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So Chaim is on his deathbed in East Berlin. He calls his rabbi over and says, "Before I die, I want to renounce my Judaism and become a member of the Communist Party."

The rabbi says, "Chaim, why on earth would you do that? You've made it through your whole life as an ethical Jew; why would you want to throw that away now? Why on your deathbed become a Communist instead?"

Chaim responds, "Rabbi, better one of them should die than one of us."

This Monday, Nov. 9, will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the most famous symbol of communism. The murderous ideology of Soviet communism was closely related to the German Nazism it replaced after World War II, but unfortunately came out of the 20th century without the same level of shame and discredit. Paul Hollander, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a former resident of communist Hungary, offered one explanation.

"The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures," Hollander wrote in the Washington Post. "The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques."

In brief, communism and Nazism shared the same vision and endeavored toward some of the same ends, but communist means were simply less horrifying -- or less known.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is therefore an event to celebrate. And, according to the Central Council of Jews in Germany, German reunification marked the beginning of Jewish return to the country that attempted to annihilate the Jewish people. Today, the German Jewish population is 120,000, a fourfold increase since the fall of the wall.

Two rabbinical academies have been established. As a result, the number of ordained rabbis in Germany has tripled since 1989.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany also notes that 1989 brought immigration in large numbers from the former Soviet Union to Germany. The German Jews who stayed in Germany felt vindicated by this new wave of immigration, which turned a Jewish community left for dead into a resurgent -- and defiant -- marker of Jewish continuity.

"Thus, the immigration stamped the final seal of legitimacy on Jewish life in Germany," the report notes. "In the past years, the international Jewish community's criticism of the Jewish immigration to Germany -- or, as some would put it, 'to Germany of all things' -- has gradually died down."

The defeat of communism also cannot be discussed without mentioning two heroes of the episode: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev, writes Joshua Muravchik in the summer 2009 edition of World Affairs, made his share of mistakes, but is "arguably the greatest figure" of the 20th century.

Muravchik explains: "The most famous names of the century were mass murderers. Of those who are remembered for the good they did, who was irreplaceable? The Axis would have been defeated without Roosevelt and even without Churchill, although Britain might have fallen first. India would have gained independence without Gandhi. Segregation would have been ended in America without Martin Luther King Jr. But would the Soviet empire have dissolved, the Cold War ended, and Communism been repealed -- all these blessings achieved peacefully -- without Gorbachev?"

Reagan's role in guiding the United States to victory in the Cold War is punctuated by perhaps his most famous foreign policy moment as president, which took place at the Berlin Wall's Brandenburg Gate: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

The fall of the Berlin Wall was good for the West and good for the Jews. But it also served as an exclamation point on the indictment of the psychological neurosis communism had become.

"The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience," Hollander eloquently concludes. "But communism's collapse also suggests that under certain conditions people can tell the difference between right and wrong. The embrace and rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deluded and destructive idealism to the realization that human nature precludes utopian social arrangements and that the careful balancing of ends and means is the essential precondition of creating and preserving a decent society."

Nov. 9 is a day worthy of a smile and a sigh, a reminder of the better angels of our nature, and that we are always stronger -- and need only the will to summon that strength -- than the evil among us.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.