“There’s always this joke that half of Tel Aviv is actually here,” Liad Hussein Kantorowicz told me when I interviewed her in her Berlin apartment. The numbers back her up: According to the latest estimates, 15,000 to 20,000 people have left Israel in recent years to forge a new life in Berlin. Most of these…
A new Jewish community was dedicated in the former East Berlin, in the footsteps of one destroyed by the Nazis. In Tuesday’s ceremonies at the century-old Beth Zion synagogue, descendants of pre-war Adass Jisroel rabbis symbolically transferred the spiritual legacy of their forefathers to the new congregation, Kahal Adass Jisroel. The new group’s 250 members…
Remember New York in the 80’s? Than you can imagine what certain parts of Berlin look like today. Here you can still see entire neighborhoods serving as battlegrounds for graffiti writers and street artists. The graffiti scene always had a strong force in this city. The Berlin Wall was a prominent surface for protest slogans…
Google has apologized for labeling a Berlin intersection as Adolf-Hitler-Platz, its Nazi-era name, on Google Maps. The apology came on Friday, after the company was made aware of the error, apparently edited in by users of its Map Maker function. The intersection today is known as Theodor-Heuss-Platz, after West Germany’s first post-World War II president,…
News that drunken revelers had, on New Year’s Eve, used Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as a urinal came shortly after The New York Times published an op-ed by Yascha Mounk on the conflicts of being a German Jew. Together, these items create an image of a Germany not at ease with…
New Year’s revelers shot fireworks and urinated in Germany’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin. But memorial staff members have vowed to put a stop to the desecration. Reacting to a shocking video of young party-goers celebrating among the 2711 steles of the memorial last week, spokesperson Jenifer Stolz told JTA that “we are all quite appalled….
In April, a glass case in Berlin upset and polarized the Jewish world. An exhibit at the Jewish Museum, entitled “The Whole Truth… Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Jews,” included an installation consisting of a half-open glass case with the question “Are there still Jews in Germany?“ printed on it. On a bench…
By moving back to Berlin three years ago, Margot Friedlander, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, has become an unlikely celebrity in the land where she was once persecuted. In 1946, when she immigrated to New York with her husband, they both vowed never to set foot again in Germany. Most members of both their families were…
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