(Interior of Synagoge Rykestraße in Berlin. Photo by Bezirksamt Pankow)

It’s a decidedly blustery day on Karl Marx Street in Eisenach, in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Gold and rust-tinted leaves scatter the ground of a small park marking the site of the town’s former synagogue—burned down by a Nazi mob on Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogroms on November 9, 1938.

Tucked away in a quiet corner not far from Eisenach’s theater, the memorial is one of 32 sites across Thuringia—spots where synagogues were desecrated or destroyed that night in 1938. Of the many previously active synagogues, only a few remain today. Only one has been rebuilt for weekly services. The others are marked by memorial stones and stairways leading to nowhere—including empty lots or garden plots, apartment buildings, and even a grocery store. Where the small town of Vacha’s synagogue once stood, there is now a hobby shop.

These places dot the east German landscape, from Potsdam to Zwickau, Dresden to Magdeburg. Along with other memorials like Stolpersteine—stones with brass plates bearing the names of Holocaust (Shoah) victims, laid in the pavement in front of their former homes and businesses—they stand as stark reminders of the absent presence of the region’s once thriving Jewish population. They are places where the palpable influence of eastern Germany’s Jews remains potent, even where they are no longer present.

(Image of Stolpersteine. Photo by David Sedlecký)

They also signal the Jewish community’s present absence. Since the Shoah, under sometimes radically conflicting conditions, a range of diverse Jews have returned, resettled, and restored a sense of Jewish life across the former East German Republic (GDR). But the community is less-than-half what it was in pre-war Germany.

In places like Berlin, Leipzig, and Erfurt, Jews’ stories over the last century speak to lives lived between far-right politics and those of the far-left, communism and capitalism, growth and decline, remembrance culture (Erinnerungskultur) and an ominously encroaching antisemitism. Looking at East Germany–past and present–through Jewish eyes reveals today’s controversies are nothing new.

The challenges Jews in Germany faced following the Holocaust, including perils to their very existence, have shaped Jewish lives in the east for decades. The story of how under such conditions they still preserved their heritage is decades long. Now, facing declining demographics, a resurgent antisemitism, and fearing a far-right political turn, eastern Germany’s Jewish communities are once again under threat. And, once more, they are not only preserving their heritage, but claiming their place in German society.

Building a Life in the “Land of the Perpetrators”

To say the least, Germany’s Jewish community has gone through numerous tragedies and triumphs over its 1,700-year-long history. Using the broadest definition of who is considered Jewish, its current community stands at 225,000, the third largest in Europe. But before the Shoah, there were an estimated 525,000, accounting for around 1% of Germany’s pre-war population.

That the community is relatively large today, given the near-complete extermination of Jews within Germany from 1933-1945, is a miracle, said Reinhard Schramm, chairman of Thuringia’s Jewish community.

Born in the town of Weissenfels, in 1944, to a liberal Jewish mother and a Protestant father, Schramm was one of some 15,000 German Jews liberated by Allied forces in 1945. Some who stayed had a non-Jewish spouse or parent, surviving in hiding like Schramm’s family, who were concealed in a holiday home until the end of the war. Others survived, somehow, in concentration camps and ghettos like Theresienstadt.

After the war, Schramm said efforts to rebuild the decimated community in Germany’s east started immediately. In the early days, this community included two groups: a small segment of Jews who managed to flee the region and decided to return, as well as thousands of displaced newcomers and refugees from Eastern Europe. Historian Annette Leo, who was born in West Germany in 1948 before coming to East Berlin with her parents in 1952, wrote that both Jews from Germany and elsewhere “shared a common hope for a brighter future for Germany.”

Yet both populations of Jews struggled to feel at home in what Leo called, “land of the perpetrators.” Within a couple years, more than 90% of Jewish refugees in Germany, whether in the West or East, moved on—mostly to the United States and Palestine. Those who stayed behind banded together to provide each other with economic, social, and religious support. By 1948, there were more than 100 Jewish communities and in 1950, the Central Council of Jews in Germany (ZWST) was founded. The Jews who remained felt they could not only survive, but possibly even thrive in a rebuilt Germany, shaping what the country could become in the wake of war.

Jewish Life in a Time of Socialism

Those nascent hopes, however, were complicated by the increasing political, economic, and social divisions between what became West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG), and East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Under their respective occupying governments, the two Germanys followed different paths. West Germany was allied with the U.S., the U.K., and France, becoming a rapidly developing capitalist country with a robust market economy. In contrast, East Germany allied with the Soviet Union, becoming a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state” under a highly centralized government that struggled to find its economic footing.

The divide between East and West also split Germany’s Jewish population, with 70 communities in the West and just eight in the East. Though largely overshadowed by their counterparts in the West, communities in eastern cities like Dresden, Erfurt, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Schwerin did their best to sustain a vibrant Jewish life over five decades of socialist rule. Overlooked for decades, their stories are now being retold through efforts like that of the Jewish Museum of Berlin, which recently opened an exhibition, “Another Country: Jewish in the GDR.” According to Leo, who contributed to the Berlin exhibition, without permanent rabbis or cantors, and often having to import kosher food from neighboring Eastern European countries, “the attempt to reestablish Jewish life [in the East] took place under contradictory conditions.”

Although officially atheist, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government “supported the founding or reconstitution of the Jewish communities and ensured that the returnees and immigrants received the basic necessities of life (a roof over their heads, clothing, health care, and additional food rations),” Leo shared. Many of the returnees, in fact, made the conscious choice to help rebuild Germany under the guise of a more equitable, socialist society. Several became prominent members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) or held positions of prominence in the arts or academia. Among them were anti-fascist painter and graphic artist Lea Grundig (1906-1977) and composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), famous for penning East Germany’s national anthem.

But antisemitism was still rampant, both among the authorities and in the general population. In 1952, an antisemitic show trial against leading Jewish state and party functionaries took place in Czechoslovakia.  Eleven of the accused, headed by Rudolf Slánsky, were sentenced to death on trumped-up charges, including high treason against the soviet state. According to Reinhard Schramm, Jews in the GDR “were scared because Prague was close.”

Antisemitism plagued the GDR. Schramm said Jews were accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionist traitors,” as GDR leadership took a more pro-Arab position with regard to land issues in Palestine. Some Jews were even interrogated. Despite the promise of restitution, the Soviets and later, the GDR state, neglected to return the vast majority of property stolen from Jewish owners in the 30s, citing Jews as “sabotage of the economy.” In 1952, the state said “capital stolen from Jewish capitalists” was not subject to reparations. During this time, around two thirds of all Jews living in the GDR fled.

As East Germany’s political and cultural hub, Berlin boasted the largest Jewish community in the GDR. In a city literally divided, a wide spectrum of Jews came together to try and construct a sense of communal life through holiday celebrations, summer camps for kids, and organized trips to the sea. These Jews identified as religious and secular, state-aligned socialists and active dissidents. And yet, despite diverse values, they mutually embraced their common cultural origins—founded in a shared value system and forged through persecution.

Long before Berlin’s now-famous New Synagogue on Oranienburger Street was reopened in the 1990s, East Berlin’s several hundred religious Jews gathered at the Rykestrasse Synagogue, chatted at the kosher butcher’s shop in Prenzlauer Berg, and buried their dead at the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, the largest of its kind in Europe. The exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin tells the story of people like Jalda Rebling, a well-known hazzan (cantor) who grew up in East Berlin. Her parents’ home was a gathering place for Jewish intellectuals who repatriated to the GDR, sharing in Yiddish their fears and hopes, cultural aspirations, and political machinations. That communal life, Rebling wrote, was vital to her self-understanding, particularly “as a Jewish child in a Berlin suburb, it was very difficult to make friends.”

(Exterior of the New Synagogue in Berlin)

Rebling went on to found a Yiddish culture festival in Germany and Wir für uns in the late 1980s—part of what became the Centrum Judaicum, a place for “creative, modern Judaism” in the 1990s that was gay affirming and progressive. In the exhibit, she speaks nostalgically about Berlin, as a city with many Jewish layers, which needed to be rebuilt and renewed, “sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes as a matter of course.”

According to historian Miriam Rürup, it is this sense of nostalgia for the former East—or Ostalgie—that has helped spark a renewed interest in the GDR’s Jewish history. As director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam, outside Berlin, Rürup says that recent scholarship has opened up new perspectives on everyday life for Jews in the GDR, showing a “great variety of Jewish experiences” and means of engaging with the state.

The Only Synagogue Rebuilt in the GDR

The eastern city of Erfurt, the nerve center for Thuringia’s Jewish community in the GDR, has been a site of everyday Jewish life for centuries. Indeed, Erfurt boasts a 900-year Jewish history and was recently named a UNESCO World Heritage site for its Old City, which includes a treasure of coins, goldwork and jewelry, gravestones, manuscripts, a medieval mikvah (bath used for ritual purification), and a synagogue dating to the 11^th century. But its community almost did not survive after 1945. From a prewar (1930) population of 1,197, only 80 Jews remained in Erfurt in 1954.

Among those who did return, Max Cars—a survivor of the Theresienstadt ghetto—served as chairperson of the community from 1945-1961, leading the effort to rebuild the city’s synagogue, razed by the Nazis in 1938. According to Reinhardt Schramm, during the first service in the rebuilt synagogue, Cars held up the Torah, which survived the Shoah in the safety of the Erfurt Cathedral, as the kernel of hope that would help restore the community. During this first reconvening, on April 25, 1946, Cars lifted the Torah as a reminder of the Jewish will to survive. Reflecting on Erfurt’s multi-century Jewish history, Cars told those gathered, “It is important to prove that the few Jews left alive are true to their faith.”

The next year, Erfurt’s city council granted the community control of the land on which the Great Synagogue stood—one of the few instances when the GDR state came through on its Wiedergutmachung, or restitution, promises—and in 1947, construction began on a new synagogue designed by Willy Noeckel. Funded by the state and inaugurated in 1952, Erfurt’s New Synagogue would be the only synagogue reconstructed in five decades of GDR rule. From an original seed of some 15 members, the community ballooned to 280, with an influx of newcomers from Poland and farther east.

Community leaders also tried to show themselves as an important part of society through active participation in mass organizations and membership in the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Even so, antisemitism remained. “Party leaders called into question the existence of the Jewish state, which was antisemitic in its effect,” Schramm said, “they even questioned whether Jews should qualify for life insurance.”

In such an environment, and with so many synagogue seats still left vacant, Schramm said Jewish life in the GDR was “kind of a niche experience.” They held Hanukkah balls, commemorated funerals, and celebrated the end of fascism at regular events, maintaining a vibrant cultural life as best they could. “When we were not seen as enemies of the system, we were able to continue our normal lives like other people in the GDR. We faced the same issues. We faced the same problems. But nothing in particular special to us,” Schramm said, “We were standard citizens.”

Evidence of this vibrancy comes from those like Raphael Scharf-Katz, who was the Chair of the Jewish Regional Community of Thuringia from 1985-1994. Scharf-Katz used his camera to capture not only his family’s private life, but also developments in Erfurt’s Jewish community, including life-cycle celebrations, and festive occasions at the rebuilt synagogue in the early 1950s. So vibrant was the community, that Jewish journalist Alfred Joachim Fischer described it in 1948 as “one of the best in Germany” with a “well organized” religious, cultural, and social life that far outshone others he’d seen in the Soviet Zones or in the West. Even so, underfunded, aging, and suffering the effects of a slow, but steady attrition, just 30 members remained by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Since 1990, however, the Erfurt community has had a bit of a renaissance, thanks in large part to new members from the former Soviet Union. When Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders in the late 1980s, there was nothing holding back the roughly two million Soviet Jews from finding new places to call home. They came from Moscow and Kyiv, Odessa and Riga. Many went to the U.S. or Israel, but tens of thousands also made their way to Germany, especially East Berlin, either to maintain geographic proximity to their homeland, because of political and economic expectations, or for stability and better prospects for their children. Jewish communities grew significantly, reopening kindergartens, schools, and youth centers. New synagogues cropped up. Since the 1990s, 30 new synagogues were constructed.

In Erfurt, Scharf-Katz was able to welcome some 200 Jews from the former Soviet Union and, today, Schramm said it is thanks to these newcomers that the Jewish Community of Thuringia numbers around 800, of which 500 live in Erfurt. “Make no mistake,” he said, “though the change came almost silently, Jews from the former Soviet Union have ensured the continued existence of our community.” According to Sharf-Katz, “The immigrants and their descendants, most of whom speak Russian, have forever changed our religious, cultural, and political life.”

Contemporary Contradictions

During a visit to Erfurt’s synagogue in October 2023, a small collection of flowers and candles marked the front of the space. These mementoes included prayers and well-wishes following Hamas’s attacks in Israel on October 7. Israeli flags were available for pick up in the lobby and synagogue staff said they had only received words of support and sympathy from the broader community. As I left, however, I passed a clearly marked police van with two officers standing outside, monitoring the entrance.

Antisemitism has been prevalent in Germany since before the early October attacks and the Israeli state’s reprisal in Gaza, with incidents on the rise in the country for the last few decades. In 2022, Germany’s Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism (RIAS), documented 2,480 incidents. According to German police, that number was 2,032 in 2019, including a synagogue attack in the eastern city of Halle. In 2010, there were 1,268 such incidents. The roots of this uptick in hate speech, attacks, and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are complex, and include a mix of right-wing political extremism, the influence and appeal of global antisemitic rhetoric on the internet, and conspiracy theories surrounding current events like the pandemic and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Along with antisemitic vandalism and assaults, Jews in Germany’s East—where the populist, anti-migrant, far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been leading in polls for months—fear further harassment and violence. Given Germany’s history leading up to and during the Holocaust, the potential political power of such parties is particularly alarming to the Jewish community.

Despite public support for, and financial backing from, the German Federal Government, some Jews, like Igor Matviyets, aren’t sure they are going to stay in Germany. Migrating from Ukraine with his family when he was seven, the Jewish politician for Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) considers the country his home. But Matviyets wonders how long that feeling will keep him rooted in Halle, the largest city in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. With the AfD’s rising political prospects, Matviyets and other Jews are openly speculating about whether they might leave if right-wing extremists become part of a state government. “I have thought about this again and again,” Matviyets said, “but the risk is high enough that we may have to pack the suitcases and go once more.”

Warning that people from outside should not be quick to judge the East or blame it for the rise in various forms of racism and xenophobia in Germany, Schramm said he is confident that democracy will win in the former GDR. “The only way to defeat antisemitic forces is as a community,” he said, “We know what our problems are. We are also Ostdeutsche citizens. We understand the issues. We can address them together.” To that end, along with local politicians, he has been engaging with right-leaning groups like student fraternities, which have frequently been linked to antisemitic crimes. Schramm said he hopes such forces won’t succeed in upcoming state elections in Thuringia in 2024.

As a man born in eastern Germany, who came of age in the GDR and Eastern Bloc countries like Poland, Schramm is not planning on going anywhere. For now. Emphasizing that antisemitism isn’t solely an East German problem or a German one, but a worldwide responsibility, Schramm remains optimistic. “But even in my family, there are different opinions about this. My wife says that if the AfD wins, she doesn’t know what to do. It’s hard to assess.”

Reminded of the Jews who returned after pogroms in the past, as well as community leader, Max Cars, as he reconvened the Erfurt community in 1946, Schramm said, “Jews know how to remain, to be faithful. I am optimistic that in 30-50 years, we will continue to have a normal Jewish life here in east Germany.” Part of that means, he said, never forgetting what went wrong and trying again, no matter the conditions, to make things right.

Ken Chitwood is a religion scholar and journalist based in Germany.