Historically, the expression “The Russians are coming!” has rarely been followed by “thank God.” But that’s how Hermann Simon feels.
Simon is a 12th-generation Berlin resident and director of the city’s Stiftung Neue Synagogue Berlin — Centrum Judaicum, a research and archival center originally established by the East German government in 1988.
When the Berlin Wall toppled one year later, Simon and his wife, Deborah, were two of about 200 members of East Berlin’s Jewish community. On the other side of the wall, about 3,000 Jews lived in West Berlin. Today, Berlin’s Jewish community numbers around 12,000 — and not because of a frantic baby boom.
“There is no future without Russian immigration,” said Simon, who spent the first two weeks of the month in the Bay Area, at the behest of the German Consulate, where he spoke at Santa Rosa’s Congregation Shomrei Torah, San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El, Stanford University and elsewhere.
Simon, 58, is a bespectacled man with a soft German accent. When asked how he could be recognized in a crowd, he replied, “Well, I’m bald!”
Jews in San Francisco and elsewhere have given up asking what used to be the big question: “How can you live as a Jew in Germany?” He replies with a Gertrude Stein-like “How can I live there? I live there.”
He added that there are 100,000 German Jews now, and that Jewish leaders have real hope for continuity.
“There is a Jewish future in Germany. And nobody expected it. I myself never expected it, nor did the founders of the Jewish community after World War II,” he said in an interview in San Francisco.
“They all tried to survive and do something, but I think none really had a hope for a Jewish future, my parents included.”
Simon estimates that 80 percent of the members of Germany’s organized Jewish community are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
The influx of Russian-speakers is a double-edged sword While it presented a vast new body of Jews eager to join the community and overtly practice their religion after lifetimes of repression, many have no idea what it means to practice Judaism.
“Most are educated, but they are not so knowledgeable in Jewish things. So we have to educate them,” Simon said.
“They want to be Jewish, and they want to be integrated not only in the Jewish community but in German society overall. And [getting involved in the Jewish community] is one way to integrate them into the country.”
Simon takes a particular interest in the Russian speakers’ children and grandchildren. He believes the majority of Jewish day school students in his hometown are now first-generation Germans, which he thinks bodes well for the future.
When he’s optimistic about the future, Simon has to pinch himself every once in a while. It was only 20 years ago that he and his wife were members of a sparse and dying East German Jewish community with few of the freedoms they now take for granted. Prior to working full-time with the Jewish community, Simon worked in universities and museums as an expert on ancient Persian coins, and he was once invited to Great Britain for an international numismatics conference.
It was a rare chance to leave East Germany, but Simon doesn’t remember the trip fondly. The postmark was worthless in Britain and he had to borrow 10 pounds and illegally change a fistful of ostmarks on the black market. He spent the entire trip hungry and nearly penniless.
And now? “I have a credit card,” he says with a laugh.
Perhaps the surest sign that life has improved is that Simon no longer thinks about it so much.
“Sometimes when I’m going on public transportation on the underground or other vehicles, I suddenly realize, ‘Oh! I’m in West Berlin!’
“That still happens,” he said.