There are only about 33,000 Jews Jiving in all of West Germany and West Berlin and a large proportion of them are elderly. But the problem of intermarriage has become a major concern of the Jewish community, according to the Juedischer Presidents, a publication of the Central Council of Jews in West Germany.
The issue has been discussed by the Council and at a recent seminar for youths in Stuttgart which drew about 120 participants. According to official statistics, two-thirds of the Jews in Germany who married last year were wed to a non-Jewish spouse.
Most of the participants at the seminar said they were married to a non-Jew, previously married to a non-Jew or intended to take a non-Jewish spouse. For them the outstanding problem was how to make conversion to Judaism easier.
Rabbi Nathan Peter Livens, who addressed the seminar, pointed out that there were guiding principles for accepting or rejecting conversion. He said that whatever the situation, the task is not likely to become easier. The participants agreed that the problem is all the more difficult because of the small number of Jews living in Germany and age structure of the community.
Most of Germany’s Jews live in large cities, mainly West Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne.
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