Jewish Immigrants Attracted to Leipzig

Statues adorn Jewish fur trading houses along Nikolai Strasse.

Jews are returning to Germany. In the years immediately after World War II it would have been hard to imagine that tens of thousands of Jews would voluntarily move to Germany. But over the past decade, since the end of the Cold War, more than 80,000 Jews, mostly from the former Soviet Union, have poured into the country. They can qualify for financial assistance and special quota status from the federal government, which also provides apartments rent-free to Jewish immigrants.

One of the German communities that in eastern Germany that has warmly received these immigrants is the City of Leipzig. The city’s Jewish community has grown to more than 300.

Jewish history in the Leipzig area can be traced back to the tenth century. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish furriers with connections to a supply chain of pelts from Russia established Leipzig’s famous fur trade center. The decorative facades of the historic trading houses for the fur traders and processors can be seen today along The Bruehl and Nikolai Strasse not far from the Main Train Station.

A quiet stroll around central Leipzig will also reveal memorials, several of which are in the vicinity of Waldstrasse, once a Jewish neighborhood.

Another memorial on Gottschedstrasse, boldly bearing a Magen David and the command, in German, Gedenkt (Remember) — with inscriptions in German and Hebrew deploring the terror committed by the "fascist hordes" — commemorates Leipzig's Great Synagogue.

A plaque on the Central Library for the Blind notes that this structure on Gustav-Adolfstrasse was once the Ephraim Carlebach School, which served as a deportation point. Not far from the Central Railway Station is the Brodyer Synagogue, the only Leipzig synagogue to survive the Holocaust.—