ZGram - 6/6/2003 - "UPI Analysis: Jews flooding into Germany"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

June 6, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Up-front, again there seems to be e-mail interference.  Did my 
Traficant ZGram go through?  I doubt it!

I am sending you this one this morning, and I am preparing another 
Amnesty International ZGram for later in the day.

Some of you have written back to me and said, in essence:  "What do 
you expect of that Communist Front?  Those folks will never help you!"

That's just the point!  These people are flying under false colors, 
and they are an international non-profit outfit who aren't doing what 
they proclaim to do.  They are fraudulently misrepresenting their 
mission.

They are only one of several groups that need closer scrutiny because 
they are, essentially, enemies of Free Speech - and looking at their 
record, I would say, enemies of genuine democracies in general.

So let us take a look at them and see how much of their shenanigans 
we can expose!

Below is a telling article I leave for your interpretation.  The only 
thing I want to add is that our enemies never cease to amaze me!  Now 
they even appropriate Germany's best poets and most genuine social 
thinkers:  Goethe and Schiller!

Heinrich Heine was a Jew - whose poetry I love, by the way! - but to 
anyone's knowledge that I know of, Goethe and Schiller were not!

Is anything safe?  Just asking.


Analysis: Jews flooding into Germany

By Uwe Siemon-Netto
UPI Religion Editor
From the Life & Mind Desk
Published 6/5/2003 5:26 PM
View printer-friendly version

WASHINGTON, June 5 (UPI) -- The turbulent relationship between Jews 
and Germany is taking yet another stunning turn. Seventy years after 
Hitler's ascendance to power and 60 years after the Holocaust, more 
Jews are flooding into Germany than into any other country, Israel 
included.

This makes Germany the one nation with the fastest-growing Jewish 
community in the world. Ironically, one reason for this state of 
affairs is the anti-Semitism in their countries of origin, chiefly 
successor states of the former Soviet Union, Julius H. Schoeps, head 
of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in 
Potsdam, told United Press International Thursday.

"Of course there are other reasons as well, such as economic 
considerations and the chance to give their children a better 
education," Schoeps allowed. "Moreover, they see Germany as a 'safe 
country.'"

As a result of this accelerating migration, the Jewish population in 
Germany has swollen from 33,000 in 1990, the year of that nation's 
reunification, to 200,000 today, according to Schoeps. Before World 
War II more than half a million Jews lived in that country. At the 
end of the war there were only 15,000 left.

But in 2002, 19,262 Jews from the former Soviet Commonwealth of 
Independent States settled in Germany, compared with 18,878 who went 
to Israel and fewer than 10,000 who were admitted into the United 
States. German consulates in CIS cities report that 70,000 more Jews 
have already applied for resettlement visas. In addition, thousands 
of Israelis, whose parents had fled to Palestine in the Nazi years, 
are now claiming German passports to which they are entitled by 
German law.

"Thanks to these developments I believe there is a good chance for 
the emergence of a new German Jewry," said Schoeps, a historian who 
was born in World War II in Stockholm, where his parents had found 
exile. "I absolutely welcome this," Rabbi Carl Feit, a Talmudic 
scholar and cancer researcher at New York's Yeshiva University, told 
UPI in an interview.

Feit interpreted the Jews' return to Germany as "a fulfillment of a 
biblical spiritual theme -- the rebirth and rejuvenation for which 
there are many examples in history, where Jewish people in one part 
of the world or another have seemed to have been eclipsed only to 
reappear against all odds and common expectations."

Feit added, "The biblical paradigm for this rebirth was the return of 
the Jews to Israel" from the Babylonian captivity in 516 B.C.

There are many ironies in this sudden rejuvenation of Ashkenazic 
Judaism. The very word, Ashkenaz, which defines German and Eastern 
European Jews, is the Hebrew term for Germany. This is so, explained 
Feit, "because the entire Jewish culture in Eastern Europe derives 
from Jewish communities that lived in three German cities along the 
Rhine more than 900 years ago."

"The German and Jewish cultures used to fertilize each other," Feit 
went on. Yiddish, the idiom spoken by 12 million Jews up until World 
War II, is essentially a medieval German dialect. The two languages 
are so close that Arnold Beichman, the New York-born writer and 
political scientist, often quips, "I like to speak German because it 
is just Yiddish with a better accent."

According to Feit, Yiddish, too, is currently undergoing rejuvenation 
after decades of decline. This is to some extent also true in 
Germany, where the ultra-orthodox Lubavichers, coming primarily from 
New York and London, are doing mission among the mostly secularized 
Russian-speaking immigrants, most of whom "don't even know the 
difference between a synagogue and a church," Schoeps said.

The Yiddish-speaking Lubavichers are a Hassidic sect. In their effort 
to bring immigrants from Eastern Europe to faith, they compete with 
assorted other religious movements, including Messianic Jews.

Only about 60,000 of the 175,000 Jewish immigrants in Germany are 
already registered with any of the 84 synagogue congregations, most 
of which have sprung up in the past decade, Schoeps related. "In some 
eastern German cities, such as Potsdam, Halle and Rostock, our 
congregations are now 100 percent Russian-speaking," he said.

Do they fear that anti-Semitism in Germany might once again be on the 
rise? "They are not really worried," replied Schoeps, who attributed 
the spate of racist outrages in the early 1990s primarily to 
hooligans raised without any values in eastern Germany's gray 
Moscow-style housing estates.

As for the rest of the population, "there are now between 200,000 and 
300,000 Russians in Berlin alone, and Germans don't know and don't 
really care who among them is Jewish and who is not."

But there is another irony in this influx of Jews from the East: 
Although most are highly educated -- Schoeps described the 
quintessential immigrant as a mathematician from, say, St. Petersburg 
-- they cost the German taxpayer money. "Between 60 and 70 percent of 
them are on welfare because they cannot find work. They don't speak 
German yet, and their Soviet diplomas are not recognized by Germany."

There are now programs to retrain them. "We have developed projects 
to turn mathematicians into computer specialists, for example," said 
Schoeps. But that's only one side. The other side is that now there 
is a sudden need for teachers, social workers, rabbis and cantors. At 
Potsdam University, of which Schoeps' center is part, a rabbinical 
seminary -- the Abraham Geiger Kolleg --has been created.

What will Germany's new Jewish culture look like? Before Hitler, 
German Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe; culturally 
they were thoroughly German. Berlin was the first city in Europe with 
a Jewish high school, created in 1778 along the traditional German 
"Gymnasium" lines at the instigation of Moses Mendelssohn, the great 
Jewish Enlightenment philosopher.

This school was closed in 1942 and did not reopen until 1993, when 
the sudden influx of Jews from the East commenced. But then most of 
its students and faculty were gentiles, and the Hebrew teacher was a 
Protestant pastor.

Reflecting on the rich cultural history of Jews in Germany, which 
this school represents, Schoeps mused, "The intellectual heritage of 
German Jews included Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Heine, 
while this new Jewish community is at home with Tolstoy and Gogol."

But then, what about the next generation of German Jews? "Probably 
Goethe, Schiller and Heine, plus Gogol and Tolstoy -- not a bad 
prospect, don't you think?"


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