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Friday April 20, 2007

Rift among Berlin’s Jews signals community’s growing diversity

by toby axelrod
jta

berlin | The recent announcement of a split in Berlin’s Jewish community may be the first shock in a seismic shift affecting Germany’s entire Jewish community.

Superficially, it’s a struggle between Berlin’s established postwar Jewish community and the new majority, who are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

More fundamentally, it reflects the new reality that the identity of Germany’s Jewish population has changed, 62 years after the end of World War II — and that more painful changes could be yet to come.

Ultimately, observers say, the rift is about the need for new power structures in the German Jewish community, which has quadrupled in size to more than 120,000 people since 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That may mean shattering the historical “united community.”

After months of angry exchanges pitting Albert Meyer, an attorney and former president of Berlin’s Jewish community, against representatives of the new Russian majority, Meyer has joined with historian Julius Schoeps to form a breakaway group.

Ironically, Meyer won his post as president in 2003 thanks to Russian-speaking voters, a key constituency in any leadership election these days. But in 2005, Arkadi Schneiderman, a former Meyer ally, accused him of improprieties with community funds. The charges did not stick but Meyer was voted out, replaced by the Russian immigrants’ new favorite, Gideon Joffe.

Meyer told German media that the Russian-speaking leadership is not interested in religion, calling them “pseudo-Bolsheviks who want to turn the community into a Russian club.”

“The German-speaking minority is being pushed to the side,” Meyer said. “I would like to add that my motto has always been, ‘It’s not important if you’re Polish, German, Russian, liberal, Reform or Orthodox. The main thing is that you consider yourself to be Jewish and act like a Jew.’ And this community, especially the governing body, is not acting like Jews.”

Neither Joffe nor the World Congress of Russian-Speaking Jews responded for comment. Meyer said he was confident that several hundred members of Berlin’s pre-unification Jewish community would join his new group. Some reportedly did leave the community during the 2005 brouhaha. Meyer says he has a building in mind for a new synagogue and financial sponsors lined up.

The announcement has rocked the foundation of the Berlin Jewish community, which — unlike most Jewish communities in the United States and United Kingdom — has functioned almost without exception as a united community, with one board making all decisions on programming and personnel for schools, synagogues and other institutions.

“I am not in favor of splitting the Jewish community,” Meyer said. “But the present leadership of the community does not give me an option.”

Some observers have suggested that the spat centers on competition for governmental subsidies to religious groups. Others say it’s really about the Jewish community’s difficult postwar maturation.

The split isn’t just between the Russian-speakers and the establishment, said Sergey Lagodinsky, a fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute and former program director at the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin.

It boils down to “the lack of a strong and integrative leadership,” said Lagodinsky, whose family immigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union.

“The rift goes between the older guard vs. the younger people, between religiously conservative Jews and religiously liberal Jews, between those advocating unconditional Israel support and those who consider themselves more liberal,” he said.

But “the Russian-on-Russian rift is more painful because here there is a real conflict over power, which will be deteriorating.”

Essentially, Germany’s Jewish community is struggling to come to terms with its diversity, which may not be represented anymore by one overarching body.

What used to hold the postwar community together was the fact that “they were all Holocaust survivors,” said Rabbi Andreas Nachama. That’s no longer the case.

Rabbi Josh Spinner blames the current problems on two issues: personalities and “the inability of some in the old postwar community to accept that the world has changed.”

No longer in control of the united community, these parties quickly found the structure “inconvenient,” Spinner said.

It’s not about religion, he emphasized, since both Russians and Germans have undertaken Orthodox and liberal initiatives in recent years.

“This is about change, personalities and the over-prominence and over-subsidising of Jewish life in Germany today,” he said.

That said, Meyer and Schoeps are doing the right thing, according to Spinner.

“If there are Jews anywhere in the world who do not like the communal options available to them, they can and do set up new communities or synagogues or whatever,” he said. “Why should Germany be any different?”

Yet there are differences, he admitted. Most important, the German government subsidizes united religious communities; once communities fragment, they fight for those subsidies.

A breakaway congregation may mean the end of the united community, said Irene Runge, a founder of the former East German Jewish Cultural Association.

“If 300 leave, it’s not a split. It’s a normal disagreement,” said Runge. A new group could appeal to “all those young Jews from the United State and United Kingdom in Berlin who don’t care for the old-fashioned Gemeinde and don’t speak Russian, either.”

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