WINNIPEG — For years, Rabbi Chaim Rozwaski preached vehemently against Jews going to Germany.

During a recent visit to Winnipeg, Rabbi Chaim Rozwaski, centre, met up with his childhood friend Sid Halpern, left, and Leon Berger, his Talmud Torah teacher 60 years ago.   [Myron Love photo]

Recently, at the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada’s fourth annual Sol and Florence Kanee Distinguished Lecture Series at Shaarey Zedek Synagogue, he explained how he became Berlin’s chief rabbi.

“It was almost by accident, I ended up in Germany,” said the child Holocaust survivor and former Winnipegger at the April 26 lecture.

In 1998, he was invited by Ron Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, to move to Berlin to become the dean of the new Lauder Jewish Institute and acting rabbi of the historic Rykestrasse Synagogue.

“I asked three rabbis for their advice [about accepting Lauder’s offer],” Rabbi Rozwaski said.

“One said that I should go because the Germany of today is not the same Germany that was ruled by the Nazis and that I shouldn’t hold the sins of the fathers against the children. A second told to me to go because I was needed and that I was the right person for the job. The third recommended that I go because I would know what to do and how to do it.”

In 2000, Rabbi Rozwaski was appointed the rabbi of the Jewish community of Berlin.

Just as the Germans of today are not the same Germans of the war years, so also does the Jewish community in Germany differ considerably from that of the prewar and postwar Germany, Rabbi Rozwaski said.

The German Jewish community that emerged after the Holocaust numbered about 30,000 and included several thousand who either spent the war in hiding in Germany or were somehow exempt from arrest and execution. Those survivors were augmented by German Jews who returned from Israel and elsewhere after the war. They stayed because they were in mixed marriages or had built up successful businesses or were too sick to leave.

Of that community, there are only 7,000 to 8,000 people left, Rabbi Rozwaski said. Most of their children have immigrated to Israel, America or elsewhere.

Since the early 1990s, however, about 100,000 Russian Jews have settled in Germany. Many of them may have preferred to go to the United States, Rabbi Rozwaski said, but the Clinton administration closed that door when it ruled that Russian Jews were no longer in need of political asylum.

“Most of the Russian Jews who came to Germany have relatives in Israel,” Rabbi Rozwaski said, “but they were afraid to go to Israel because of the potential for violence.

“In Germany, they were given housing, free schooling and financial assistance from the government. Germany was a viable alternative, and the level of anti-Semitism is much less than what they faced in Russia.”

For older Russian Jews, though, with memories of the war, coming to Germany, – in many cases following their children – was still a hard choice. Rabbi Rozwaski recalled one elderly immigrant who broke down and cried at a Holocaust memorial event because he remembered being forced by the Nazis to shoot his own parents.

Rabbi Rozwaski presided at a funeral for a Russian Jew who had served as deputy commander of a Russian paratrooper military camp during the war.

When Rabbi Rozwaski first arrived in Berlin, the major issue under debate was whether it was still important to remember the Holocaust or whether it was time for the new generation of Germans to move on, he said.

Ten years later, the Holocaust has not been forgotten in Germany – a new Holocaust memorial was recently built by the German government – but anti-Semitism in Germany and across Europe is on the increase, he said.

He attributed the substantial growth in anti-Semitism in Europe to a process he referred to as a “de-Europeanization” of Europe. With the growth of the European Union, Europeans are losing their sense of nationality, he said.

Then there is the tremendous growth in the number of Muslims immigrating to Europe, a large population in many European countries that refuses to assimilate or integrate and become Swedish or Dutch or French or German.

“The growing Muslim population is changing Europe,” Rabbi Rozwaski said. “They have also brought with them a new anti-Semitism, which is finding fertile ground on the left and the right in Europe. This presents a serious problem, not only for the Jewish people and Israel but also for the entire world.”

He noted that Germany is currently Israel’s best friend in Europe. There are four times as many Israeli-owned businesses in Germany now than there were when he arrived.

“The German government stands by the Jewish community and Israel politically, financially and socially,” he said. “But who knows how long that will last. The German government doesn’t control public opinion. I receive a lot of hate letters and am on a ‘threatened persons’ list. This is a time not unlike the 1930s. Everything is in a state of flux and the Jews are at the centre of it.

“We have to trust in God that He will continue to take care of us.”