For the first time in history, the 14th European Maccabi Games, Europe’s biggest Jewish sports event, will start next week in Berlin the place whereJewish athletes were excluded from the Olympic Games in 1936 by the Nazi regime.

The games will take place in the same stadium built on Hitler's orders for the 1936 Olympic games. Thousands of Jewish athletes will gather in the German capital from July 27 to August 5.

“More than 2,000 Jewish sportswomen and sportsmen from more than 36 countries will compete against each other in 19 disciplines in Berlin’s Olympic Park,” reads the games’ website.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere declared: “This is the stadium where the Olympic games were exploited by Hitler. To hold on that spot a Jewish sporting event like the Maccabi Games, that is an important and nice message.”

The decision to host the Jewish Games in Berlin, although difficult, is a “signal of reconciliation” 70 years after the end of WWII, according to Alon Meyer, President of Maccabi Germany.

“There were a lot of people who said that they would never in their lives step again on German soil and we have to respect that,” he explained.

‘’However, we are a new generation and the question of guilt is long resolved,” he added.

‘’Thousands will send a message for tolerance and openness and against anti-Semitism and racism,”he stressed.

For Meyer, the games are finally returning to the place where it all began. “The first Maccabiah games, in Europe and in Israel, were organized from Berlin. Even when the Maccabi headquarters moved to London, its president was still German,” he says. The Jewish sports clubs in Germany were reopened in 1965, and four years later Germany participated again at the Maccabiah in Israel. But hosting the games sooner was out of the question for the local Jewish community.

The torch will be carried into the Berlin stadium by motorcycle riders, making their way from Israel through Europe, just like the bikers who spread the news of the first Maccabiah in Israel (then Palestine) in 1932.

Security will be tight for the games. Meyer said he had answered numerous queries about safety, especially from parents of the approximately 600 youth athletes who will be participating.

According to i24news, the Shin Bet security service provided advice. In total, almost 800,000 euros were spent on private security - on top of the hundreds of policemen assigned by the city of Berlin - out of a budget of about 5.5 million euros.

The 13th European Maccabi Games were held in 2011 in Vienna and it was the largest gathering of Jews in the Austrian capital since the Holocaust.