CHEMNITZ, Germany The soprano voice of a 13-year-old boy singing in Hebrew rang through the Jewish center here, signaling the revival of a community that had once been nearly extinguished.

Alexander Beribes, who is originally from Ukraine, was celebrating his bar mitzvah, the first boy to be so welcomed into Jewish manhood in this city since the Nazis burned the synagogue to the ground on Nov. 9, 1938, and dragged the rabbi off into the Night of the Broken Glass.

"There is Jewish life in this city again," said Siegmund Rotstein, head of the Jewish community in Chemnitz and one of about 80 congregants, nearly all of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

As Rotstein watched, the young man"s voice carried him back to the gutted synagogue and his own aborted bar mitzvah, which was to have been held there on Nov. 30, 1938.

In 1990, the official Jewish community in Chemnitz, a small, industrial city in eastern Germany known as Karl Marx City under Communist rule, consisted of 12 aging members. "I was 55 and I was the youngster," said Renate Aris. Eleven years later, it has 390-more Jews than in all of East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and a new synagogue under construction. Men chatter in Russian in the halls of the community house and the smell of challah bread wafts from the kitchen where two Ukrainian women are baking for a street festival.

With Germany opening a landmark Jewish museum in Berlin on Sunday commemorating 2,000 years of Jewish life here and recording its destruction between 1933 and 1945 the land that spawned the Nazis finds itself with the fastest-growing Jewish population in percentage terms in the world.

A wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union has at least tripled the number of Jews in Germany in 10 years. In 1990, there were 29,000 Jews in West Germany and 370 in East Germany compared with 500,000 in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. Today, the Central Council of Jews in reunified Germany has 90,000 members another 60,000 former Soviet Jews and their non-Jewish family members who came with them are not registered with the council. Synagogues are being built across the country, including three in the former East German cities of Chemnitz, Dresden and Leipzig.

"Demographically, there wasn"t much of a future, especially for small communities," said Michael Brenner, professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich. "Immigration has changed that dramatically."

The invitation to Soviet Jews began as an act of redemption by East Germany"s first democratically elected government after the fall of the Wall in 1989 it was incorporated into the reunification agreement between the divided Germanys. Each year since 1991, at least 5,000 Jews and accompanying family members from the former Soviet Union have received visas. German officials predict the wave will not break for another five to 10 years.

With immigration to the United States now difficult and some Jewish families reluctant to emigrate to Israel because of the violence there, Germany has become a magnet as much for economic reasons as religious ones.

"I did it for my sons," said Yakov Maekov, 65, a former professor of education in the Russian city of Orel who arrived here in 1996. "Both my sons work here one is a doctor in Leipzig and the other is a manager at a company in Stuttgart." Maekov said he feels free to live as a Jew here, reviving a religious identity that he had suppressed in Russia for fear of discrimination.

Despite a rise in xenophobic crime in Germany since 1991, the immigrants dismiss concerns about German anti-Semitism as their presence becomes more visible. "I can wear this proudly," said Abram Frandlih, 64, a tailor who moved to Chemnitz from the former Soviet republic of Moldova in 1997. He was pointing to his yarmulke. "In Moldova it would have been impossible."

"We don"t like anti-Semitic actions, but the situation is not too tragic compared to what many of us had to deal with in the past," said Boris Feldman, who immigrated from Latvia in 1991 and who now publishes a chain of Russian-language newspapers in Germany. "We have experience, believe me, and it"s not a big issue here."

But immigration has not come without tension. The immigrants, often Jews only by virtue of a stamp in their Soviet identification papers, mostly arrive with little knowledge of Judaism and no ability to speak German, swamping small congregations and forcing established communities to act as social welfare agencies. Older immigrants, many of them highly educated but unemployable here, must live on handouts.

And, in some cases, the immigrants are greeted with the startling truth that whatever they may have thought and been persecuted for in the past they are not considered Jewish.