The German government and the country's fast-growing Jewish community opened a new chapter in their relationship Monday, marking the annual day of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust with an accord that gives Germany's main Jewish organization the same legal status as the country's main churches.
The signing of the agreement by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Paul Spiegel, the head of the Central Council of Jews, came on the 58th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
"No one, but no one, would have believed in 1945 that there could ever be Jewish life in Germany again," Spiegel said at the signing ceremony at the Berlin chancellery. "Today, we are even tempted to speak of a coming renaissance of Jewry in Germany. No one could have imagined that a few years ago."
Germany's once-strong Jewish community of 500,000 was decimated in the Holocaust, in which 6 million European Jews were murdered. From some 15,000 Jews living in Germany after World War II, the community grew to 30,000 a decade ago, but has since burgeoned to 100,000 with Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
The accord recognizes the importance of Jewish life in Germany and triples the council's annual government funding to $3.2 million, reflecting the surge in size of the Jewish community.
It establishes the first legal partnership between the Jewish community and the government since World War II, in the spirit of similar agreements with the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches under which the state finances the costs of some institutions, such as schools.
"Remembering the Holocaust is thus bound up with a declaration in favor of a good and secure future for Jews in Germany," Schroeder said.
The additional resources will help the community, among other things, train more rabbis and introduce Jewish rites to immigrants who grew up under communism without a religious education.
The government is supporting the Central Council's efforts to integrate those newcomers into German society, also with the aim of combating anti-Semitism and far-right violence that Jewish leaders fear is on the rise.
"Germany is without doubt a stable democracy," Spiegel said. "But this society unfortunately doesn't understand that ... for the sake of its own dignity, it cannot allow this kind of inhumanity to grow in its midst."
More than a million people, 90 percent of them Jewish, perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. It was liberated by advancing Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945, a date marked in Germany with a day of national remembrance since 1996.
At the former Buchenwald camp near the eastern city of Weimar, Hungarian author Imre Kertesz read Monday from his novel "Fateless." The book is a tale of surviving Nazi internment as a young Jew that mirrored his experience in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and that was rewarded last year with the Nobel Prize for literature.
At the site of the former Auschwitz camp, near the southern Polish city of Oswiecim, some 200 survivors, war veterans and Polish officials laid flowers at a monument in the Birkenau part of the complex.