Andrew Gimson

Within the German pale

Andrew Gimson on why increasing numbers of Jews are returning to Germany

issue 21 June 2003

More Jews are moving to Germany than to any other country in the world, including Israel. This statement seldom fails to provoke gasps of astonishment among people whose knowledge of Germany is limited to the Holocaust. To them it seems a very strange and wonderful thing that the Jewish life which the Nazis tried with such grotesque thoroughness to extirpate should now be flowering anew on German soil.

This generous reaction is surely in the end the right one, but I must admit that my own reaction – when a colleague pointed out a news-agency report according to which 19,262 Jews moved to Germany last year from the former Soviet Union, compared with 18,878 who went to Israel and fewer than 10,000 who went to the United States – was less generous. During the six years I spent in Berlin in the 1990s, I found myself bombarded with information on Jewish subjects.

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