The Tenth Man

For the Jewish community in the historic German city of Worms, a commonplace ceremony this Sabbath takes on special significance. A 13-year-old boy, Ilan Walzer, will be ushered into manhood at his bar mitzvah, and though the rite elsewhere is primarily an occasion for rejoicing by family and friends, to Worms it means that the city will now have ten adult Jewish males, the number set by Talmudic law as the minimum for a Jewish congregation. The Jews of Worms already had a synagogue; last month Vice Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and other West German dignitaries attended the dedication of a new $125,000 structure, which replaced a medieval synagogue gutted by the Nazis in 1938. But the city's Jewish community, once 1,200 strong, is so small that until this week it could not even provide the essential "tenth man."

Hitler's Monument. Today Worms and all of Germany (West and East) are as Hitler intended, largely judenfrei--free of Jews. Before the advent of the Third Reich, Jews numbered 760,000 in a nation of 66 million; German life and art were immeasurably enriched by the work of such Jews as Physicist Albert Einstein and Composer Kurt Weill. Thousands fled the Nazis; thousands more died in the concentration camps. There are now no more than 30,000 Jews--including some 5,000 who escaped from Eastern Europe--among West Germany's 55 million people, and only 1,900 among East Germany's 17 million.

In most of the 73 German cities and towns where Jews live, worship rooms in community centers take the place of synagogues. There are only a dozen rabbis in the country, and no theological seminary to provide new ones.

A characteristically wry Jewish joke is that the Germans have reached the point of forgiving the Jews for what the Germans did to them. Despite occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism--three weeks ago rowdies toppled most of the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery at Barsinghausen --Germany's Christians have made many amends. The West German government has paid out $3.4 billion in postwar reparations to the worldwide Jewish community (with $2 billion more still to come), and it has cracked down hard on swastika painters. Thirty-one German societies promote Christian-Jewish friendship.

"We Can Never Be Friends." Dachau and Buchenwald loom large in Jewish memories: one householder suspected that his surly postman was an unreconstructed Nazi, only to discover that the man was a lifelong socialist who had spent years interned in a concentration camp. Most of the German-born Jews who fled abroad have refused to return home, and the few who have come back are cautious still. "We work together with the Germans," says the production manager of a clothing firm in West Berlin, "but we can never be friends. They either feel guilty about what they did to us, or they are sorry to see any of us still here."

To post-Hitler German youth, Jews are almost as exotic as Javanese. Karl Marx,* editor of the Jewish weekly Allgemeine Wochenzeitung (circ. 48,000), reports that students swarm to him on his lecture tours, tell him in awe: "You are the first Jewish person we have ever met." In sharing the Germany of this new generation, some of Germany's Jews regard themselves as a reminder to Christians of the sins of the past, and as a continuing litmus paper for testing the country's democratic intentions. "There has not yet been any test of Germany's democracy," says Heinz Galinski, 49, the leader of West Berlin's Jewish community. "Such a test comes only during difficult times. But we have hope in the generation now coming into its own."

*No kin.

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