was a Jew, and a German Jewish system that accepts you only if your mother was a Jew – has alienated many immigrants, like the journalist Yuri Ginsburg, who have left the Jewish community altogether.
“There’s not much solidarity here – what we call in Russia brotherhood,” Ginsburg, 55, said over a late-night coffee in his eastern Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauerberg. Ginsburg, who had a religious upbringing with grandparents who came from the Vitebsk shtetl in White Russia, found the Berlin Jewish community cold and bureaucratic from the outset. “All they wanted were my papers, but my mother was only half- Jewish and that wasn’t enough,” he said. His son, at 21, knows little about Judaism and wants to be an actor. “For him, Germany is homeland,” he said.
And that’s typical of the younger generation of Jews growing up in Germany today. Only 30 percent are having bar mitzvahs. Less than that many attend synagogue. For some members of the community, like the Yiddish entertainer Mark Aizikovitch, it’s a worrisome sign. “Our kids will be more German than Jewish,” he said. “This is normal assimilation. It’s what happened in Russia. But we must stay within the tradition while modernizing. We must stay Jewish.”
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Aizikovitch, like the writer Vladimir Kaminir – who won acclaim for his post-Soviet book of stories about Berlin, “Russian Disco” – is one of a handful of the early Soviet Jewish immigrants who’ve achieved success in the arts in Germany. A bear of a man with fiery eyes, a gray beard and wild long curls of hair, Aizikovitch left Poltava, Ukraine, in 1990 and has starred as an actor and singer in the Yiddish theater here ever since.
“My work is to see Jewish culture remain at a high level. I want to see it bloom,” he said. “I can’t forgive the Germans. Every time I go on stage I sing a few songs about the Jewish fate. I want to open their eyes and ears to our thoughts: to show them that we’re no longer victims. We’re normal people. We’re a part of the culture and landscape of Germany.”
Rebuilding on Ruins
Clearly, there’s a paradox in the steady flow of Jews back into Germany, the country that murdered them en masse just over 60 years ago. In a reversal of that historic liquidation, they’ve now settled in some 80 towns and cities across the country, many of which offered little or no infrastructure in the form of synagogues or rabbis when they arrived. Like pioneers, they’ve built up Jewish populations where all were wiped out a half century before. And, in the capital, they’ve moved into the same pre-War neighborhoods – mainly Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf in the west of Berlin – rehabilitated the same synagogues and opened businesses on the same streets where Jewish commerce once thrived. Seemingly, though, no one’s batting an eye.
“I like Berlin. It’s an international, democratic city,” Irma Polyntseva, a frailfaced woman of 62, from St. Petersburg, said. Polyntseva came to Berlin eight years ago and takes classes at a Jewish community center in Wilmersdorf, on Passauer Strasse – formerly a street that housed Jewish shops and a synagogue – where she improves her German grammar and letter-writing skills.
“It’s bad for Jews in Russia with the typical antisemitism. Here I don’t feel it. It exists, of course, but I know there’s police and security. Also, there’s little money for pensioners there. Here it’s better – it’s also hard, but better.”
Next door on Passauer Strasse, Anna Rubin, a nurse from Vladivostok, runs a Russian foods market with her Latvian Jewish husband. The business has become popular among many of Berlin’s Russian-speaking Jews who “come to the store and feel good here,” Rubin said. The attractive, 35 year old, wears a necklace with the gold-plated word “Life” in Hebrew lettering. She had doubts about moving so far away from Siberia, but the benefits for her children outweigh the costs.
“I want to give them more than I had in the way of Jewish culture and education. I didn’t have this possibility. It doesn’t matter what language they speak – only that they’re Jewish,” she said.
Into the Fold
In addition to the smattering of kosher food stores and markets like Rubin’s, a wider Russian infrastructure has sprung up in Berlin in recent years. Now you can find Russian doctors, Russian pharmacies, Russian lawyers, Russian plumbers, Russian funeral directors – all available in the Russian Berlin phonebook. And thanks to Russian-language services offered at the Chabad Lubavitch synagogues, more Jews are slowly being brought into the religious fold.
“For the older ones, going to synagogue is really the only thing they can do for no money,” said Runge at the Cultural Center. “Everyone learns together, and there’s even a sort of group pressure to become more Jewish.” Many Russians are attending synagogue as though it were a kind of club: a social meeting place where they can share stories, interests and language. Fifteen years ago, no public Passover existed in the city. Now, Runge said, a dozen places host Pesach – which has become so popular you can’t even find a seat.
Still, on a regular basis, only about 200 of Berlin’s 10,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union show up for the services held at seven synagogues around the city, according to the Jewish community’s central bureau, housed in a heavily protected building in central Charlottenburg. Though most Russian Jews claim they feel extremely safe in the German capital, the fact remains that almost every Jewish point in the city – from the Jewish community building to synagogues, from culture festivals to Jewish bakeries and cafes – is regularly patrolled by the German police. Despite its current growth, one could say there’s something ominous – and maybe not quite real – about a community that requires constant protection in order simply to exist.
“I shared a balcony with a young Nazi and there was no problem,” Igor Chalmiev, a tall bearded Jew from Baku, Azerbaijan, said. Chalmiev’s grandfather was a rabbi in the Caucasus, and he knows about real antisemitism. For him, dealing with – and even revealing his identity to – the occasional skinhead isn’t nearly as threatening. “I’m not afraid of anyone here,” he said.
Divided they Stand
Ironically, much of the tension in this insular community arises not from the outside but between the native German and immigrant Russian Jews. The infusion of immigrants happened so quickly, and their language and culture became dominant so fast, that it’s hard to speak about a united Jewish society in Germany. “The German Jews hate this Russianization – unofficially, of course,” Anita Kugler, a German author and journalist who spent a decade covering post-Soviet Jewish immigration in Berlin, said.
“Hearing Russian in the streets, in the synagogues, at high holidays, has been a taxing experience for many from this city’s more established class of Jews.”
And the divisions carry further. Within the former Soviet Jewish community of Berlin, the Sephardic Jews, who number about 2,500, most of them from the Caucasus, are clamoring to have their own synagogue and Sephardic rabbi. They bring a louder, fiery atmosphere to the Jewish culture here – still one more sign that diversity and Jewish expression, while not entirely harmonious, is on the rise.
It’s hard to say what the face of this community will look like 10 years from now – how Russian, how religious and how integrated. But the fact that they’re even here, and that they’re moving forward, gives some a reason to be optimistic.
“It’s important the Jews keep coming: to help build a Jewish middle class, like in America,” said Vladimir Stoupel, a concert pianist from Moscow who moved to Berlin just after the Wall came down. Stoupel acknowledges a level of discomfort and “ambivalence” as a Jew in Germany. But, he said: “If not a single Jew lived here today, it would mean that Hitler won.”