Word: holocaustal
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...Empire. Yet cruel as generations of persecutions were, all stopped short of the Nazi attempt at genocide. There were 8.3 million Jews in Eastern and Central Europe before the rise of Hitler. Some 450,000 fled the Nazis before World War II. More than 5 million died in the Holocaust. After the war a few hundred thousand of the survivors left immediately for Israel, Western Europe or the U.S.; an additional 265,000 managed to emigrate from the Soviet Union between the mid-'60s and the early '80s; and still more headed West when communism collapsed...
Even a biblical prophet could not have foreseen the cataclysms the 20th century would visit on the Chosen People. The Jews of Europe would come close to extinction in the Nazi Holocaust. Many of the traumatized survivors would be repressed and secularized by more than four decades of communism. The fathers would be forced to turn away from their faith, and their children would grow up in ignorance...
Even more remarkable is Poland's renewed interest in Judaism, despite the fact that very few Jews still live there. Only 300,000 Polish Jews out of a prewar population of 3.5 million survived the Holocaust, and nearly all of those emigrated in the 1960s under pressure from the communist government. Barely 5,000 remain. Yet kosher food, Yiddish theater and Jewish-history studies are becoming more popular...
...Germany, the very heart of the Holocaust, so-called philo-Semitism is widespread. Berlin ranks just after New York City and Los Angeles as a center for klezmer music, the clarinet-based tunes traditionally played at Jewish weddings and gatherings. The Institute for Judaism, part of the Free University of Berlin, has 122 students, none of them Jews, enrolled in its classes on religion, history and Israeli politics. Some young Germans with no Jewish background are even choosing to convert...
...remain. ``If all of us fled Germany,'' says Shlomit Tulgan, a student in Berlin, ``then Hitler would have achieved his desire of making Germany free of Jews. We can't let that happen.'' Serge Klarsfeld, the French Nazi hunter, believes the Jews belong in Eastern Europe despite the Holocaust. ``To live in Cracow, in Prague or in Budapest is not to live with assassins. It is to live with the memory of Jewish life that once flourished there...