On the 70th anniversary of the liberation
of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Huffington Post UK is running a series of pieces
looking at how we remember the Holocaust: The victims and perpetrators and the
untold stories, on what's likely to be one of the last major commemorations with
living survivors.
Showing off how much cheaper Berlin was than
Tel Aviv earned Naor Narkis this response on Facebook: "See you in the gas
chambers."
He insists he understands this reaction. His
grandfather fled Strasbourg in 1940 as the Nazis advanced into France, and if he
were alive today, Narkis admits he "would not be happy" to hear his grandson
lives in a country that tried to exterminate its entire Jewish population.
But the cosmopolitan 26-year-old's attitudes
are emblematic of the gradual change in the relationship between Jews and
Germany. He is one of thousands of Israelis who have made Berlin home in recent
years. He acknowledges the long shadow the Holocaust casts among his people, but
while older Israelis still boycott German goods, living in the country or
interacting with its culture is not, to him, a problem.
After serving in the military for six years, he
left Israel in 2014 because of the high cost of living, initially moving to
Paris and Strasbourg before heading to Berlin. He says he went to Germany to
learn another language, having already learned Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, English
and French.
While there, he took a photo of his grocery
bill to show that his shopping cost him a third of what it would in Tel Aviv. He
set up a Facebook group called Olim Le Berlin - 'Let's Ascend to Berlin', a
deliberate play on the Israeli notion of Jews who "ascend" by emigrating to
Israel and "descend" by leaving it. At its peak, the group was reportedly
reaching 600,000 people a week.
The storm in Israel was huge. Narkis initially
posted anonymously, wanting people to hear his arguments about how expensive the
Jewish state had become but the press became "really violent" in trying to
unmask him. "I started to imagine maybe the Mossad was after me," he tells The
Huffington Post UK.
"The Israeli press started a race to find out
who was behind it. They said I would be sad when I come back to Israel, it will
be humiliating for me to be back."
He says he was "terrified" when some of the
criticism came from Holocaust survivors and understood their point - but said
they had to appreciate where he was coming from.
He says: "They have to understand one thing:
our government should understand people in Israel can't afford themselves a life
in Israel."
"If they're criticising me for telling people
to move to Berlin, maybe they should criticise the government for creating a
country where only rich people can live."
Narkis was dubbed "pudding man" because of the
desserts included on the receipt he used as a picture. Even a government
minister was moved to comment: "I pity the Israelis who no longer remember the
Holocaust and abandoned Israel for a pudding."
Naor Narkis: 'The younger you are, the
better your opinion towards Germany and Germans is'
If this level of anger does not surprise you,
this might: Jewish life is thriving in Germany and the population has
skyrocketed in the last 25 years.
When Germany was reunited in 1990, there were
28,000 Jews in the country. Since then, the number has more trebled to 107,000,
largely due to an influx from eastern Europe, after Germany passed the "Quota
Law". Enforced until 2004, this gave those from the former Soviet Union who
could prove they were Jewish, or had a Jewish parent, the right to settle.
Germany now has now the third largest Jewish population in western Europe after
Britain and France.
With violence against Jews worldwide dominating
headlines, the Israeli government has dialled up the rhetoric about the
importance of Israel as the Jewish homeland. In Paris, the Israeli PM Benjamin
Netanyahu told French Jews "Israel is your home" after terror attacks saw four
Jews die after being taken hostage in a kosher supermarket.
But the appeal of Israel does not appear to
have resonated with German Jews. According to Israeli government statistics, 100
emigrated there from Germany in 2012 and 79 in 2013. By comparison, 1,603 and
2,903 people arrived from France in the same years.
Last week, the president of the Central Council
For Jews In Germany Josef Schuster said: "The Jewish community in Germany is
certainly unsettled by recent events. But I'm confident that we are not packing
our bags, not even mentally."
Josef Schuster said Jews in Germany
'are not packing our bags' to emigrate to Israel
Narkis acknowledges his Facebook page broke the
taboo of encouraging Jews to emigrate from Israel and "the second taboo" of
encouraging them to go to Germany. But they are not his taboos. He grew up
without antipathy towards Germans.
His first introduction to them was at school,
when he spent a month there as part of a exchange with his hometown's German
twin city. "This is where I saw, Germans and Israelis have a lot in common," he
says, adding that both countries, in different ways, are strongly influenced by
the Holocaust. State history syllabuses in Germany place strong emphasis on the
teaching of its tragic history.
Narkis adds: "There are mostly older people in
Israel that criticise Germany, don't buy German products. I think that, the
younger you are, the better your opinion towards Germany and Germans
is.
"Every city (in Israel) here has a twin city in
Germany. I think there's a lot of interest between the countries. Most young
people are favourable of Germany. They are considered to be a very important
ally of ours, while other European countries are less favourable towards
Israel."
He lived in Berlin for around six months, and
lived the pretty typical life of a young expat in a world city. He taught
languages and pursued his interest in designing mobile phone apps on the side.
"My experience of Berlin - it's one of the cities with one of the greatest
experiences you can get...It's really cool," he says.
He says he encountered no anti-Semitism in his
time there and made "tonnes" of friends. Did he seek out Berlin's Jewish
community? "Not at all, actually," he says. "It's an international place...with
people from everywhere."
When asked whether Germany or France was more
tolerant of Jews, he speaks only from his own experiences in each country,
judging them on what he knows. He says recent events have shown it's "more
dangerous" for Jews in France. "Germany's history, they have more tolerance
towards minorities in general, specifically towards Jews, but French
people...they are not too enthusiastic about any one religion."
"Minorities are assimilating better in Germany
because they accept them. While in France, they stay minorities, they force
people to try to be unique because they don't want to accept uniqueness... They
try to force everyone to be the same."
A photo uploaded to the Olim Le Berlin
Facebook page
"Pudding Man" triggered a series of headlines
in the Western press about Israelis moving to Berlin late last year, most of
which portrayed it as something very new. But Israeli historian and essayist
Fania Oz-Salzberger says the trend began in the late 1990s and estimates up to
20,000 Israelis live in the German capital.
"Few of them came for cheap beer and cheap
housing alone; many were attracted to Berlin's aura of freedom, individuality,
sexuality and state-of-the-art creativity, topped indeed by the beer and the
housing," she
wrote last year as an updated 2014
edition of her book 'Israelis In Berlin' was released.
"No other European city...can offer the same
setting of an affordable, hyperactive world-city where Jews are uniquely
welcome. Make no mistake: for many Israelis, Berlin is still the ultimate icon
of evil. But for many others, it is the friendliest of cities, offering the best
kind of globalisation."
She tells HuffPost UK: "Times have
changed...Berlin has become a global icon of openness and pluralism and its
rejection of its Nazi past is deep and honest, thereby making Israelis feel far
more at home in it than they did even two decades ago."
But she adds the Israelis there have not
"forgotten" the history of the Holocaust. "They are very conscious, and rather
knowledgable...In Israel, they can still meet holocaust survivors in person,
but, because many victims were younger than the perpetrators, the oldest person
you meet on the bus is in Berlin no longer a suspect ex-Nazi."
As well as being young, Israelis in Berlin are
"mostly secular" and tend to "keep their distance" from the city's established
community, she says, which reflects Narkis' experience.
But it is not just secular Jews, who feel
comfortable living in the country.
When Orthodox Rabbi Mendel Gurewitz was growing
up in France, his grandparents' view on Germany was uncompromising. “My
grandparents boycotted German products, anything made in Germany," he says. "My
grandmother lived on the outskirts of Paris and if she had to take a bus and it
was a Mercedes, she waited for the next one.”
Eight months after he got married, Rabbi
Gurewitz moved to Offenbach, near Frankfurt, to do what he calls "outreach" work
for the growing, now 1,000-strong, Jewish community there for one year. His
uncle suggested he would be a good fit, partly because of his knowledge of
Yiddish and Russian.
Sixteen years later, he's still there and his
eight children are all attending mainstream German schools. He says the country
"completely" defied his expectations.
“We grew up with the idea that Germans were
bad. I understand my grandparents. I understand them… [They thought Germans]
won’t be nice to us when we move there. I saw it was completely different,"
Gurewitz, 40, tells HuffPost UK.
"It was very hard [at first], whenever I walked
outside in the street, I looked at people and wondered ‘what were they doing in
the Second World War?'... I thought I was going to walk in the streets, they’re
going to curse at me. But it was completely not what I was thinking."
“I feel safer than in other European countries.
People are very tolerant here and very nice.”
He speaks to me while supervising someone who
is making kosher sushi. Three years ago, he approached a major supermarket in
Frankfurt to ask why they served no kosher products. They replied they would, if
he helped ensure the proper standards were met.
“That’s something very interesting... No one
expects to find any Kosher products in a non-Jewish supermarket.”
'We Love Our Jewish Fellow Citizens'
and 'Never Again' - signs held during a rally against anti-Semitism last
September in Berlin
He agrees that the differences to attitudes to
Germany are generational and says he "understands" older Jews' views.
“They were completely persecuted by the
Germans. They grew up with fear. They walked in the street they saw uniforms
they were scared of. I understand them. They would never imagine things could be
different, they could never imagine that a German can be a nice person, they
would never imagine that a German can be a human like they are."
As an orthodox rabbi, Gurewitz is a much more
visible target for anti-Semites. When asked if he has suffered any attacks, he
concedes he has, but trying to choose his words carefully, says the most common
perpetrators are other recent immigrants.
Eighteen months ago, he was attacked by a group
of six boys aged between 11 and 15, who called him "a shitty Jew". The Jerusalem Post
covered the story and reported the attackers were "Mediterranean
looking". Gurewitz says:
"[Anti-Semitism] doesn’t come from the people who are German for more than two
generations, [they] don’t feel that." He says attacks like the one he suffered
can happen "all over Europe".
He describes feeling "really scared" while
visiting his family in France. "You can get slaps on the back, [people saying]
‘get out dirty Jew’," he says. "But here in Germany, it’s not happening... it’s
not like in other countries. Here, people are much more tolerant. There’s a
difference between Germany and other countries in Europe. Why? Because they’re
being taught and getting the standard education in the Holocaust. That’s why
they start to understand, they start to open their eyes."
The rabbi is well travelled - he was born in
New York, grew up in France, got married in Canada and moved back to the US
before moving to Offenbach. But he is fairly sure he has found his home for the
rest of his life.
"I’m here on an outreach mission, I’m assuming I have
to stay here until they don’t need me anymore. I feel if I’m not here, there
will be a void for the next 20 or 30 years. That’s why I’m thinking of
staying.”
Narkis, meanwhile, has returned to Israel,
saying he wants to be with his family and, besides, for all its expensiveness,
Tel Aviv has "the best weather". He imagines he will go abroad again, probably
to learn another language.
What would Narkis say to an Israeli who wants
to move to Germany but fears incurring the same wrath he did? He treats this as
a practical question rather than a moral one, saying he warns people that being
an immigrant anywhere is "not easy" and that, without speaking the language,
they will struggle to get work or, without an EU passport, a visa.
"I always tell people that the taboo is the last thing they
should be afraid," he says. "The things people should be afraid of are not what
our people think."