Jewish Ossis

In 1953, approximately 500 Jews fled the GDR. 70 years later, this story is virtually forgotten. Was there a Jewish experience of the GDR – and is there, accordingly, something like a Jewish memory of it? When examining the lives of Jewish re-migrants and their descendants in the GDR, we encounter the positions of those GDR citizens who had a special influence on the arts and culture in the GDR – and yet, at the same time they remained outsiders.

But the story of Jewish re-migrants is only the first chapter in the history of Jews in the GDR. The second generation often went a completely different way. Some of them left the GDR in the mid-1970s, while others stayed and – unlike their parents – revisited the question of Jewish identity in the 1980s.

And then, from a Jewish perspective, the period of German unification is made up of multiple and ambivalent turning points. On the one hand, the process of accession of the GDR to the Federal Republic was accompanied by an eruption of right-wing extremist and antisemitic violence. On the other, it was followed by the immigration of almost 200,000 Jews from the countries of the former Soviet Union. This immigration revitalized – and permanently changed – the Jewish community in Germany which at the end oft he 1980s had shrunk to a few tens of thousands, Ultimately, the question remains: Is there such a thing as a “Jewish Ossi“?

Jewish Ossis is a festival series organized by the Institut für Neue Soziale Plastik. The first two editions took place in 2023 and 2024 at Hans Otto Theater (Potsdam).