Founded last year, the program sends pairs of Jewish volunteers to speak to non-Jewish groups—school classes, soccer teams, interns at the foreign ministry.
The goal is to help fill what many Jews here see as a gap in Germany’s remembrance: While German schools teach extensively about the Holocaust, Jews today say they are still not fully accepted into German society. Many say this kind of remembrance, very much focused on the past, does little to address their current concerns.
“Germans are very willing to put this very heavy weight on their shoulders, like, ‘We have this dark stain in our history,’” said Ms. Kisilis, 27 years old. “But everything about Jews is centered on that, instead of addressing problems for Jews today.”
The Jewish population here remains so small—at around 120,000 people, it is roughly a quarter of what it was before World War II and less than 0.2% of the overall population—that many Germans have never met a Jewish person, or don’t know that they have.
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