Nilowa’s new life is one of bitter disappointment. And while there are skinheads loitering around her communist-era apartment building, it’s her fellow Jewish immigrants who bring her the most frustration. Unlike other German cities with renascent Jewish communities, such as Berlin and Frankfurt, Rostock has a tiny Jewish population of 470, no rabbi and a makeshift synagogue that’s nearly empty even on High Holidays. Nilowa found a part-time job teaching Hebrew at the Jewish center, only to discover that all 40 people who signed up for classes were Germans. “Most immigrant families say, ‘If you want to be a Jew, go to Israel. We’re here to become Germans’,” she says.
Nilowa’s struggles exemplify the difficulties faced by those Jews from the former Soviet Union who came to Germany hoping to become part of new, distinctly Jewish communities. Driven by a desire to atone for the Holocaust, the German government has settled 65,000 former Soviet Jews across the country during the past decade. The policy has made Germany’s the fastest-growing Jewish population in the world. Sixty years after Jewish life was effectively extinguished here, the new immigrants are subtly changing the face of Germany’s biggest cities. In Berlin, where 12,000 Jews are officially registered, seven synagogues are open, a Jewish high school last month graduated its first class since World War II and a Jewish street festival is likely to draw tens of thousands of visitors in November.
But the influx has hardly led to a flowering of Jewish life. The new immigrants used their legal status as Jews to secure German visas, but many have little or no interest in Judaism.The threat of anti-Semitic violence makes others wary of expressing their faith. Moreover, Germany’s tough immigration laws have kept the new arrivals scattered and isolated. The government allows 5,000 former Soviet Jews into the country a year, distributes them evenly across the 16 states and forbids them from moving unless they find jobs in other cities. As a result, few institutions exist to nurture a sense of Jewish identity. Of the 120 towns and cities in Germany with a Jewish population of more than 400, fewer than two dozen have rabbis. “The government is sticking Jews in places without communities,” says Joshua Spinner, an Orthodox rabbi who works with immigrant Jews in Germany under the auspices of the Lauder Foundation. “There’s no commitment to developing Jewish culture.”
Rostock is typical. The first Jews arrived here in 1868, and by the turn of the century the city had a thriving population of 500 German Jews and refugees from tsarist Russia. They built a synagogue in 1902, opened schools and established a burial society. But Nazi Storm Troopers burned down Rostock’s synagogue on Kristallnacht in 1938. Four years later the 175 Jews who remained were deported to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. All but two were murdered. For decades afterward, there was no sign of Jewish life in Rostock. In its effort to deny East German guilt for the Holocaust, the communist government rarely mentioned the Jews who once lived there. By the late 1980s, however, the climate was again changing. A member of Rostock’s prewar Jewish community returned from Israel to be made an honorary citizen in 1987, and the first group of 40 Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union arrived in 1990 to put down roots.
The soil was barren. “We had no building, no programs, no structure,” says Leonid Bogdan, who emigrated from Riga, Latvia, in 1994. Two years earlier the town had become a symbol of right-wing violence after skinheads burned down a foreign workers’ hostel and rioted for days. When Bogdan arrived, he discovered that many fellow Jews were hiding their background; one neighbor identified himself to Germans as a Russian of ethnic German descent. Awakened to his own Jewish identity after his arrival in Germany, Bogdan has struggled to build a sense of community among Rostock’s Jews. In 1996, he secured a 75-year lease on a run-down three-story building near the central train station for a symbolic payment of one German mark. He organized a sports club known as the Maccabees and turned a ground-floor yoga room into a makeshift synagogue.
Four years later he’s still struggling. Only 20 of 470 former Soviet Jews in Rostock are active members of the community, and the synagogue rarely gathers more than a half-dozen worshipers on the Sabbath. American rabbis and students now visit Rostock during High Holidays and Jewish festivals such as Purim to lead prayer services and offer instruction in tradition and culture. But Rostock’s Jews still have no money to hire their own rabbi, which Spinner claims would cost about $150,000 a year for salary and living expenses. “It’s a disaster,” says Spinner. “Any rabbi in Rostock needs to be a community activist, fund-raiser, public-relations man and an educator. Find me one of them who’s also willing to move to a place like Rostock.”
Nilowa tried to be hopeful when she first arrived in town. Though the family had no friends or relatives in Rostock, a large Russian-Jewish family cooked them meals and introduced them to other Jewish immigrants. Nilowa soon discovered, however, she had little in common with the others. “They had nothing to eat in the Motherland,” she explains. “Here the social benefits give them a good opportunity to eat well, travel, buy nice furniture. They are happy, but their spiritual life is barren.” Then there are the constant reminders of the Jews’ near invisibility. Last December, Nilowa was elated after Rostock’s city council invited the community to construct a large menorah in the town square for Chanukah and light it each evening. But the sight of the candles flickering unnoticed by the crowds celebrating Kris Kringle and singing Christmas carols left her feeling empty.
Nilowa hasn’t experienced any overt anti-Semitism, but she’s haunted by the Holocaust. “When I walk along the streets, I think, ‘Did Jews live on this block? What happened to them’?” she says. Nilowa’s elder daughter, 18-year-old Lejana, recently left Rostock to study in Israel. “She didn’t feel any connection to the German kids in her school,” Nilowa says. Desperate, she applied last spring for Hebrew-teaching jobs with larger Jewish communities in Hamburg and Dusseldorf, but was turned down. Without a job offer in another city, she can’t leave Rostock. Says Nilowa: “For me, there’s a feeling of loneliness all the time.” That’s a side of the Jewish immigration experience that Germany isn’t so eager to publicize.
