Echoes of Solomon: Jewish Berlin
Berlin is experiencing something of a Jewish renaissance. And as for those Jews taken from us by a monstrous history, their presence lingers. Just search and tune in.
I happened by a ceremony the other day in central Berlin. VIP’s were entering the Finance Ministry to mark an event called “Survivors: 75 Faces of Life after the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem’s chairman Dani Dayan was to speak. My request for entry as a journalist was politely declined. Invitation only. But I was invited to return in a few days when the exhibit would be open to the public. Fair enough. The acknowledged irony is that it was held in what had been Hermann Goering’s aviation ministry.
Over the course of several days, I’ve explored Jewish Berlin in the context of museums, former Jewish institutions, a cemetery and even a restaurant. Most writers, when focusing on Jewish life in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, dwell on Jews’ absence in the wake of the Holocaust. I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I have visited erstwhile Jewish quarters in European cities, from Vienna to Seville, though the communities have long been gone, their presence continues to be felt in the form of architecture, names, historical markers, in literature, family lore and, yes, the metaphysical.
The Jüdisches Museum Berlin is Europe’s largest such museum and one of Germany’s most visited. It focuses on “Jewish Life in Germany: Past and Present.” While the section on the Nazi period and the Holocaust is its largest, the museum highlights Jewish life — religion, family, work, achievement, community strength and endurance. It recurrently reminds us that the Jewish people are a vibrant and thriving community, our neighbors, co-workers, friends and celebrities. There is a wall of video screens profiling individuals, from the very young to the elderly, telling us about their lives. I especially enjoyed a stairwell with the etched likenesses and profiles of prominent Jews throughout history. I reflexively laughed as my eyes first fell on the Marx Brothers. But then, there’s Franz Kafka, on whose weird stories I cut my teeth with German; Felix Mendelsohn — we all know his “Wedding March” and “Hark the Herald, Angels Sing”; Heinrich Heine — whose exile and banning of his works over his political beliefs we Americans today would be wise to heed; Jewish-German patriots such as Walther Rathenau, Weimar foreign minister assassinated weeks after he signed the diktat that was the Versailles Treaty; there’s a display case of World War I military medals won by Jewish soldiers who served beyond the call of duty. And also on the staircase wall is, of course, Jesus.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, around 160,000 Jews were living in Berlin. Some 90,000 managed to flee Germany, leaving just 70,000 still in the city when war broke out in 1939. The vast majority of these perished in the Holocaust.
As you explore the city, you regularly encounter the past Jewish presence. In my neighborhood is the 12-acre Schönhauser Allee Cemetery, containing 25,000 graves; maxed out, it has been closed to burials since 1945. The cemetery survived the Nazi era and the war largely unscathed. It is sort of a smaller counterpart to Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, the final resting place to some of Berlin’s most prominent citizens:
Gerson Bleichröder, banker to the Prussian court, financial advisor to Bismarck, and the first Prussian Jew raised into nobility; Giacomo Meyerbeer, opera composer who influenced Verdi and Donizetti; Max Liebermann, impressionist painter, President of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. To art lovers, Liebermann’s genius transcends into an enduring presence. His clever play with light and color recalls that of Vermeer. The list of Who Is Who of makers and shakers of Berlin’s and Germany’s past goes on and on, the reputations of many make their mark on us today.
Near the cemetery entrance is a stone memorial on which is etched: “Hier stehst du schweigend, doch wenn du Dich wendest, schweige nicht!” (“You stand here silently, but when you turn to leave, do not remain silent!”)
A former Jewish retirement home abuts the cemetery. No indication of famous people having resided there, just old photos of grandpas and grandmas enjoying their golden years in the library reading or kibitzing over tea in the dining hall. The Nazis sent its last inhabitants to Theresienstadt and subsequent murder in 1943. Ukrainian forced laborers were later housed there. After the war, it housed East Germany’s Volkspolizei. Today it is a condo building.
Further down the street is a former Jewish orphanage, now an apartment block. A memorial plaque states the children were inculcated with “discipline, cleanliness and hard work.” It doesn’t sound like it was a fun place to be. Nonetheless, former orphans kept in touch with the stern yet beloved director, Sigmund Feist, for decades.
These and many other former Jewish institutions, plaques and landmarks in Berlin resonate past lives — still though not muted if you just pay attention. An old Yiddish saying goes: “Geshvign heyst oykh geredt.” “Even silence speaks.”
I firmly believe the dead have much to tell us. See my essay on this: “Dead Men Talking: Confessions of a Graveyard Tourist” in which I wrote, “I draw from these tales of the dead in helping me establish place, persons and history in my writing. We should all pay heed for we all shall follow in their steps.” This applies no matter how we leave this life, whether it is our own forebears passing away peacefully in their homes or a religious community eliminated by evil men. Their lives radiate through time.
The crimes perpetrated by the Nazis are well and fully documented in Berlin at the spare and stark “Memorial to the Murdered Jews” opposite the Brandenburg Gate as well as the “Topography of Terror” Museum, which occupies the grounds of the Third Reich’s equivalent of Washington’s Federal Triangle, and included Hitler’s chancellery and Himmler’s Gestapo headquarters — bombed to rubble during the war. And the stoppelsteine — cobblestones bearing the names of Jewish residents killed by the Nazis — greet train passengers as they exit the Berlin-Grunewald Bahnhof, the main point for deporting Berlin Jews to the East during the Holocaust.
Yet today Jewish life is thriving and growing in Berlin. Some stats:
4 rabbinical seminaries are active in Berlin today.
There are six kosher restaurants and cafés in the city.
13 synagogues are active in Berlin (all protected 24/7 by the police). Only four of these were functioning before the war when there were more than 80.
Around 85 percent of the members of the Jewish community in Berlin are Russian speaking Jews who immigrated after the fall of the Soviet Union.
One occasionally hears Hebrew spoken on the street, aural evidence of the fast-growing Israeli community here. Attracted by free education, employment opportunities, rich culture, relatively lower cost of living, a welcoming population and the general hip vibe of the city, young Israelis have been moving to Berlin in accelerating numbers since the turn of this century — estimates range from 7500 to 30,000 (it is German policy not to count residents by ethnicity or religion). Officials, however, reveal that some 100,000 Israelis hold German passports.
Israeli researcher Yossi Penias reports that “Today, the Israeli community in Berlin is a divergent one. It consists mainly of students, artists, high-tech engineers, real estate agents, relocated employees, Israelis who married German spouses and older people who chose Berlin as their summer getaway.” Another Israeli researcher has found that Israelis in Berlin generally are agnostic, politically liberal and highly educated. Many also leave Israel for Berlin because they are fed up with the politics back home and lack of a serious peace process with Palestinians.
Penias writes that “Israeli immigrants feel safer in Berlin than they do in Israel, the change in personal security following the move to Berlin is positive: 62.2 percent of the Israelis report that their feeling of personal security has improved as a result of the move to Berlin, and only 8.3 percent report it has changed for the worse. . . 52.3 percent of the Israelis in Berlin state that they are not considering returning to Israel.”
One respondent told Penias, “I can tell you without hesitation that in my mind this is the best place for Israeli immigrants because it combines so many advantages in everyday life that we all struggled with in Israel, money, culture, politics, stress and many more.”
Eighty percent of Israeli immigrants report that Germany’s past plays no role in their everyday life, with 16 percent reporting being targets of antisemitism since moving to Berlin. The German government’s Research and Information Center on Anti-Semitism reports “a slight decrease in the total number of antisemitic incidents in 2022 compared to the previous year. However, the figure is still significantly higher than in 2020.” Most incidents involve either adherents of Germany’s far-right or Muslim residents.
Berlin’s Jewish community is far from unified or even necessarily convivial, divided as it is along linguistic, national, traditional, generational and political lines. Many are secular or agnostic, others observant. An Israeli immigrant, Yoav Sapir, married to a German Jew and active in the community, notes that:
The community you’ll find here should probably not be described as a community of “German Jews,” but rather as “Jews in Germany,” whose descendants might one day become “German Jews” in one way or another, but at the moment, we’re really not there yet.
Nowadays, the majority of Jews in Berlin are immigrants, who — just like myself — were not born here and whose mother tongue is not German. There are some families that can actually trace their roots back to that glorious time before the Nazis, usually descendants of Jews that left Germany before the war and came back after the war for various reasons. But that’s the exception, not the rule. Everybody else was either born to immigrants or, in most cases, is an immigrant.
Sapir also notes that the Jewish renaissance in Berlin does not apply to the rest of Germany, where Jewish deaths exceed births and the ageing communities are shrinking. Jews in Germany are estimated to number roughly 200,000.
The late poet Jim Carroll wrote that “Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.” Those who went before us speak to us — not literally, but in how they lived their lives, echoes of their presence on this planet as evidenced by the stories that are passed down to us, the history they may have made, the art they bequeathed us, their epitaphs, photos, plaques, their painstakingly reconstituted lives by the living employing their consciences. In Berlin, I hear a cacophony of Jewish voices. You only need to search and tune in.
Kudos!