So Long, Israel; Hello, Berlin {
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At the St. Oberholz café on Rosenthaler Platz, in Berlin, a trio in their early thirties chatted animatedly in Hebrew about dating in Berlin, Jungian therapy, and the theatre troupe that they were in the process of founding to explore German-Jewish dynamics in the third generation after the Holocaust. “When I came to Berlin, I felt like I was home,” Nora Fischer, a striking actress with blond dreadlocks, who moved here three months ago, said. Her companions, an opera singer and a dancer, both recent transplants from Israel, nodded as she added, “Here just feels so right.”
The three artists are part of a wave of young Israelis moving to the German capital. While no one knows for sure how many Israeli expats now call Berlin home—in part because descendants of German citizens persecuted by the Nazis are frequently eligible for German citizenship—the Israeli Embassy in Berlin puts the number at ten thousand to fifteen thousand, and growing. The Israelis who choose Berlin tend to be young, creative, highly educated, politically minded, and left-leaning; they form an intelligentsia that includes novelists, tech entrepreneurs, Grinberg body-work practitioners, and a world-renowned mandolin player. In recent years, these expats have founded myriad projects—Hebrew-language kindergartens, a Hebrew library, a Hebrew literary magazine, a Hanukkah market, Iranian-Israeli techno parties, and a Tel Aviv-style beach on the Spree, to name just a few.
All this has been accomplished under intense media scrutiny: Israelis in Berlin have been written about so extensively in both the German and the Israeli press that subjects complain of media-cliché fatigue. I was warned that if I didn’t want to induce eye-rolling during interviews I should refrain from mentioning Yair Lapid. (Last fall, the Israeli finance minister famously inveighed against young Israelis who were “willing to throw away the only country the Jews have just because it’s more comfortable to live in Berlin.”) Likewise, I should include the often profiled hummus restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg only if absolutely necessary. “Please, don’t write another gay-Israeli-disco piece,” one curator said, with heartfelt ennui.
Given the city’s history, it’s not surprising that journalists have pounced on the “Israelis in Berlin” story—in the German case, with a jubilation that you can practically hear between the lines. Before the Nazis came to power, Berlin’s vital Jewish community comprised a hundred and sixty thousand people. By war’s end, seven to eight thousand survivors remained. During the following decades, some—like a group of Jewish Berliners who had fled to Shanghai—returned, while others left. Growth came only in the nineties, when Germany passed a law welcoming Jews from the former Soviet Union.
Many people point to 2011—and to Israel’s social-justice protests—as the year that the trend of young Israelis moving to Berlin (where, as expats from all over the world will tell you, the quality of life is high and the rents are low) really gained momentum. Certainly, these new Berliners constitute a real change in a city where, according to the German historian Clemens Maier-Wolthausen, only thirty thousand “people of Jewish identity” had been living.
Israelis coming to Berlin bring a desire for a culturally, but not necessarily a religious, Jewish life—something largely lacking here. Seeing an absence, Israelis are jumping in: new cultural events run the gamut from cool Shabbat get-togethers to readings, screenings, and the like. But it is the internal processes of this group of determined individualists that Tal Alon, a journalist, finds most fascinating. Alon, who launched Spitz, the first Hebrew-language magazine in Berlin since the Nazi era, two years ago, said that Israeli expats here are engaged—in a way that other, more conservative Israeli communities are not—in creating a new identity. “There are things they don’t want to give up from an Israeli, Jewish identity,” she said. “But they are also wanting to become more cosmopolitan, open-minded people—citizens of the world.”
With Spitz, whose latest issue included a guide to the Berlin art world (aimed at helping visiting parents), as well as tips for navigating the German preschool system, Alon seeks to examine the complexities that she sees in her daily life in Berlin: the black humor with which Israelis talk about their family histories with one another but not with German friends; the way in which Berlin’s excellent public-transportation system reflects a cultural expectation of stability that would be impossible to imagine in what Alon called the “disaster mentality” of her own country. While she avoids assigning articles that deal explicitly with the Holocaust—“For us, it’s boring already”—Alon said that the topic is nonetheless one of the motivating forces behind the magazine. “I can’t imagine doing Spitz in Madrid or Lisbon,” she said. “Here, I have an emotional connection. This is a place for dealing with the past intensively.”
Other expats find the omnipresence of Berlin’s past more frustrating than inspiring. “Sometimes I feel fed up with the German-Jewish story,” Liraz Axelrad, who moved here two years ago to work for a technology startup, said. “The only reason Americans in Berlin are not as interesting as I am is because of all these dead people. I guess I’m trying to run away from that.” On her blog, Axelrad wrote that the questions she asks herself are the same ones that any self-aware person would explore when living in a new country: “What does it mean to be a stranger? Why is it so hard to learn German?” She finds it annoying when Israelis are praised for learning German, while others are simply expected to; if anything, Axelrad said, it should be easier for Israelis like her to learn German than it is for, say, an Italian exchange student. “We grew up in a country where our grandparents spoke German,” she said.
“I didn’t move to Berlin to relive the war years,” Axelrad, who grew up on a kibbutz founded by her grandparents, who were both from Berlin, added. (The German language was banned on the kibbutz.) “I don’t wake up in the morning thinking someone is trying to catch me. I really enjoy being here. It’s beautiful, it’s comfortable, it’s interesting. It allows me to live my life as close to my ideal as possible.”
“The vibes in this city force you to live a very modest life style,” Rotem Malach, who has been working for the World Zionist Organization in Berlin for just over a year, said. When he first moved here, he found the city’s daily reminders of the Holocaust—for example, subway trains whose end point is Wannsee, where the Final Solution was decided on—very upsetting. Now, while still touched by things like the golden pavement stones dotting the sidewalks that are inscribed with the names of former residents who were killed in the death camps, Malach said that he also appreciates the city’s openness, stability, calm, and less materialistic culture. “People come here and relax. They have time to look more deeply at themselves, to learn more about themselves,” he said.
Most of the Israelis he encounters here will probably return to Israel, Malach said. “They’ll take what they learned about themselves, and about life, back with them—how to be satisfied without working as much, without eating out four times a week in fancy restaurants, without being part of the capitalist rat race.” Michal Friedlander, a curator at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, said that she would be sorry to see the trend reverse. “I hope they stay,” she said. “It brings a breath of fresh air into the Jewish landscape in Berlin.”