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Comments (0)More than 70 years after its synagogue was destroyed by Nazi rioters, the German town of Herford dedicated a new Jewish house of worship.
In a ceremony Sunday, local and national Jewish leaders and clergy joined to unveil the new structure, which will serve the 106-member community—90 percent are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Four rabbis carried a Torah scroll into the sanctuary as Cantor Jacow Zelewitsch chanted “Ma Tovu” and Rabbi Shimon Grossberg of Osnabruck lit the eternal light. The community does not yet have its own rabbi.
Among the guests were Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany; Jurgen Rüttgers, minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia; Rabbi Julian Chaim Soussan of Düsseldorf; Harry Roth, president of the Jewish community; and Rainer Heller, mayor of Detmold.
The new synagogue cost about $2.7 million, a third of which was borne by the German government. Another $137,000 is needed, community member Ruben Heinemann, head of the building fund, told JTA.
Heinemann, 47, said his late father and uncles had spoken often of the old synagogue of Herford, which was burned down in 1938, where they had their bar mitzvahs.
For decades after World War II, the tiny community used an old Jewish school building and the former rabbi’s residence as a synagogue.
“But it only had 28 seats, which became too small,” Heinemann said, adding that he expects the larger synagogue to draw more members to the community from the region.
Ten new synagogues have been built in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in the past 15 years.
The Jewish population in Germany has quadrupled since 1990 with the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
An estimated 200,000 Jews live in Germany today, but only about half are affiliated with Jewish communities. There are 82 active Jewish communities in the country.
Israeli Defense Company Awarded Australian Contract
An Israeli defense company won a $300 million contract to develop a cutting-edge command and communications system for the Australian Defense Force.
The Haifa-based Elbit Systems, one of the world’s largest defense electronics manufacturers, won the international tender, Australian Defense Personnel Minister Greg Combet said Tuesday.
“The introduction of this new capability will increase the ADF’s battle space awareness, automate combat messaging and assist in the successful conduct of operations,” Combet said in a statement. “Importantly, this capability will significantly reduce the possible risk of casualties resulting from friendly fire.”
The technology will help the army towards having a fully networked brigade by 2012, he added.
Elbit CEO Joseph Ackerman said the project would take three years to complete and would spur additional contracts from other foreign armies.
“We are in talks with a lot of different countries,” Ackerman told the Jerusalem Post. “All militaries are interested in such command-and-control capabilities.”
Is Austrian Presidential Challenger a Nazi Sympathizer?
Austrian politics is roiling over the question of whether the lone challenger to Austria’s president in the upcoming election is a Nazi sympathizer.
Barbara Rosenkranz, 51, was nominated last week as a presidential candidate from Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) to oppose President Heinz Fischer of the Social Democratic Party in his re-election bid on April 25.
Earlier this week, Rosenkranz announced that contrary to rumors, she never has questioned Austria’s law banning Nazi organizations and ideology, and Holocaust denial. Rather, she said, she condemns Nazi crimes.
But according to the daily Tages-Anzeiger, only a week earlier Rosenkranz called for the law to be repealed.
Asked if she believed that the Nazis killed victims in gas chambers, she did not answer.
Critics called her about-face this week—in which she signed a statement against Nazism and had it notarized while TV cameras rolled—a political ploy.
“These kinds of statements are usually not even worth the paper they are written on,” Stephen Kramer, secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the Austrian daily Standard.
Kramer said he suspected Rosenkranz sought to follow in the footsteps of the late far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider as a uniter of right-wing populists across Europe.