OVERVIEW: Assimilation

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  Today, repeated racist violence intimidation and discrimination continue to drive Jews out of the former Soviet bloc and into the arms of Germany, which despite its own historic antipathy towards immigration, has become the single biggest receiving nation for all people seeking sanctuary in Europe. And there is every reason to expect the Exodus to Berlin will continue.

  Eleven days after that mass demonstration in Germany's capital, the Associated Press reported from Moscow on the latest episode of anti-Semitism which continues to push Jews into the stream of immigrants. The former vice governor of a province whose new governor has been criticized for making disparaging remarks about Jews said that he was beaten up in a government building by assailants shouting anti-Semitic slurs.

  ``To say they were beating me is an understatement — they were killing me,'' Sergei Maksachev said on Russian television channels from a hospital bed in Kursk, 300 miles southwest of Moscow.

  Exodus to Berlin is not only a powerful story of hope and struggle for people fleeing persecution today, it is also a tale of transformation of the soul of a city whose very name is synonymous with mass murder and guilt, but is now being born again in the light of public and private compassion. Just as Berlin has re-emerged as the capital of reunited Germany, the city--in the hands of a new generation of Germans schooled about the horror perpetrated by their ancestors--is also rising to this great humanitarian challenge. But not all Germans are joining in the noble enterprise.

  In the first week of October 2000, two Jewish temples were attacked by Arab and suspected neo-Nazi assailants, whose violence shattered synagogue windows and the newly arriving Jews' sense of security. In partial response to the two very recent attacks on synagogues in Berlin, several prominent figures, including Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, attended worship service at the temples. But, in January, another synagogue was desecreated.

  During the Holocaust, police in Berlin rounded up Jews for deportation to the death camps. Today, Germany's police protect and defend Jews and hunt down those who would harm them. Germany's Interior Minister, Otto Schily, says that neo-Nazi activity in Germany is on the rise with more hate crimes including murder, beatings, vandalism and the displaying of banned Nazi symbols. That's up from about 10 thousand incidents for all of 1999 versus the same number for just the first nine months of 2000. These acts were carried out against a wide range of those perceived as foreigners in general and not only Jews. Still, Jews in Germany get the message that they have real enemies in their place of sanctuary despite strong support from the Government.

  "It is especially discouraging for me that there has been such a rise in the number of politically motivated crimes," Interior Minister Schily said at a meeting with other top police officials. "But I am certain German society will not accept racism and violence directed at minority groups."

  Exodus to Berlin—researched, reported, produced, directed and photographed by two award winning American broadcasters and authors--is an uncompromising investigative documentary examination of the people involved in Berlin's new role as provider of sanctuary to the Jewish people. This film deals directly with issues of culture, faith, and politics.

  Before the Nazis came to power, one-third of all Germany's Jews—160 thousand of almost a half million nationwide--lived and flourished in Berlin, and played a powerful role in making this city the center of art, commerce and education, during the period of intellectual enlightenment that came before the great darkness of Hitler's National Socialism descended on Europe and engulfed its Jews. By the time the Allies crushed the last remnants of the armed forces of the Third Reich and rumbled into Berlin, the only Jews left in the shattered city were surfacing from places where courageous German Christians had hidden them at great risk to themselves.

  Today, as the anti-Semitism unleashed by the fall of Soviet communism intensifies and sometimes terrorizes the Jews of the former Soviet bloc, Germany--especially Berlin--has thrown open its arms and said, "Come! Here you will be safe and have a new life!"

  That new life is vigorously underway: Old synagogues are being resurrected and the new immigrants--many of whom had little or no knowledge of Judaism--are learning. Jewish rites of passage including weddings, baby namings, bar and bat mitzvahs abound and are testaments to the rapidly rising Jewish population--hundreds of new arrivals every week. Many of them speak no German, no English, no Yiddish and no Hebrew--the common languages of Berlin's older resident Jews. The newcomers require a wide range of help as they struggle to adapt, but there is no question that Jewish life in Berlin is sprouting anew with the vigor of spring flowers poking through the cold, hard ground of the winter of 2000-2001.

  Exodus to Berlin recalls the past to provide context but the film's main focus is on the children, women and men of this new exodus and the determined people of Third Millennium Berlin who are working hard to make the name of Germany's capital synonymous with compassion and rebirth for the cousins of those who were slaughtered under orders that came from this very same city.