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We believe we are good and true Germans, Germans who received
their cultural training in German schools, heard the word of God in
German from the Jewish mouth of the rabbis, and hear it still and are
not ashamed to announce that Germany is our fatherland and German
is our mother tongue. I and people like me are staying in Germany
because we do not want to leave, because no lunatic fool, no tempter
should or could rob us of our German homeland, our Germany....
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Although this may be dismissed by some as a form of Yekke pathology, it
was certainly true that among surviving German Jews there was the sense
that they had to refute Hitler, to refute the very idea of creating a Germany
that was
"judenrein."
But they also largely felt that German Jews, not the culturally less–
advanced Ostjuden, should be the ones to reestablish Jewish life in the
communi ties across Germany. The fact that in certain areas of Germany,
Bavaria in particular, East European Jews made up as much as ninety per–
cent of the Jewish population did not help the effort to return community
leadership to German Jews. In Munich, the Jewish community went so far
as to deny "non-German citizens" (i.e., Ostjuden) the right to vote in the
conm1Unity elections of 1946. Discrimination against the East European
Jews by German Jews, which persisted at least until the late 1950s,
stemmed mainly from their differences of religious practice, but also came
from older prejudices against the Yiddish language and the fear of being
associated with such visibly "Jewish Jews."
By the time that the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central
Council of the Jews in Germany) was founded in Frankfurt inJuly 1950, and
more than one hundred Jewish communities had emerged from the ruins of
post-Shoah Germany, most communities were dominated by East
EuropeanJewish tradition and ritual. Even if the heads of the communities
were German Jews, as was the case in Munich and Nuremberg, the ortho–
dox practices of Eastern Jewry prevailed. As a means of consolidating the
objectives of the different regional and state Jewish associations in Germany,
and thereby overcoming the tensions between the German-Jewish and DP
communities, the Zentralrat was to serve as an umbrella organization for all
Jewish communities in Germany. It was a break from prewar Germany,
where no such centralization existed, but a necessary one. "With the estab–
lishment of the council," asserts Brenner, "the Jews remaining in Germany
sent an unequivocal signal: against all internal and external opposition, they
were laying the cornerstone for a long-lasting infrastructure in Germany."
Jews in Germany were no longer sitting on those proverbial "packed
bags," waiting for exit visas and the ticket to emigration. They had, in
