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KEN CHITWOOD

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“The person who knows only one religion, knows none”
— Max Müller

Photo: Ken Chitwood.

Afghan Christian Arrested in Berlin Amidst Church Asylum Furor

August 4, 2025

Along the quiet, tree-lined streets and avenues of Berlin’s middle-class Steglitz district, police in plain clothes were staking out a church on Monday.

Their target: an Afghan man living in the basement of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church. 

The man didn’t know it, though, and “dared to go a few steps outside of the church on the sidewalk,” pastor Gottfried Martens told CT. The man was immediately arrested.

According to Martens, the man is a Christian convert who will face “immediate danger to life and limb” if he is deported back to Afghanistan. 

The congregation, which is part of the Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche (Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church), a small denomination connected to Missouri Synod Lutherans in the United States, has welcomed hundreds of Farsi- and Dari-speaking refugees since 2011. According to Martens, many of them have become Christians, and the church is “committed to protecting converted Christians from deportation to their deaths.”

In recent days, that has become a contentious position in Germany.

Learn more
In Church Ministry, Missiology, Religion, Religion and Culture, Religion News Tags Gottfried Martens, Refugees, Church asylum, Kirchenasyl, Berlin, Germany, Religion in Germany, SELK, SELK Berlin, Afghan Christians, Church refugees, Christianity Today, Christianity in Europe
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The memorial where the synagogue once stood in Eisenach, Germany.

Contradictory Conditions: Jewish Life in East Germany, Past and Present

December 12, 2023

It’s a decidedly blustery day on Karl Marx Street in Eisenach, in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Gold and rust-tinted leaves scatter the ground of a small park marking the site of the town’s former synagogue—burned down by a Nazi mob on Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogroms on November 9, 1938.

Tucked away in a quiet corner not far from Eisenach’s theater, the memorial is one of 32 sites across Thuringia—spots where synagogues were desecrated or destroyed that night in 1938. Of the many previously active synagogues, only a few remain today. Only one has been rebuilt for weekly services. The others are marked by memorial stones and stairways leading to nowhere—including empty lots or garden plots, apartment buildings, and even a grocery store. Where the small town of Vacha’s synagogue once stood, there is now a hobby shop.

These places dot the east German landscape, from Potsdam to Zwickau, Dresden to Magdeburg. Along with other memorials like Stolpersteine—stones with brass plates bearing the names of Holocaust (Shoah) victims, laid in the pavement in front of their former homes and businesses—they stand as stark reminders of the absent presence of the region’s once thriving Jewish population. They are places where the palpable influence of eastern Germany’s Jews remains potent, even where they are no longer present.

They also signal the Jewish community’s present absence. Since the Shoah, under sometimes radically conflicting conditions, a range of diverse Jews have returned, resettled, and restored a sense of Jewish life across the former East German Republic (GDR). But the community is less-than-half what it was in pre-war Germany.

In places like Berlin, Leipzig, and Erfurt, Jews’ stories over the last century speak to lives lived between far-right politics and those of the far-left, communism and capitalism, growth and decline, remembrance culture (Erinnerungskultur) and an ominously encroaching antisemitism. Looking at East Germany–past and present–through Jewish eyes reveals today’s controversies are nothing new.

The challenges Jews in Germany faced following the Holocaust, including perils to their very existence, have shaped Jewish lives in the east for decades. The story of how under such conditions they still preserved their heritage is decades long. Now, facing declining demographics, a resurgent antisemitism, and fearing a far-right political turn, eastern Germany’s Jewish communities are once again under threat. And, once more, they are not only preserving their heritage, but claiming their place in German society.

Read the full story at The Revealer
In Religion, Religion and Culture, Religious Literacy, Religious Studies Tags Jewish life in Germany, Jewish life, Jewish diaspora, Judaism, European Judaism, DDR, GDR, East Germany, Religion in Germany, Judaism in German, Another Country: Jewish in the GDR
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