GERMANY: The head of Berlin's Jewish community said yesterday that the German capital needed a flourishing Jewish community if it was to establish itself properly as a strong European capital.
"Berlin can only be successful as a capital with Jewish life," Mr Albert Meyer, who was elected president of the Berlin community last month, said in an interview.
Only a handful of Jews survived the Nazis and the second World War in Berlin, one of them Mr Meyer's father, but he said the Jewish community had gradually re-established itself to become the fastest-growing in Europe, boosted by migrants from Russia.
Of around 12,000 Jews in Berlin, some 500 were of German origin and 3,500 of Polish origin with most of the rest from Russia, he said.
Before the Nazis came to power, Berlin had around 160,000 Jews, roughly a third of Germany's Jewish population at the time. Mr Meyer said the new wave of immigrants had transformed the Berlin community, which boasted an unusually distinguished group of scientists, artists and intellectuals before the war, as well as a solid stratum of middle-class professionals.
With the rise of the Nazis, that community was virtually wiped out through exile and deportation in the Holocaust and it was not until Berlin re-emerged after German reunification in 1990 that there was much appetite among Jews to return.
"After the war the Jewish community here was a shut-up, closed society, which had a special position because of what had happened. Now there's a new generation," he said.
As an example, Mr Meyer said that whereas around half the lawyers in pre-war Berlin were Jewish, there were only three out of 1,500 when he qualified after the war. That number was now 50 and expected to grow.
He said the increase in anti-Semitism remarked on recently in Europe was not particularly marked in Germany, despite some incidents, although criticism of the state of Israel still frequently tipped over into anti-Jewish feeling.
"It is still not a natural situation. It's always on a razor blade. \ I don't think I would say that Germany is more anti-Semitic than other European countries," he said.
He also rejected comparisons between the barrier being built by Israel in the West Bank and the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for 28 years during the Cold War.
"Why should Israel not have the right to build a wall to stop people shooting at it?" he said.
Mr Meyer, whose family has lived in Berlin for generations, said the Berlin Wall served a different purpose to the Israeli barrier. "It's a preventive wall, to defend itself," he said.