German President Joachim Gauck Gauck said he had never imagined as a young man that Jews would want to live in Germany again after the Holocaust.
Gauck spoke at a conference hosted by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the country’s main umbrella organization.
He reiterated his support for Israel and his commitment to Jewish life in Germany.
Some 105,000 people are official members of Jewish communities throughout the country but the total Jewish population in Germany amounts to 200,000.
In his speech, Gauck , who grew up in former East Germany, also defended his decision to sign the Prague Declaration in 2008, which called the Nazi and Communist regimes twin disasters of the 20th century.
“We should avoid competition between victims,” Gauck said, noting that as a German he felt a special responsibility to warn against genocides.
Last week, at the opening of Europe’s first university-level school of Jewish theology at the University of Potsdam, just outside Berlin, Gauck said : ‘’Jewish theology taking a prominent place at a European university creates a milestone in the history of science, but also in the history of German and European Judaism".
“In Germany, of all places, where the Jewish intelligentsia – which had such a large and irreplaceable share in the intellectual prestige of German academia – was expelled and murdered, out of all places in Germany, Jewish theology is finally given its proper role,’’ the German president added.