ABSTRACT
Germany has become the third largest Jewish community in Western Europe through the settlement of Eastern European displaced persons who remained after the war, Israelis who followed them in the 1950s and subsequently, and Jews from the former Soviet Union who have arrived more. Without serious linkages, most of the Jewish communities of Europe, possibly excepting France and Britain, are small and weak, without the demographic or economic wherewithal to provide for their needs as Jewish communities, jeopardizing Jewish continuity and even Jewish survival. The Jewish world needs a strong European Jewry that is backed by its millions to at least the same degree that American and Israeli Jewries are. With the establishment of Israel at the very beginning of the postmodern epoch and the mobilization of North American Jewry in its support, a worldwide arena of substance was initiated for the first time since the collapse of the Muslim empire in the eleventh century.
