Waterbury, CT - Jewish Community Helps Develop Learning Center In Berlin

Waterbury's Yeshiva Gedolah is sending students to Berlin -- the one-time capital of Hitler's Nazi regime -- to help develop a central place of Jewish learning in central Europe.

Ten students visited Berlin to serve as role models for Orthodox Jews living at the fledgling Beis Midrasch d'Berlin yeshiva, the first Jewish synagogue built in Germany in decades. The yeshiva largely educates Jews from former Soviet bloc countries.

Waterbury's Yeshiva Gedolah is the only organization in the country that sends young men to the Berlin yeshiva.

Germany is now a growing Jewish population in Europe. As recently as 1990, there were only 33,000 Jews in Germany. Today there are 200,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Israel, whose parents fled to what was then Palestine before the war, who have settled in established Jewish communities around the country.
Beis Midrasch, opened in 1999, serves 35 students, most from former communist countries, by providing an intense program so those with little to no background in Jewish studies can achieve a high level of Jewish literacy within two years.