Jews flocking back to Germany

According to recent news stories, which you can read in full here and here, Jews are now leaving their homeland in Israel and migrating to Germany, the country which perpetrated the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed.  The Jews are now saying “Next year in Berlin,” instead of “Next year in Jerusalem”.

The Jews, now living in Israel, are returning home: The Jews are flocking to Berlin, where most of the German Jews lived before they were deported or killed.

Berlin has been rebuilt with modern buildings and the Jewish synagogue (in the center of the photo) has been restored

Jews returning to Germany can gloat over the ruined church in Berlin, which was bombed by the Allies

Just how many German Jews were killed in the Holocaust?  Good question.  I had to look it up myself.  I went to the website of the  United States Holocaust Memorial  Museum (USHMM) where I read the following information:

In all, the Germans and their collaborators killed between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews in the Holocaust, including most of those Jews deported out of Germany.

This quote is from one of the news articles, cited above:

Between October and December 1941, German authorities deported around 42,000 Jews from the so-called Greater German Reich—including Austria and the annexed Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia—virtually all to ghettos in Lodz, Minsk, Kovno (Kaunas, Kovne), and Riga. German Jews sent to Lodz in 1941 and to Warsaw, the Izbica and Piaski transit ghettos and other locations in the Generalgouvernement in the first half of 1942 numbered among those deported together with Polish Jews to the killing centers of Chelmno (Kulmhof), Treblinka, and Belzec.

German authorities deported more than 50,000 Jews from the so-called Greater German Reich to ghettos in the Baltic states and Belorussia (today Belarus) between early November 1941 and late October 1942. There the SS and police shot the overwhelming majority of them. After selecting a small minority to survive temporarily for exploitation as forced laborers, the SS and police interned them in special German sections of the Baltic and Belorussian ghettos, segregated from those few local Jews whose survival the SS and police had permitted, generally to exploit special occupational skills.

By now, my readers might be wondering, as am I, where the 6 million Jews, who died in the Holocaust, came from.  A maximum of only 180,000 German Jews were killed?  Impossible.

The following quote from the USHMM website mentions Nizko. Thanks to Wolf Murmelstein, who sent me an essay about Nizko, I am one of the few people who know about “the Nizko Plan.” I blogged about it at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/let-me-tell-you-about-the-jewish-settlement-in-nisko-poland/

Public imagination associates the deportation of Jewish citizens with the “Final Solution,” but indeed the first deportations of Jews from the Reich—albeit Jews from areas recently annexed by Germany—began in October 1939 as part of the Nisko, or Lublin, Plan. This deportation strategy envisioned a Jewish “reservation” in the Lublin District of the Government General (that part of German-occupied Poland not directly annexed to the Reich). Adolf Eichmann, the German RSHA official who would later organize the deportation of so many of Europe’s Jewish communities to ghettos and killing centers, coordinated the transfer of some 3,500 Jews from Moravia in the former Czechoslovakia, from Katowice (then Kattowitz) in German-annexed Silesia, and from the Austrian capital, Vienna, to Nisko on the San River. Although problems with the deportation effort and a change in German policy put an end to these deportations, Eichmann’s superiors in the RSHA were sufficiently satisfied with his initiative to ensure that he would play a role in future deportation proceedings.

The Jews who will be flocking to Berlin will not have to look at the old Berlin.  The photo below shows one of the mounds of rubble that have been covered over, after Berlin was bombed back to the stone age.

A grass-covered mound of rubble hides the bombing of Berlin

Berlin is now a modern city, full of Holocaust Monuments, so the Jews will feel right at home.  The photo below shows the 5-acre Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin.

Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin covers 5 acres

The Sony Center in modern Berlin

The following quote is from a news article about the Jews returning to Germany:

….. A Facebook page launched in Hebrew this month on how to move to a city far from rockets and rocketing prices in Israel has gone viral, reaching 600,000 people in a week. It is called Olim Le-Berlin, “Let’s ascend to Berlin”, using the same rousing verb Jews reserve for emigrating, or “ascending”, to Israel. An Israeli band sings a similar tune, turning the lyrics of Israel’s favourite song, “Jerusalem of Gold”, into a yearning for a “Reichstag of Peace, euro, and light”. Even Professor Manuel Trajtenberg, a leading economist commissioned by the government to look at the high cost of living, which sparked mass protests in 2011, has piped in. “Berlin is more attractive than Tel Aviv,” he says.
The voice of the nationalist right decried them as an insult to all Holocaust survivors. “See you in the gas chambers,” commented one critic on the Facebook page. The finance minister, Yair Lapid, has promised to extend price controls to more food

[…]

Though the Israeli diaspora is growing in Berlin, London and Barcelona, the trend is hardly new. Some 700,000 Israelis have abandoned the Promised Land since its creation, says Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer.

[…]

Fears of anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, deter many Israelis from making the move. But Mr Netanyahu’s apparent rejection of compromise with Palestinians, and wars every few years, is eroding hope. Arguments about economic priorities are growing as Israel’s generals demand resources; on October 8th, they secured cabinet approval for a 10% rise in military spending. On their Facebook page, the Berlin ascenders displayed a bill for groceries in Germany that would cost three times as much in Israel. “Even our forefather, Jacob, went down to Egypt to earn double the salary and pay a third of the rent,” sing the hip-hoppers.

[…]

Israelis with Ashkenazi, or East European, ancestry are queuing at German, Hungarian and Polish consulates for what was once regarded as a shameful act of seeking European passports. Their numbers will only swell if the Spanish parliament approves a plan to grant nationality to potentially millions of Sephardi Jews, descended from those it expelled in 1492.