“By the early 1990s. the Jewish communities in Germany numbered no more than 27–28 thousand people. Their demographic structure was such that German Jewry was again threatened with literal extinction. Many small and even medium-sized communities, due to their small population, had to reckon with the threat of imminent self-liquidation. In 1987, Freiburg, for example, opened a magnificent new synagogue, but the dynamics of the community were such that by 2006 it could no longer accommodate a “minyan”—that is, the minimum ten Jewish men required according to Jewish tradition , for prayer, funerals and other ritual activities. As Klaus Teschemacher, one of the then leaders of the community, joked bitterly, everything was heading towards the fact that the most important Jewish institution in Germany would not be the synagogue, but the cemetery. But in April 1990, the first 70 Soviet Jews who were in Germany, or more precisely in the GDR, with guest, tourist or business visas, “surrendered” to the East Berlin authorities and did not return to their homeland, where at that time anti-Semitism reared its head and the threat of pogroms arose...”