German-Jewish Relations Center Inaugurated in Berlin

With prayers in Hebrew and the affixing of a glass mezuza to the door frame, the American Jewish Committee on Monday inaugurated a center here--sponsored by Lawrence and Lee Ramer of Los Angeles--dedicated to improving relations between Germans and American Jews.

The Lawrence and Lee Ramer Center for German-Jewish Relations is the American Jewish Committee’s first permanent facility in Europe. Its small offices were so packed Monday with photographers and public figures, all eager to witness Germany’s latest step toward normalcy half a century after World War II, that even Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris was crowded out into the vestibule.

“We are seeking to participate, no longer from a distance, in the dynamic development of Jewish life and German-Jewish relations in a democratic Germany,” Harris said later in a speech. He said that Germany--the country whose government once tried to exterminate Jews--now has the world’s fastest-growing Jewish community outside Israel.

The growth results mainly from Jewish immigration. In 1990, with the Soviet Union collapsing, Soviet Jews frightened of a possible rise in anti-Semitism in the East began boarding trains for the West--and the first stop on their route was Berlin.

Because of Germany’s history and its sense of obligation, Bonn decided to let all the newcomers stay, and in the years since, they have reshaped the face and character of the Jewish community in this country. In the last eight years, Harris said, the Jewish population of Germany has more than doubled, to 100,000.

“There is a chance that this Jewish life can once again become an integral part of German culture and society,” said German President Roman Herzog in a speech Monday. “It would have been audacious just a few years ago to even hope that would happen.”

But the increased presence of Jews in Germany has also coincided with a rise in anti-Semitic activities, particularly in the former East Germany. A number of Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated since German unification, their tombstones toppled and spray-painted with swastikas. The small eastern town of Gollwitz made headlines last fall by refusing to let a group of about 60 former Soviet Jews come and live in an empty local mansion.

The past year has also seen a troubling number of incidents in which German soldiers have been caught rallying around Nazi symbols.

Against this backdrop, the American Jewish Committee hopes that the Ramer center will improve understanding between Jews and non-Jews, both in Germany and in the former Communist countries farther east.

The committee has been operating exchange programs between American Jews and German non-Jews since the early 1980s; the Ramer center will continue and expand that work from Berlin.

The center also plans to lobby the German government on issues of importance to American Jews, such as Germany’s relations with Iran. It will be home to a research library, sponsored by Dottie Bennett of Falls Church, Va., who used money she recently received in compensation for expropriation of her family’s property by the Nazis.

The new office, within walking distance of where the German chancellery will stand once the government moves here from Bonn--and just one block from the bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide at the end of World War II--is one of the first rental properties to be occupied on Berlin’s historic Potsdamer Platz.

Potsdamer Platz was once Berlin’s most bustling intersection, but it was reduced to rubble during World War II, then turned into a weed-choked no man’s land when the Berlin Wall was built. Since the end of the Cold War, developers have been turning Potsdamer Platz back into normal urban space, and the land is said to be Europe’s biggest construction site.

“We’ll have wonderful access here,” said Lawrence Ramer, president of the Los Angeles investment firm of Ramer Equities and associate chairman of the American Jewish Committee board of trustees. Ramer is also chairman of the California School of the Arts and is president and chairman of the Center Theater Group.

“When you have incidents happening like you have now in the German military, we’ll be right on the spot,” he said. “We won’t have to send delegations from New York.”

“It’s a long way from home, but it’s very important to us to be here,” added his wife, Lee, vice president of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission.