By Philip I. Rosenbaum
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) – Jews who came to America to mend their shattered lives after the Holocaust now look on in dismay as thousands of their Soviet counterparts embrace Germany as a new promised land.
“For Jewish Holocaust survivors, settling again in Germany cannot but provoke the most profound negative, painful and emotional reaction,” Benjamin Meed, executive director of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, wrote in a letter to Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress.
The WJC’s North American, Latin American and Israeli branches Wednesday endorsed the position expressed in the Dec. 28 letter, said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the organization’s American section.
The European branch will consider the issue later this month, and in February the WJC’s world body will decide on a final position in Jerusalem.
“We are not like the pope that we can order any particular community to do anything,” Steinberg said.
Other Holocaust survivors were incensed over the recent wave of up to 5,000 Soviet Jews settling in Germany in 1990.
“I myself would never live in Germany even if I had to wash floors all my life in another country,” said Judith Gruber, 64, of New York City.
Gruber, who survived the Holocaust in Lublin, Poland, by living with a Roman Catholic family that helped her conceal her Jewish identity, said no Jews should live in Germany, even German Jews.
Some survivors, however, said the immigrants must decide for themselves where to make their homes.
“I cannot speak for any Russian Jews who live in the Soviet Union who want to get out, and if they have an opportunity to go to Germany and improve their lives, I personally see nothing wrong with it,” said Ernest Michel, executive director emeritus of the United Jewish Appeal, which raises funds to help Soviet Jews enter Israel.
But Michel, who grew up in Mannheim, Germany, and came to the United States in 1946, said he would prefer it if all Soviet Jews settled in Israel.
About 200,000 immigrants came to Israel in 1990, about 90 percent of them from the Soviet Union. It was the highest annual immigration figure since 1949, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Norbert Wollheim, another Holocaust survivor from Germany, said while he doesn’t feel he can judge whether Soviet Jews should settle on German soil, his “feelings are painful” over their decision to do so.
“I cannot tell them where to go,” said Wollheim, a 77-year-old semi-retired accountant who lives in the New York City suburb of Fresh Meadows. “I’m living here in the safety of Fresh Meadows and I have no right to tell them where to go,” he said.
The surge of Soviet Jews going to Germany has led to calls to limit their numbers. The governors from Germany’s 16 states meet next Wednesday to consider setting limits on the number of Soviet Jews who can legally take up residence.
Germany had a population of more than 500,000 Jews before World War II. Between 1933 and 1945 nearly all fled or were deported to their deaths.
In the postwar decades, the number of Jews grew to more than 25,000 – all but a few hundred of them living in former West Germany.
Now public debate in Germany has begun over how to stem a flood of refugees – not only Jews – coming from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and from Third World countries.
Germany took in about 1 million East Europeans in 1990 and about 200,000 asylum-seekers from other parts of the world. The newcomers are straining Germany’s social welfare budget and its housing and job markets.
James E. Young, professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of “Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust,” sees the movement of Jews to Germany in a positive light.
“After something like the Holocaust, it somehow creates a condition where the country where it happened should function as a refuge,” Young said.
But Wollheim said, “It’s a very weird twist of history that a country that threw Jews out should become a haven for them.”
One such quirk in Jewish history is a building in Berlin, where many of the thousands of Soviet Jews seeking sanctuary make their first stop at a relief office. Although few of the newcomers realize it, the building once housed the Nazi propaganda ministry headed by Josef Goebbels.
PHILIP ROSENBAUM 