Bush Salutes Germany in Rose Garden Rites : Reunification: ‘Dreams do come true,’ the President tells celebrators. But in Israel, the reaction is somber.

President Bush staged his own celebration of German unification on Wednesday, congratulating Chancellor Helmut Kohl by telephone and proclaiming “German-American Day” at a Rose Garden ceremony.

“Today, it is the wall that lies in ruins and our eyes open on a new world of hope,” Bush told an audience of German-Americans.

Bush called the remnants of the Berlin Wall “a ragged monument in brick and barbed wire” that serves as “proof that no wall can ever crush a nation’s soul.”

“Dreams sometimes do come true. Germany is united. Germany is free,” Bush said.

From elsewhere around the world congratulations were showered on Germany for its rebirth as a united country after 45 years of division.

But many references to the previous experience with Germany as the dominant power in Europe showed that the past is still not quite forgotten.

Israel, gripped by memories of the Nazi Holocaust, greeted German unification somberly, with one newspaper calling it an insult.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said he was disappointed that the unity agreement made no mention of wartime Germany’s slaughter of 6 million Jews.

The prime minister’s adviser, Avi Pazner, said that a message from Kohl, delivered in Jerusalem by the German charge d’affaires, “stressed the united Germany’s historical commitment to the Jewish people and the state of Israel . . . a result of the crimes against the Jewish people by Nazi Germany.”

Pazner said Israel had mixed feelings about reunification. He said Lichter’s meeting with the Polish-born Shamir, whose family was wiped out by the Nazis, took place in a “reflective mood.”

The English-language Jerusalem Post said memories of the wartime genocide against Jews will never fade.

“And to many, the rise of a super-Germany less than 50 years after the Holocaust is not only dangerous but an insult to historic justice,” the conservative daily said.

In Moscow, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev paid tribute to the “peaceful and worthy solution of the ‘German issue.’ ”

He cited “all those in my country and in your country who, overcoming sorrows, remembering losses and honoring the dead, did not yield to prejudice and fears.”

In Brussels, NATO held a special meeting Wednesday to mark German reunification, a time of “undiminished rejoicing,” and thanked the Soviets for agreeing to united Germany’s membership in the alliance.

“Today we put nearly half a century of confrontation and frustration behind us,” NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner told the 16 Atlantic Alliance ambassadors.

President Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, the first country invaded by the Nazis, wrote in a letter to German President Richard von Weizsaecker: “In this historic moment for the German nation, I am convinced that united Germany will not disappoint the trust of the world, and especially of its neighbors.”

Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel called unification “the final end to the war. . . . The unnatural division of Germany becomes a matter of the past, as does the division of our continent.”

“The desperation and scars cannot be erased from our minds, but it is necessary and possible to overcome them,” Havel added in a statement issued in Prague.

While most commentaries looked back to the Nazi past, in Hungary the former Communist daily Nepszabadsag saw a wider significance in the death of the German Democratic Republic, the former East Germany.

“The GDR was the socialist state par excellence, the country on whose existence the viability of the socialist system hinged,” it said. “So the disappearance of the GDR also means a symbolic goodby to the phenomenon of European communism.”