page_title: Religion in Germany
section_title: Judaism
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in Germany / Judaism
caption_attribution_description: English: Outer view of the Men's Synagogue in Worms (Germany), the Raschi-Schul, a former yeshiva, is the appendix of the Men's Synagogue Deutsch: Rückwärtige Aussenansicht der Synagoge in Worms
context_page_description: Christianity is the largest religion in Germany, and was introduced to the area of modern Germany with the conversion of the first Germanic tribes in the 4th century. The area became fully Christianized by the time of Charlemagne in the 8th and 9th centuries. After the reformation started by Martin Luther during the 16th century, a significant part of the population had a schism with the Catholic Church and became Protestant, mainly Lutherans and Calvinists.
  Nowadays around 55% of the population identifies as Christian, however only 10% of German people say they believe in God as absolutely certain, and 50% say they believe in God as less certain, with about half of those being Catholic, most of them Roman Catholics, stronger in the southern and the western part of the country, half belonging to the Evangelical Church of Germany predominant in the northern regions, and the rest to several small Christian denominations such as the Evangelical Lutheran Free Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Jehovah's Witnesses. Between 5 and 6% are Muslims, while much smaller religions include Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and Yazidis.
context_section_description: Jewish communities in German speaking regions go back to the 4th century. In 1910, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany. After Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1933, he began systematically persecuting Jews in Germany. The systematic mass murder of Jews in German-occupied Europe began with the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of World War 2, around 6 million Jews had been killed by the Nazi government.
  About ninety thousand Jews from the former Eastern Bloc, mostly from ex-Soviet Union countries, settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is mainly due to a German government policy which effectively grants an immigration opportunity to anyone from the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic states with Jewish heritage, and the fact that today's Germans are seen as more significantly accepting of Jews than many people in the ex-Soviet realm.
  Recently, antisemitic abuse against Jews in Germany has increased. The Central Council of Jews urged Jewish Germans to avoid wearing their kippahs in public.
  Total religious Jews — 100,000 (0.1%)
  Jews whose religious status is not ascertained — 90,000. They come from Eastern Europe and have no membership in any Jewish community.
  Union of Progressive Jews in Germany — 5,000 members
  Central Council of Jews in Germany — 23 national associations of 108 communities comprising approximately 100,500 members in 2014.
caption: Worms Synagogue (originally built 1034) is the oldest still existing synagogue in Germany.
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