Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Berlin Court Orders City To Issue Funds to Berlin’s Jewish Communal Umbrella

A court in Berlin ruled today that the city must pay the city’s state-funded Jewish community, its annual subsidy, according to wire reports.

The court described its decision as an “expedited procedure,” pending resolution of a dispute between the city and the community because the community has been in serious financial straits for months. The city’s annual subsidy to the community, which has 10,000 members, is more than $7.3 million.

Berlin?s Neue Synagoge Image by Wikicommons

”Today’s interim decision was designed to sustain the community until the court’s final verdict,” the court stated in its ruling.

The city stopped paying the Jewish Community last month, citing the organization’s failure to respond to a request for information on the number of people employed by the community and their salaries. Community chairman Giddeon Joffe initially refused to give the city the information but said he would do so by the end of June.

Joffe refused today to be interviewed by the Forward.

As a consequence of the lost funding in the second quarter of 2013 the community was forced to borrow money.

Joffe told the Forward in May that he had obtained a loan to cover salaries, using Jewish community property as collateral. Joffe refused to divulge the amount that was borrowed or the location of the property.

On May 23 a two-thirds majority of the community’s representative assembly authorized Joffe to take out the loan during a stormy meeting in which supporters and critics of Joffe shouted blunt obscenities at each other. Police were called in after a physical brawl erupted that led to the filing of six criminal complaints.

Joffe’s opponents are conducting a campaign for new elections to unseat him.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.