Reinhard Schramm put it bluntly. “There would be no Jewish community here without the Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union.” Schramm should know. He is president of the association of Jewish communities in the state of Thuringia, in the geographical heart of Germany.

Schramm, 68, sat in the boardroom of the only synagogue in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, where the revisionist theologian Martin Luther was a student in the 16th century and where the sociologist Max Weber was born in 1864.

Cold statistics prove his point. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power, Thuringia was home to 4,500 Jews in 37 communities, while 1,290 Jews lived in Erfurt. By 1939, 232 Jews were left in Erfurt, the remainder having emigrated. Starting in the spring of 1942, the stragglers were deported to concentration camps in Poland and what is now the Czech Republic.

At the end of World War II, when Germany was divided into two ideologically antagonistic states and Thuringia was incorporated into the newly formed socialist German Democratic Republic, a handful of Jews trickled back to Erfurt, whose known Jewish population in 1945 was a mere 15, said Schramm, a retired professor of engineering who was born in the town of Weissenfels.

With the dissolution of East Germany in 1990, only 26 Jews were registered with the Jewish community in Erfurt, a centre of the microelectronics industry. Just when things looked bleakest for Jewish continuity, Jews from the Soviet Union began streaming into reunified Germany. Hundreds landed in Thuringia.

Today, 820 of the 850 known Jews of Thuringia are concentrated in the cities of Erfurt, Jena and Nordhausen. They are mostly from the European parts of the former Soviet Union.

“It’s difficult for some of them in Germany,” explained Schramm in a reference to the Soviet Jews. “The younger ones have learned German and have integrated. Young people have good conditions here. They feel good in Germany. But it’s hard for the older people. They’re like older German Jews who immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s and couldn’t make it.”

Konstantin Pal, Erfurt’s only rabbi, is a Soviet Jew, having emigrated from Moscow to West Berlin in 1989. But as far as he is concerned, the future of the Thuringian Jewish community view is not particularly bright, at least from a demographic point of view.

“We’re getting smaller and older,” said Rabbi Pal, who’s 34 and engaged to be married. “More than half of our members are over the age of 60 to 65.”

Since 2010, he added, there have been 20 funerals, two conversions to Judaism, no weddings and one bat mitzvah.

Next year, two boys will have their bar mitzvahs.

“In another generation, I don’t expect more than 200 Jews to be living in Thuringia,” said Rabbi Pal, who studied at the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam and completed his rabbinical studies at the Hebrew Union College, the Pardes Institute and the Steinsaltz Institute in Israel. “The future is not very positive. It sounds bad, but that’s the reality.”

Due to the higher unemployment rate in this region of Germany, he noted, university graduates tend to leave for destinations such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich, where job prospects are better.

“This is a problem for all Jewish communities in eastern Germany,” said Rabbi Pal, who conducts services in the New Synagogue, which opened in 1952 on the site of the synagogue destroyed during Kristallnacht and was the only shul ever built in East Germany. “We try to persuade them to stay, but we can only hope they stay. We can’t honestly tell them we’ll find them jobs with high incomes.”

Rabbi Pal himself may leave one day, having considered continuing his career in South America or Australia. “But at the moment, I don’t want to move,” he said.

Like so many Jews in this corner of Germany, Rabbi Pal is of mixed race descent. His Jewish mother felt the pangs of Soviet antisemitism when she was denied the opportunity to study medicine at the University of Moscow due to its Jewish quota. His father, a carpenter, is a Russian Orthodox Christian. He was raised in a secular milieu when, as he put it, matzah and bread could both be found on the kitchen table.

As far as he knows, he is Erfurt’s first full-time rabbi since the late 1930s. “I’ve never really thought what it’s like to be the first rabbi here in 75 years. I don’t think about this. It’s tough to live in a Jewish community without a proper infrastructure, like you have in Canada and the United States.”

Citing logistical and spiritual difficulties he has encountered in Erfurt since his arrival three years ago, Rabbi Pal said, “If I want to buy matzah, I have to order it from Berlin. Our members came here without any Jewish education to speak of, especially those who emigrated after the end of communism in the Soviet Union. So it’s hard to be a Jew, and a rabbi, in Erfurt.”

Unlike Rabbi Pal, Schramm, who is culturally German to his fingertips, has no intention of leaving Germany. But like the rabbi, he comes from a Jewish-Christian background.

During the Third Reich period, his father, a teacher, lost his position because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife, throwing him into joblessness until he became a street cleaner. “My family wanted to remain in Germany, hoping it would be better in the future,” he said.

In February of 1945, Schramm and his mother were about to be arrested and deported when they were saved by one of his father’s friends, a communist. Nonetheless, six members of his family, including his grandmother and uncle, were murdered during the Holocaust.

After the death of his father in 1948, Schramm’s mother, a communist, briefly toyed with the notion of making aliyah, but dropped the idea when the Arab-Israeli war broke out.

Schramm, who was also a member of the Communist party, was not brought up Jewish in officially atheistic East Germany, an ally of the Soviet Union, an ideological foe of Israel and a supporter of the Arab cause. “My mother said, ‘After the Holocaust, I don’t think there’s a Jewish god.’” But in 1987, she began attending services at the New Synagogue, and Schramm joined her.

Schramm and his Polish Catholic wife have three children, and although they are not halachically Jewish, he said, “They respect Judaism and are familiar with Jewish history.”