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Subject: Article from Der Spiegel - in case anyone's interested
Hugo    10/7/2007 7:02:01 AM
DER SPIEGEL 40/2007 - October 1, 2007 URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,509066,00.html WOOING THE DIASPORA Israel Pursues Germany's Eastern European Jews By Guido Kleinhubbert and Christoph Schult Many Eastern European Jews who emigrated to Germany have been rejected by local Jewish communities. Now Israel is sending envoys to Germany to try to encourage them to emigrate to Israel to boost the flagging population. DDP The newly opened synagogue in Berlin's Rykestrasse shows how Jewish culture has once more become an integral part of life in Germany. But Jewish communities in Germany are not doing much to welcome Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. At first glance, the story of Natalja Scheinbaum seems a prime example of an immigrant's successful integration into German society. Scheinbaum was 36 when she moved from Ukraine to Germany in 1991. She learned German in record time, studied at university and found a well-paid job as a network administrator. Her son, Jewgenij, received his high school diploma and then obtained a university degree in computer science. But Natalja Scheinbaum's own integration into the Jewish community was less successful. Already a victim of religious discrimination in the Soviet Union, Scheinbaum has felt for the past 16 years that Berlin's Jewish community has erected an invisible wall between itself and her. "It's sad and absurd," she says. The problem lies in differing ideas of what it means to be Jewish. For traditional Jews, a person's mother has to be Jewish for that person to be a Jew, whereas the Soviet Union had a looser definition. Although Scheinbaum's old Soviet Union passport states that she is Jewish, the Jewish community in her new home town takes a different view. It does not consider her to be a real Jew because, although she has a Jewish father, she has no Jewish mother. She was therefore barred from becoming a member of the community -- a fate she shares with thousands of others. This state of affairs is one reason why the Israeli government has now begun to focus its attention on Natalja Scheinbaum and the many others who have been turned away for similar reasons. Traveling to Germany soon will be two members of Nativ -- the Israeli liaison organization founded as an arm of Israeli intelligence in the early 1950s to maintain contact with Jews living in communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War. They know that more than half of the 220,000 Jews who have immigrated to Germany since 1991 now have virtually no contact whatsoever with the Jewish community. They know about the conflicts between Eastern European and Western European Jews, conflicts that have brought many local communities throughout Germany to the brink of schism. And they will discreetly point out to their target group that, by virtue of their Jewish ancestry, they have the right to move to Israel whenever they choose. Under Israel's Law of Return, having one Jewish grandparent is enough to qualify a person for the right to immigrate. FROM THE MAGAZINE Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. The mission is diplomatically sensitive in every respect. In the view of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the visit by the two Nativ employees is tantamount to a slap in the face. Stephan Kramer, the Council's general secretary, grants that immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union was always "a story full of conflicts." But Israel's decision to send two Nativ employees without first informing the Council has prompted Kramer to pen a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In his letter, Kramer describes Israel's intervention as a "sign of mistrust that insults us personally." In part, the harsh words betray the fear of losing influence: What if the Russians and Ukrainians rally around Nativ and it becomes a counterweight to the Central Council? That fear is nourished by the history of Nativ. The organization once worked clandestinely, tending to the oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union. Nativ's headquarters in Tel Aviv still exude something of the atmosphere of the organization's past as a secret service. There is no sign by the entrance, and the lobby is empty. Two employees of the domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, sit behind a glass door. Having passed the security controls, visitors are led by a female soldier to the office of 47-year-old Naomi Ben-Ami. DPA Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, wrote a letter of protest about the Nativ plans to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The former ambassador to the Ukraine begins the conversation by saying: "We have nothing to hide." These days, Nativ's work is "really no different from that of the German Goethe Institute," she explains. The organization plans to organize exchange programs for young people from Berlin, set up religious education classes and organize public events informing people
 
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