July 14 issue — When Shlomo Afanasev and his parents set out to make a new life for themselves late last year, they had choices. The country where they lived—Uzbekistan—was an economic basket case, and its 2,000-year-old Jewish community had all but disappeared.
IT WAS TIME TO GO to a place where they’d be welcomed as Jews, and where they’d have opportunities. They considered going to Israel. But like thousands of other Jews from the former Soviet Union, they decided instead to settle in Germany. “The political and economic situation in Israel is terrible,” says Afanasev, speaking over a kosher lunch in a Berlin yeshiva. “Here life is so much better.”
Jewish immigration and an increasingly vibrant cultural life have even fueled talk of a German-Jewish renaissance. “We never thought it could happen,” says Michael May, executive director of Berlin’s Jewish Community organization. “Jewish life is thriving here again 60 years after the Holocaust.” In perhaps the most delicate of ironies, Germany last year passed Israel as the leading destination for Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union: 19,262 admissions, compared with 18,878 for Israel.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/935247.aspEdit: sorry; had two windows open and mixed them up.