Menorah in a jewish restaurant in Chemnitz
Jewish and returning to Germany
Presented and Produced by Naomi Scherbel-Ball
Nominated for a Sandford St Martin Award for Broadcast Journalism
To listen to the documentary please click here
Eighty years ago, just days before the outbreak of the Second World War, a young woman, Kaethe Berliner, fled Nazi Germany. She made a new life in Great Britain and like many others was determined to leave the evils of Nazi Germany firmly behind her.
Naomi Scherbel-Ball is the granddaughter of Kaethe Berliner, and after years of deliberation, she has decided to reopen that door to the past. Naomi will be the first in her family to apply to reclaim German nationality and she is being joined by thousands of descendants of German Jewish refugees doing the same.
Despite the revival of both religious and secular German Judaism, the recent success of the far-right has awakened old fears. Has contemporary Germany changed enough for descendants of Jewish refugees to overcome the tragedy of the past?
GERMANY’s REFUGEE TEACHERS
Presented by Naomi Scherbel-Ball
Top 10 listened to World Service Radio Documentaries 2020
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Five years on from the refugee crisis of 2015, Germany is now home to over a million refugees. Naomi Scherbel-Ball explores a classroom experiment with a difference: a scheme to retrain refugee teachers and place them in German schools, to help the country with a shortage of 40,000 teachers.
Naomi visits a school in Mönchengladbach in Western Germany, where Mustafa Hammal teaches English. Mustafa, an English teacher with eight years of experience, fled the civil war in Syria with his family in 2015. Arriving in Germany, he discovered a teacher retraining programme designed to harness the skills that refugee teachers bring with them.
Miriam Vock, an educational psychologist at Potsdam University, transports us back to the summer of 2015. Amidst the chaos of the refugee crisis, she wondered if there might be some teachers among the refugees arriving in Germany. A year later, the first refugee teacher retraining course was launched - an idea that inspired a number of other pilot courses across Germany.
Retraining as a teacher in a system with rigid set qualifications is particularly challenging, however, and graduates are finding it difficult to find work. The success of the far-right Alternative for Germany, now the country’s main opposition party, has raised the stakes for refugees trying to integrate.
As Germany struggles with an ageing population and a severe labour shortage, Naomi asks if refugees can fill the gap.