Newsgroup: it.cultura.ebraica
Titolo: "Hitler è solo un nemico militare, noi abbiamo sofferto sotto Stalin"

Come cambia l'Ebraismo tedesco.
Germany's Jews - Latkes and vodka
Jan 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union are transforming Jewish life
in Germany
IN 1938 Julius Schoeps's parents did what many German Jews who were
prescient or lucky did at the time: they left. They went to Sweden,
where Julius's father worked as an archivist. Julius was born there in
1942.
Then in 1947 Mr Schoeps did something few German Jews did at the time.
He went back, followed by his wife seven years later, to join what for
decades was a tiny, insular community. "These were years of silence.
Everyone suffered because nobody would talk about the Nazi years. My
father, who taught at university, often questioned his decision to
return to Germany," says Mr Schoeps. His father grieved for his own
parents, Käthe and Julius Schoeps, who had stayed behind in Germany:
his mother to die in Auschwitz, his father in Theresienstadt.
German Jews who survived in Germany, or in exile, had a deeply
ambivalent relationship with their homeland. Apart from guilt--that
they had survived, and even stayed in the killers' country--many felt
an almost physical revulsion when they came into close contact with
Germans. So they retreated to live in yet another form of ghetto.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's Jewish community had only
30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-
largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe,
after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified
and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from
the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more
than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and
about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some
parts of Germany, immigrants--usually referred to as "the Russians"--
make up 90% of the local Jewish population.
A few of the so-called established Jews--those who lived in Germany
before the fall of the Berlin Wall--are enthusiastic about the new
arrivals. Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum, a museum
and research centre in Berlin, was born in 1949 of German parents, and
grew up in East Berlin. He says that without the immigration of
Russian Jews, the future for Germany's Jews would be dark.
Yet most established Jews disagree. The dapper Mr Schoeps, now
director of the Moses-Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies
in Potsdam, near Berlin, argues that Germany's old Jewish heritage is
gone. Its so-called "memory landscape"--memorial sites, commemorative
plaques, cultural centres and museums--is now being guarded by gentiles
who are merely interested in things Jewish; the sort of people who
crowd to the Chanukkah market at Berlin's Jewish Museum to sample
latkes and sufganiot (doughnuts) and to sip kosher mulled wine.
As for the immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most neither know
nor care about Jewish rituals and traditions. Few of the newcomers
keep a kosher home. Many men are not circumcised. When they arrive in
Germany, they focus on the practicalities of life--jobs, flats, social
security and health insurance. They play chess rather than Skat, a
popular card game in Germany. Their cultural icons are Dostoyevsky and
Tchaikovsky, not Goethe and Beethoven, let alone Mendelssohn or Heine,
who were German Jews.
Established Jews find the newcomers anders (different from us),
suspect that they are not "real" Jews and think they are mainly coming
in search of prosperity and material help from the state and the
community. "They take whatever they can get," sniffs one.
There is also an argument over identity. For decades, Jews in the
former Soviet Union did their utmost to hide from Soviet authorities
and even to destroy proof of their origins. So when Germany started to
admit Jews in 1991 under the "quota refugee law" (which granted them
special refugee status), many could not assemble the papers required
to prove their Jewishness. Thousands are reckoned to have got into
Germany with false documents.
The strictly orthodox faction in the German community, which is by far
the strongest, does not accept even the majority of those who came
with proper identification. According to halakha, or religious law,
only a convert or a child born to a Jewish mother is Jewish. Jeffrey
Peck, a professor at Georgetown University and author of "Being Jewish
in the New Germany", a book exploring the diversity of contemporary
Jewish life in Germany, says that about 80% of the newcomers are not
halakhically Jewish. Yet they are the future of Judaism in Germany.
Judenrein no more
It is an irony of history that the country that Hitler wanted to make
judenrein (clean of Jews) now has the fastest-growing Jewish community
in western Europe. Before the Nazis came to power, about 600,000 Jews
lived in Germany. At the end of the war some 1,500 survived in hiding;
9,000 were in concentration camps; and 15,000 survived by marrying non-
Jews. A few hundred emigrants returned from exile in Shanghai and
other cities.
Between 1945 and 1952 some 200,000 Jewish displaced persons lived in
camps (often disused concentration camps) and urban centres in
Germany. Most were zealous Zionists. Keen to leave the camps and build
a new life, they became an influential force in the political debate
about the creation of a Jewish state. Most of them emigrated to Israel
as soon as they could after the state's creation in 1948.
By 1950 only some 20,000 Jews remained in Germany. About 8,000 of
these were native German Jews; 12,000 came from eastern Europe, mostly
from Poland. They were ostracised by international Jewish
organisations because they had decided to stay in the land of the
perpetrators of the Holocaust. Most of them considered their sojourn
in Germany to be only temporary; they were "sitting on packed
suitcases", as they put it, and travelled to Israel at regular
intervals.
Remembrance of things past
Defensiveness made German Jews try hard--sometimes too hard--to be
better friends of Israel than any other diaspora Jews. Anthony
Kauders, an historian, says that they engaged in "shaming rituals" in
the 1950s and 1960s to bully fellow Jews into donating money to
Israel. They had donation rankings, and sent out letters that named
and shamed anyone who proved stingy. A representative of Keren
Hayesod, the central fund-raising organisation for Israel, once
returned DM2,500 (then $600) to a wealthy donor because it seemed too
small a contribution.
Germany's growing prosperity and its readiness to come to terms with
its Nazi past encouraged Jews to unpack their suitcases in the 1970s
and 1980s. Cultural centres and new synagogues were built; Germany now
has 89 synagogues. Jews made themselves seen and heard in public life.
In 1985 Jewish protesters stopped the première of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's "Garbage, the City and Death", a play portraying a
ruthless property developer referred to as "the rich Jew".
This new Jewish assertiveness became even more evident in the 1990s
when Ignatz Bubis, a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Central
Council of Jews in Germany, started a public spat with Martin Walser,
a well-known writer. In his speech of acceptance of the German
Booksellers' Peace Prize, Mr Walser denounced the "moral battering-ram
of Auschwitz" and pleaded for normality in German-Jewish relations. Mr
Bubis accused him of "spiritual arson". A heated debate among
historians, politicians and journalists followed. Indeed, it became so
venomous that the then president of Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker,
asked the participants to "cool it".
More recent arguments have taken place over the "memory landscape".
Hundreds of memorials now dot Germany, from concentration-camp museums
to brass bricks sunk in the pavement outside ordinary houses, naming
the Jews who once lived there. As is often the case with Jewish
issues, Berlin saw the most heated controversies. Eberhard Diepgen,
former mayor of Berlin, was unhappy about the plan to build a
Holocaust memorial, the chief national symbol of atonement, in the
heart of the city. In a much-criticised speech in parliament, he
argued that Berlin already had many memorial sites, including the
Topography of Terror, an entire block in the city centre, which once
housed the headquarters of the Reich security services. On the
remaining foundations, uncovered in the mid-1980s, an open-air
exhibition describes what went on there in grim detail.
Even so, the city and the federal government went ahead, and in May
2005, after many delays, the new Holocaust memorial was inaugurated.
It is an undulating labyrinth of 2,711 concrete blocks on a site the
size of a football field near the Brandenburg Gate. It is a place
where visitors are meant to feel unsettled, lost and frightened, as
the murdered Jews did. And the development of the memory landscape
continues: at the end of September 2007 a new glass-covered courtyard
opened at the Jewish Museum Berlin, a building inspired by the
sharpness and angles of barbed wire. Last March a Jewish museum opened
in Munich.
The Red Army faction
Germany's new Jews are not especially interested in any of this. Most
of them suffered not under Hitler but under Stalin, who murdered
millions of Soviet citizens or sent them to brutal labour camps. For
them, Hitler was the enemy only in a military sense. Each year in
early May, when everybody else in Germany solemnly commemorates the
country's unconditional surrender, the Russian war veterans among
Germany's Jews march around with their military decorations to
celebrate the victory over Nazi Germany. "This was their proudest
hour," says Mr Simon from the Centrum Judaicum, who campaigns to give
the newcomers a voice and an honoured place. Last year he organised
"From Soviet Star to the Star of David", an exhibition of wartime
memories of 13 Red Army veterans, which included their personal
stories.
German Jews complain that the newcomers have only the faintest notion
of Judaism and Jewish traditions. In April Mr Schoeps threatened to
establish a new group of Jews in Berlin, made up of those who feel
alienated by "the Russians". The immigrant community, he complained,
"resembles a Russian-speaking cultural club rather than a religious
association." Albert Meyer, a former head of Berlin's Jews who
supported Mr Schoeps, accused the Russians of using "Stalinist
methods" to influence other Jews and said they had no interest in
faith.
Berlin's Jewish community is now troubled, not just by its cultural
divide but also by mismanagement and corruption, involving both
Russians and Germans, which have tainted its reputation. It has a
whopping yearly budget of EURO 25m ($37m), more than 80% of which is paid
by the city of Berlin. Most of the running costs of Jewish synagogues,
schools, cemeteries, libraries, hospitals and nursing homes are met by
the German state as an atonement for the past. "The community has too
much money," comments Mr Schoeps. He believes this encourages misuse
of the funds by Jews, both old and new.
"People of the second sort"
Although many German Jews concede that strengthened numbers--of both
real and purported Jews--will reinvigorate their previously tiny
community, many complain that they no longer feel at home in their
community centres and synagogues, where Russian has become the
language of choice. The Berlin Jews' monthly magazine is now published
in both Russian and German. In spite of the government's offer of free
language lessons, many older incomers--and most of them were already
over 45 when they arrived--have not bothered to learn more than
rudimentary German. "Of course Jews from the former Soviet Union,
though highly educated, are people of the 'second sort' for the German
Jewish establishment," says Anna Sokhrina, a Russian writer who now
lives in Berlin.
What do those "second sorts" think? Nora Gaydukova, a sociologist who
left St Petersburg in 1997 with her husband, a doctor, came in the
hope of a better life and a western education for her second daughter,
who is 14. (Her older daughter, who is 35, stayed in Russia.) During
her first years in Germany she felt terribly unhappy; she missed her
friends and her job. Her Soviet diplomas were worthless. The German
authorities, who offered her lessons in German, English and computer
skills on condition that she found a job, discouraged her from
retaking the sociology exams.
 He survived
"Today I am happy in Berlin, which has the only Jewish community that
feels somehow real," says Ms Gaydukova on a rainy winter afternoon at
the recently opened centre of the Chabad Lubavitch, a branch of
Hasidic Judaism, in the western part of Berlin. She is employed as a
social worker by a Russian cultural association, her daughter is at a
bilingual (German and Spanish) high school and she has found new
friends, though she admits that most of them are foreigners as well.
"There is little contact between Russians and Germans," she notes.
The Lubavitcher community centre attracts many Jews from the former
Soviet Union who, like Ms Gaydukova, are keen to learn more about
Judaism. On the day before the mid-November election of the head of
the Jewish community in Berlin, Gideon Joffe, fighting for re-election
after two controversial years in the job, came to address members of
the congregation while they shared a meal with their rabbis, who come
from Israel and America. He was gently teased for coming only when he
is campaigning for votes. He retorted that Berlin has nine synagogues
and countless community meetings.
"Real" German Jews, rather than recent immigrants, still monopolise
the leadership of Jewish communities everywhere in the country,
although they now represent only about 10-15% of the total Jewish
population. In the event Lala Süsskind, a 61-year-old woman who came
to Berlin from Lower Silesia as a baby, beat Mr Joffe in the contest
for the top job by a large margin. She had campaigned for unity of the
Jewish community and pleaded with Mr Schoeps, Mr Meyer and other
alienated Germans to avoid a split. "Her big challenge now is to
integrate the Russians at last," commented a German Jew who voted for
her.
Yet as Sergey Lagodinsky, a former programme director at the Berlin
Office of the American Jewish Committee, who migrated with his family
to Germany from southern Russia in 1993, says, one cannot integrate
85% of a community. In his view, the definition of Jewishness
according to religious criteria is a chief cause of division; because
the newcomers tend to be secular, it only alienates them further. In
November 2006, when a front-page editorial in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative and highly respected newspaper,
said that the biggest challenge for the Jewish community in Germany
was to make Russian Jews into authentic Jews, Mr Lagodinsky fired back
with a polemic in Tachles, a Jewish magazine, entitled "False Jews,
real problems".
The newcomers pose a difficulty for gentiles, too. Although the
immigration authorities admit Jews under ethnic guidelines (ie, the
father or mother have to be Jewish), most non-Jewish Germans insist on
defining Jewishness in purely religious terms. "This is the result of
German guilt about the Nazi obsession with race and racial
stereotypes," says Mr Kauders. Most Germans believe that it is wrong
to think of a Jew in terms other than adherence to the Jewish
religion.
Yet the fact is that times have changed. Germans will have to adapt to
having a big, largely secular Jewish community. Established Jews will
have to accept that the glory days of sophisticated German Jewry--from
Albert Einstein to Kurt Weill--are gone forever. The titles of the two
most recent books about Jews in Germany since 1945 (both of which were
published last September) suggest that Germany cannot be the long-term
home of a forward-looking Jewish community. "L'impossible Retour" (The
Impossible Return) was written by Olivier Guez, a Frenchman.
"Unmögliche Heimat" (Impossible Homeland) was penned by Mr Kauders, an
American. But the authors' conclusions are less stark and more hopeful
than their titles. "Something new and different is being created with
the Jews from the Soviet Union," concludes Mr Kauders.
---
Per il manifesto, le FAQ ed un'interfaccia Web visita 
http://www.e-brei.net/

 wrote:
ecco, bravi, se Hitler era solo un nemico militare restino pure ad
aspettarne un altro lě in Germania, poi vediamo se capiscono la
differenza tra sterminio e persecuzione...


 ecco, bravi, se Hitler era solo un nemico militare restino pure
mammamia, č questo il rispetto per la memoria?


 mammamia, č questo il rispetto per la memoria?
scusa se ritengo che sia chi minimizza a tal punto lo sterminio da
parlare di chi l'ha voluto come semplice nemico militare ad aver ben
poco rispetto per la memoria dei morti....


 parlare di chi l'ha voluto come semplice nemico militare 
Hai letto l'articolo?
E' sempre una buona abitudine farlo, invece di commentare a caso.
Tb
-- 
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Basel Hurani, 'Abd al-Halim Rumieh, Ratib Sha'bu, and Doha 'Ashur
al-'Askari 
http://snipurl.com/1oqtm


 scusa se ritengo che sia chi minimizza a tal punto lo sterminio
aha. quindi gli ebrei possono avere memoria delle loro persecuzioni
solo se lo permetti tu? Per inciso, in quella formula c'č molto
rispetto, se non per il comunismo (da un punto di vista ebraico mi
sembra impossibile) sicuramente per l'Armata Rossa.


 sembra impossibile)
scusa? E perchè è ebraicamente impossibile rispettare il comunismo?
Stai dicendo che gli ebrei non possono essere comunisti?


 Stai dicendo che gli ebrei non possono essere comunisti?
Possono anche essere cardinali, non è questo il punto.
Tb
-- 


 Perché il comunismo ha nel suo programma la distruzione degli ebrei come popolo
fonti?


 scusa? E perchè è ebraicamente impossibile rispettare il comunismo?
perché non si rispetta chi ti vuole far scomparire - anche non
fisicamente.


 fonti?
Tu, per caso, sei uno dei 43 mila candidati respinti al concorso per
l'ammissione alla Magistratura, di cui riferisce la stampa di oggi ?
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

 stato il peggio assoluto
E' stato il peggiore per coloro che ne sono stati perseguitati. Per chi ha
avuto la sventura di essere schiavo dei marxisti, sono essi i peggiori. 
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

 nelle sue versioni più light, l'assimilazione.
Se tu che sei ebreo avversi il comunismo perché, nella sua versione light,
vuole distruggere l'ebraismo assimilandolo, figurati chi non è ebreo e
viene minacciato di distruzione fisica e perseguitato, solo perché non è
un proletario, quanto può odiarlo.
 
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

 fisicamente.
Non c'è mica solo il comunismo. La Chiesa vuole convertire gli ebrei al
cristianesimo, dunque, vuole far sparire l'ebraismo rabbinico. Per questo
non ha il tuo rispetto. 
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

 fisicamente.
Quoto. Capisco che ci possano essere delle remore per chi comunque è 
stato fatto <<a Sua immagine, come statua>> (immagine tridimensionale), 
tuttavia la Torà ci insegna che non bisogna avere compassione dei 
malvagi. E' il caso del <<Rodef>>, ovvero un persecutore di ebrei; 
perché qualcuno prendendo alla lettera i suoi insegnamenti potrebbe, D_o 
ne guardi, agire. Pertanto più severa è la punizione meglio è. E se 
viene condannato, questo insegnerà anche agli altri che perseguitare gli 
ebrei ha un costo. Spesso la pena non è abbastanza pesante nonostante 
non ci siano attenuanti. Tuttavia un potrebbe obiettare che una 
eventuale condanna verrebbe usata per parlare del <<potere degli ebrei>> 
(una delle tante accuse storiche mosse al popolo ebraico). Ma anche se 
cosi fosse, meglio che pensino che gli ebrei hanno potere che il 
contrario. Almeno qualcuno avrà timore di perseguitarli.


 almeno qualcuno avrà timore di perseguitarli
e penserà che sia meglio metterli in condizioni di non nuocere. Meno male
che non sei tu a guidare la politica israeliana.
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

 fonti?
Se si intende il comunismo realizzato nel Novecento, la fonte è la storia 
delle persecuzioni antienbraiche, Giovanni. Se si intende il comunismo 
ideale, è bene non dimenticare che l'idea che tutte le differenze 
culturali debbano sparire è presente in molte versioni dell'ideale 
comunista, non solo riguardo agli ebrei. Per questo, oggi si cerca, anche 
nella sinistra radicale, di costruire un pensiero che dia una grande 
centralità a tutte differenze, e che non immagini mai la liberazione dal 
capitalismo come annullamento delle differenze. In questo il pensiero 
femminista è stato decisivo, insieme alla ricezione del pensiero di 
qualche fiolosofo di sinistra francese (guarda caso, ebrei). E' un fatto 
cultural-politico degli ultimi trent'anni.


 che non sei tu a guidare la politica israeliana.
Che c'entra la politica israeliana con l'ebraismo??????


 un proletario, quanto può odiarlo.
Anche per le classi sociali, talvolta, è prevista la conversione.
Tb
Ps: pensa quanto è incazzato uno che è ebreo e non è proletario
-- 


 non ha il tuo rispetto. 
Parlo per me.
Personalmente la rispetto, come rispetto i comunisti.
Trovo augurabile che nessuna delle due cose divenga regime politico. 
Indipendentemente dall'approccio light di alcuni, la teocrazia crea sempre dei 
problemi.
Se poi è una teocrazia che ti vuole distruggere...
Tb
-- 
Libertà per i comunisti siriani in carcere: Fateh Jamus, 'Isam Dimashqi,
Basel Hurani, 'Abd al-Halim Rumieh, Ratib Sha'bu, and Doha 'Ashur
al-'Askari 
http://snipurl.com/1oqtm


 pensa quanto è incazzato uno che è ebreo e non è proletario
Se è in gamba, può sempre diventare capo di stato maggiore
dell'aeronautica. Oppure, addirittura, primo capo del partito. 
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

 ideale
L'ho visto tre mesi fa. Qualcuno gli spieghi che non può mettere incinta
una donna con la testa.
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

 dell'aeronautica. Oppure, addirittura, primo capo del partito. 
Questo è successo anche (direi prevalentemente) a non-proletari/non-ebrei.
Come dicevo, anche le classi sociali "sbagliate", possono prevedere la conversione.
Se però sei anche ebreo devi convertirti due volte, prima per diventare non 
ebreo, poi proletario.
Tb
-- 


 dell'aeronautica.
Questo succede anche a nonproletari nonebrei.
Direi prevalentemente.
Come cercavo di far notare, la conversione salvifica in certi casi è prevista 
anche per le classi sociali "sbagliate". Se poi sei ebreo hai anche un ulteriore 
problema.
Tb
-- 
Libertà per i comunisti siriani in carcere: Fateh Jamus, 'Isam Dimashqi,
Basel Hurani, 'Abd al-Halim Rumieh, Ratib Sha'bu, and Doha 'Ashur
al-'Askari 
http://snipurl.com/1oqtm


 Personalmente la rispetto, come rispetto i comunisti.
Si, ma non facciamo un dramma di una punzecchiatina a nahum. 
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