Weizman comments spur Jews to defend homeland

WHEN Israel's President Ezer Weizman visited Berlin last weekend, he whipped up a storm of controversy by expressing bewilderment that any Jew could bear to live in Germany.

"I don't understand how 40,000 Jews live in Germany when the place for the Jews is Israel," he said.

Addressing the Bundestag in Bonn last Tuesday, he thanked Germany for its support of the Middle East peace process but said he could never forgive the crimes of the Holocaust.

"It is not easy for me to be in this country, to hear the memories and the voices that scream to me from the earth," he added.

Mr Weizman received a standing ovation in the Bundestag but many German Jews thought that his remarks were insensitive and lacked understanding of the present reality of Jewish life in Germany. Before Hitler came to power in 1933 there were more than half a million Jews in Germany. By 1945, there were fewer than 20,000.

Today's figure is probably twice as high as the 40,000 mentioned by Mr Weizman and the German Jewish community is now the fastest growing in the world.

The Green MEP, Mr Daniel Cohn Bendit, a French Jew who came to Germany after he was expelled from his own country in 1968, wrote in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit last week that Mr Weizman's remarks made him feel hurt and angry.

"If Jews cannot find a home in Germany after Auschwitz, the same applies to homosexuals and gypsies or the disabled, in fact, how can any Germans born after 1945 live in Germany with this history?" he wrote.

Mr John Bendit argues that the memory of Auschwitz has taught today's Germans to respect democracy and to distrust nationalism all the more.

And he suggests that other Europeans, notably in France and in Austria, have made less strenuous efforts to confront their legacy of barbarism from the second World War.

Mr Hermann Simon, director of Berlin's Jewish Study Centre, goes a step further by claiming that Jews have a historical obligation to remain in the land that spawned Nazism.

"I think it is very important that Jews should be able to live in Germany, so that the Final Solution does not finally succeed.

I can, I want to and I will live here. Hitler must not be allowed to win," he said.

The leaders of Germany's Jewish community have been more cautious in their reaction to Mr Weizman's statement, saying privately that he is an old man who is unable to understand that times have changed for Jews in Germany.

They point out that thousands of Russian Jews have chosen to live in Germany rather than in Israel in recent years and that, although links between Israel and the Jewish diaspora must remain strong, no single country will ever be the ideal place for everyone.

But for Mr Tsafrir Cohen (29), an Israeli who has lived in Berlin for 10 years, Mr Weizman's failure to understand why Jews live in Germany reflects nothing more than the President's own Zionist philosophy.

. The arrest of a Lebanese refugee, identified only as Mr Safwan F (21), who has denied accusations he started a lethal fire in a foreigners' hostel in Lubeck sharpened a debate in Germany yesterday on whether neo Nazism was back on the march.

Many Germans, who swiftly assumed that neo Nazis were to blame for the blaze that killed 10 people, were perplexed by the arrest and further puzzled by the suspect's subsequent insistence that he was innocent.