Such was last year's record: fewer than 19,000 Jews moved from the independent states of the former Soviet Union to Israel, while 19,262 were registered in Germany. The social benefits granted to emigrants in Germany, fear of the intifada in Israel, and the impossibility for many to move to the United States—a country still most desired by Soviet Jews—outweighed.
"Russians" are merging into German Jewry, giving its face new features, changing it not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. Over the past decade, German Jewry has increased three to four times, and Russian has become the most common language of communication among its members.
No one knows how many Jews there were in the two Germanys before their unification—after all, not everyone dared to openly declare their national and religious affiliation. And then there are mixed families, forged documents freely obtained in the former homeland and giving the right to enter Germany. Go figure.
Although official statistics give some figures. For example, at the end of the 1980s, 20,000 to 30,000 people called themselves German Jews. By comparison, before the Nazis came to power in 1933, about half a million Jews lived in Germany.
The German government does not hide its interest in the revival of Jewry, but that is precisely what is not happening. Today, those who come here are by no means descendants of the glorious Jewish tribe that inhabited the country before the Nazis took power. After World War II, those who survived the Holocaust and ended up in refugee camps were mainly Eastern European Jews who could neither return to their homeland nor immigrate to the United States or Israel. These "veterans," their children and grandchildren, are now forced to integrate, taking advantage of the government's generosity. They have already numbered 100,000—those who arrived from the East after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Russian-speaking emigrants first have to learn to be Jews, and only then to be Germans. Such is the multi-stage process of their search for a new identity. According to Cilly Kugelmann, director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, only after two or three generations will today's immigrants become a serious creative component of German culture. For now, they do not go to the Jewish Museum: "This is not their history. For them, all of this is pure exotica."
Ronen Reichman, an Israeli lecturer in the department of Jewish studies at the famous University of Heidelberg, says that almost all Jewish students in the department are immigrants from Eastern bloc countries, mainly from the former USSR. And although only a quarter of these young people are Jews by Halakha (Jewish law), they all say they feel emptiness and dream of finally finding their Jewish identity.
Most communities are shaken by the confrontation between veterans and newcomers. The old-timers accuse the "Russians" of pushing—sometimes not without success—for executive positions and control over community affairs, of being interested only in money, and of knowing nothing about Judaism. The "Russians," in turn, insist that they are the majority in the community, and therefore more must be spent on their economic and cultural absorption.
According to Dr. Alexander Brenner, a former science attaché in the German diplomatic corps, the Jewish community and German authorities are now faced with the problem of how to treat immigration from the CIS. Israel is displeased that immigrants prefer Germany, while German Jewish communities are interested in increasing their numbers.
The German government knows about this confrontation but is in no hurry to change its integration policy: this would be illegal and would invite accusations that "Germany is deporting Jews again."
Yes, the Jews of the new generation themselves prefer Germany. Life there seems less problematic to them than in Israel. They do not experience negative emotions associated with the tragic past. The experience of their ancestors does not burden their minds and feelings, and their memory is free from an excess of dark images. What can be said about those for whom the Holocaust is nothing more than a tale of olden times, even if not very distant? Stalinist anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews in their former homeland are much closer and more concrete to them.
But among the old immigrant generation, among those who survived the Holocaust and ended up in refugee camps, and among their children, there is still an internal rejection of Germany as an enemy, and they sometimes even accuse new immigrants of being more German than Jews.
Herman Simon, head of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Jewish Research Institute in Berlin, is convinced that the immigrants themselves differ greatly from each other in socio-cultural terms: the contrast between those who came from St. Petersburg and, say, natives of the Caucasus is too striking. And people from one wave of immigration are not like those from another. "Jews who know nothing at all about Judaism come to Jews who know extremely little about Judaism," says Simon. "No one can predict what the next generation will be like."