In the last few years, Jews in eastern Europe have decreased in population because of emigration; the Jewish populations in some Western countries have also decreased because of intermarriage. Germany's Jewish population, on the other hand, is slowly increasing, mostly through immigration. It's estimated that between 40,000 and 80,000 Jews now live in Germany, a figure that's nowhere near the prewar high of 500,000 but that still represents significant growth. The most prominent of the new arrivals are from the former Soviet Union. Some 70% of Jews in such cities as Bremen and Hamburg are native Russian speakers.

Berlin's Jewish community is the largest. Its 10,000 to 20,000 members are well served by several kosher restaurants, a Jewish high school, the new Mendelssohn Center at nearby Potsdam University, and both a weekly and a monthly paper. Other important Jewish communities are located in Frankfurt (7,000), Munich (3,000), Dɒsseldorf (2,000), Stuttgart (1,600), Cologne (1,500), and Hamburg (1,500). Another 75 smaller communities are scattered throughout the country.

While anti-Semitism has not disappeared completely, in general, postwar Germany has worked hard to confront its past -- far more so than Austria, for example. Some 30 museums today deal with Jewish issues, and former concentration camp sites display their grisly reminders to visitors. German high schools include Holocaust studies in their curriculum. In politics, there are about 80 extreme-right groups, 20 or so classified as neo-Nazi, with maybe 65,000 members, a small minority in a country of more than 80 million people.

Berlin has the country's highest concentration of places of interest to Jewish visitors. The Jɒdischer Friedhof at Weisensee, a suburb of Berlin, was Europe's largest Jewish cemetery and today contains around 110,000 graves and a memorial to Jews murdered in the Nazi era. A darker sight is the chillingly elegant Wannsee Villa, overlooking the Wannsee (lake), where the "Final Solution" was formally proposed in January 1942. The most hopeful landmark is the newly renovated Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue. Unlike the other five Berlin synagogues, this glorious and immense Moorish-style structure operates only as a memorial and museum. Berlin also has two museums dedicated to the city's Jews and many monuments, such as the Wives of Jewish Husbands Memorial, dedicated to the hundreds of non-Jewish women who demonstrated outside Gestapo headquarters in February 1943 after their husbands had been arrested.