Home of the Holocaust becomes a haven for young Israeli migrants
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Foreign Correspondent By Eric Campbell
Updated Thu at 5:06pm
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But many Jewish expats we met say they felt more comfortable in the former Nazi capital than in the Jewish homeland. It wasn't just the cost of living that drove Shirah Roth to leave.
She says she was sick of the never-ending conflict with Palestinians.
"This conflict will end badly for everyone. No one will be happy. Maybe this is a dead end. I don't know. That's hard to say," she says
- "Because I do love Israel. I miss it very much and I'm heartbroken by it. I'm disappointed by it. I feel that it's kind of slowly pushed me out." -
Such sentiments may be one of the reasons there's surprisingly little contact between young Israeli expats and Berlin's small German Jewish community.
We filmed a gathering marking the Holocaust. None of the secular, hipster Israelis attended.
Community president Gideon Joffe made a speech condemning Israel's critics, saying "For years, Israel has been criticised and discriminated against in the UN — more than any other country in the world."
Ofer Waldman, in contrast, runs the German chapter of New Israel Fund, a human rights group that criticises Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
"We believe in the deep connection between Germany and Israel," he says, "and we believe that from here we can maybe encourage the Israeli civil society, or Israelis to support civil society in order to bring Israel back on the right track that it used to be on."
Rather than hanging out with Berlin Jews, some young Israeli expats gravitate to Arabs, finding they have more in common with fellow Middle Easterners.
"You know, the thing in Israel, you cannot go to visit the neighbours," says Ohad Leev Roage, a rock musician who moonlights as a waiter at one of Berlin's hippest restaurants, owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian.
"Here I can meet people from Syria, from Lebanon, from Jordan, and I can be friends with them and I can see their own perspective about how they grew up and what their culture is like and it's really mind-opening. I haven't really had any bad experiences."
Some Jews have had very bad experiences. Berliners were shocked in April when a young Israeli wearing a kippah was attacked by a Syrian-Palestinian refugee.
Rising anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe has also made its way into Berlin.
On our first day of filming we came across an openly Neo-Nazi Polish-German spouting abuse at Jews, Roma and gays.
It's more to worry about for the young expats' parents in Israel … and rich material for Ori Halevy's jet-black humour.
- "I moved to Berlin recently," he explains to his audiences each night, "which shows you how f***ed-up things are in Israel if I'm moving to Berlin, thinking, 'whoo, this'll be safer now'." -
But beneath the irony, there's a genuine pride in making a new life in a city that once filled Jews with fear.
For Shirah Roth, whose grandmother fled Berlin for her life, it's the best revenge a Jew can have.
"I'm not going to let the Nazis ruin me and tell me where I'm going to go and not go."
Migrants from Syria and Iraq take selfies with German Chancellor Angela Merkel outside a refugee camp near the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees after their registration at Berlin's Spandau district, Germany, September 10, 2015. (photo credit: REUTERS)
BERLIN - A growing number of migrants are finding jobs in Germany, according to data released on Tuesday that will give heart to supporters of Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to let in hundreds of thousands of war refugees since 2015.
Figures last week also showed that German companies have managed to attract more apprentices to on-the-job training schemes due to a surge in applications from asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Syria.
The figures will feed into a running debate in Germany on the impact of Merkel's decision in 2015 to open German borders to more than a million migrants, many of them refugees from war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
Critics including the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have said the new arrivals will be a burden on Germany's welfare system and economy.
But the head of Germany's Labour Office, Detlef Scheele, told dpa news agency there was no reason to be overly pessimistic about the country's ability to cope with the record number of arrivals.
"This is all going pretty well," he said, adding that the numbers were slightly better than expected. "These are good numbers, also taking into account that the people came here for humanitarian reasons and not for finding a job," Scheele added.
The number of employed migrants from the eight countries with the biggest numbers of asylum seekers surged by more than 100,000 to 306,574 in May compared with the same month in the previous year, data from the Labour Office showed.
SKILLED LABOUR SHORTAGE
Among those, roughly three out of four had a labor contract in which the company and the employee were paying full contributions to social insurance schemes, the data showed.
There were roughly 500,000 people from the eight main asylum seeker countries who were registered as looking for work in July, the data showed. This includes people who are currently completing an integration and language course.
Among those, nearly 197,000 people were registered as unemployed which is roughly in line with the level seen a year earlier, the data showed.
Shortages of skilled labor and a lack of young people willing to commit to on-the-job training for up to 3-1/2 years have become big concerns for managers in Europe's largest economy.
Vacancies for training positions have reached their highest level in more than 20 years with more than a third of companies unable to fill all of their training spots.
The number of new arrivals in Germany has fallen sharply this year, partly due to stricter border controls across Europe as well as tighter asylum rules in Germany and other countries.
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