(RNS) Can you answer these questions? Unfortunately, no prizes are given for correct responses.

1. Which city, called “Faust’s Metropolis,” was famous for its superb literature, dramas, music, films, art, science and medicine in the early years of the 20th century before it became the capital of a radically evil regime?

2. Which city during the 1930s was home to the well-known religious leaders Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer?

3. Which city, just three years after nearly being destroyed by Allied forces, was rescued from a Soviet blockade by those same air forces in an airlift that lasted 11 months?

4. Which city had its infamous wall of separation come tumbling down about 20 years ago? (Hint: it wasn’t Jericho.)

5. Which city is witnessing the rebirth of a vibrant Jewish community 65 years after history’s worst anti-Semite committed suicide in the same city?

The answer to all of the above, of course, is Berlin, the capital of Germany.

Eugene DuBow, the American Jewish Committee’s senior advisor for German programs, has called the rebirth of German Jewry “a miracle,” just two generations after the end of Nazism and Adolf Hitler’s suicide. By DuBow’s estimates, the German Jewish community may soon become the largest in Central and Western Europe. The Jewish renaissance, he says, “is good for Germany and wonderful for Jews.”

Needless to say, it’s not something many people would have expected.

One aspect of the “miracle” is the growing number of young Orthodox Jews in the former Nazi capital. Every Friday evening at the onset of the Jewish Sabbath, men and women in their 20s and 30s — many of them from the former Soviet Union — walk past Berlin’s glittering shops and cafes on their way to religious services at the Rykesstrasse synagogue.

The spiritual leader of the burgeoning Orthodox community is 39-year-old (and Baltimore native) Rabbi Joshua Spinner, supported by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. Lauder’s mother, the late Estee Lauder, headed the cosmetic company that bears her name.

Biblical and Talmudic study centers abound in Berlin, along with a Jewish kindergarten and a rabbinical academy. Spinner is especially pleased about the increasing number of weddings among his youthful congregation.

Progressive Judaism, too, is growing in Berlin. A few years ago, Rabbi Walter Jacob of Pittsburgh, who fled Nazi Germany with his family as a youngster in the 1930s, established a seminary in Berlin that recently ordained its first graduates to serve German-speaking congregations in Europe. Jacob is a third-generation rabbi, and the new Berlin seminary is his tribute to the Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust.

Rabbis Spinner and Jacob are following the example of the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah who, about 50 years after the Babylonian destruction of Judaism’s first Temple in 586 B.C., led exiled Jews back to Jerusalem where they reconstructed a viable Jewish community.

While reverently remembering the past, today’s German Jews confidently look ahead. It is often difficult for people living outside Germany to understand this sense of optimism after the horrific events of the Holocaust. What Jew, after all, would want to live in the blood-soaked land of Hitler, Goring, Himmler, Goebbels, and Eichmann? The answer, it seems, is about 20,000 in Berlin, and nearly 250,000 in all of Germany.

That ambivalence is almost as old as Judaism itself. It was first described in the book of Ezra when the older generation remembered the bitter past before the Temple was destroyed, while the young expressed joy about the future.

“The old men who had seen the Temple standing wept with a loud voice, but many others shouted aloud for joy so that the people could not distinguish between the shouts of joy (about the future) and the noise of weeping (about the past),” the Bible tells us.

There’s one more thing worth remembering. German-born Rabbi Emil Fackenheim taught that rebuilding Jewish communities — especially in Germany — after the Holocaust was a tangible way of denying Hitler a posthumous victory.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)