Other Religious Communities : Germany
Other Religious Communities : Germany
Other religious communities include in particular the free churches. Two of the largest Protestant free churches, the Methodists and the Protestant Community, joined together in 1968 to form the Protestant Methodist Church. There are also the Baptists. The Orthodox churches in Germany have a membership of well over one million. The Old Cath olic Church came into being in 1870 as a breakaway from the Roman Catholic Church after the First Vatican Council. The Mennonite congregations, the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Salvation Army are known for their social work.
In 1933 about 530,000 Jews lived in the German Reich. After the National Socialist genocide, only a few thousand people of Jewish origin remained in Germany. Today the Jewish communities now have about 61,000 members. Many of them have come here in the past few years from the countries of the former Soviet Union. The largest Jewish community is in Berlin (more than 10,000 members), followed by Frankfurt am Main (6,000) and Munich (just under 6,000). Since the unification of Germany, Jewish communities with rich traditions in eastern Germany, such as those in Dresden and Leipzig, have once again been able to develop an active community life. The national organization of the Jewish communities is the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In 1979/80 the College for Jewish Studies was founded in Heidelberg. Through research and scholarship, this institution serves to cultivate and develop the Jewish humanities and related disciplines. Heidelberg is also the seat of the Central Archive for Research on the History of the Jews in Germany. This archive, which was established in 1987 under the patronage of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, particularly focuses on research pertaining to the postwar period.
The presence of many foreign workers and their families has greatly increased the importance of religious communities which previously were hardly represented in Germany. This is the case with the Orthodox churches and especially Islam. Today more than 1.7 million Muslims, most of them Turks, live in the Federal Republic of Germany.