Jewish Sites in Berlin kept under guard

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 5

Jewish Sites in Berlin kept under guard

By

MARK HEINRICH,

the Associated Press Berlin

Berlin, where the Nazis once plotted the deaths of more than six million European Jews, is now the centre of West Germany’s biggest Jewish community. Today, the 6200 Jews in West Berlin grapple with problems ranging from loss of Jewish identity through intermarriage, to terrorist threats which dictate that all of the community’s main buildings and sites be kept under constant guard. They also continue the slow process of rebuilding — with plans afoot to build the community’s first elementary school. “Things like elementary schools are important for our survival as a minority

in our environment,” said Heinz Galinski, aged 73, chairman of the Jewish community of Berlin. “This doesn’t mean any segregation, any recoiling into isolation, but simply the necessities for surviving as Jews,” said Mr Galinski, who survived the Auschwitz extermination camp. “At one time, everything against Jews came out of here, and Berlin is a place of historical tragedy for that,” he said. The events of four decades ago are never far from mind, as the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, made clear when he visited Berlin in January, only the second Israeli head of state to do so.

Mr Peres described what he saw as “a trip out of the darkness into the

hope of light.” Bolstered by an influx of more than 2000 Soviet Jews in the last decade, West Berlin’s Jewish community has four synagogues, two rabbis, five cantors, and centres for senior citizens, youth recreation and adult education.

The city’s Jewish residents include electricians, doctors, musicians and other professionals and tradesmen.

Other large West German cities have Jewish populations, including Frankfurt with 5000 and Munich with 4000 of the 30,000 European total.

The Jews’ renaissance in West Berlin holds poignant significance. It was the seat of power in Hitler’s Germany and site of the 1942 “Watansee conference” that charted

the “final solution” for the Jpws. The Nazis killed about six million Jews from 1933 to 1945.

East Germany, and the eastern part of this former capital, have been slower to recover. Mr Galinski estimated that 300 Jews live in Communist East Germany, about 250 of them in East Berlin, the East German capital. He said his community’s contacts with East Germany’s Jews became more difficult with the construction in 1961 of the Berlin Wall to stop illegal emigration to West Berlin, which is an administrative enclave of West Germany. “We are deeply affected (by the wall) like all others here in that we can no longer maintain close bonds with our people on the other side,”

Mr Galinski said. “The wall is a terrible barrier for all peoples.” While the Berlin Jewish community is thriving, there is a growing trend towards marrying nonJews. Mr Galinski says there are “certain dangers” posed by intermarriage. An aide in the Jewish community administration, Mr Bernhard Lerner, aged 29, said “There are many Jews who don’t find their Jewish marriage partner, and this is perfectly attributable to our small numbers” in West Germany. “The choices are staying alone because they can’t find a Jew who is a good partner or marrying outside the faith to someone they love,” said Mr Lerner, a native of West

Berlin. The chairman of the Central Council of German Jews, Werner Nachmann, said last year that only one in four young Jews in West Germany married within their religion. While many West German Jews take comfort from the nation's transformation from Nazi tyranny to liberal democracy since World War H, occasional anti-Semitic outbursts remind them that they can never let down their guard. “I grew up and was educated in Germany, and I am at peace with the values of German culture,” Mr Lerner said. “But when you get letters saying Hitler forgot to kiH?*the rest of the Jews, or when you hear (in a small Rhineland

town in January) a German mayor saying they need to kill a few rich Jews to balance the budget .. . then you can’t really feel normality, you can’t feel totally at home,” he said. t West German policemen with sub-machine guns pace back and forth in front of the Jewish community house where Mr Galinski works, guarding against a possible assault by Arab or Leftist extremists. The largest surviving synagogue today is invisible from its city centre street, sitting behind a nondescript postwar building with a police-guarded entrance.

"Unfortunately, all our institutions must be guarded,” said Mr Galinski, who has bodyguards

wherever he goes. “It is a great tragedy of Jewish ‘ life that 40 years after the collapse of Nazism politi- ~ cal protection is still needed.” Still, for Soviet Jews like Mazliach Mischaev, living in West Germany is a dream come true. “I live here because of democracy. There Is only dictatorship In Russia,” said Mr Mischaev, aged 46, a synagogue caretaker who emigrated with his wife and three children from Soviet Georgia in 1979. “All Germans, even police, are my friends,” the grizzled Mischaev said. “I find no anti-Semi-tism. One German may not be nice. One Jew may not be nice. But that’s life,” he said.