Jewish life in Berlin flourished after the Enlightenment. Berlin became the most important Jewish center east of Warsaw. On the wake of the 20th century over 100,000 Jews lived in Berlin, with some of the most significant Jewish, Zionist and world figures in this century among them: physicist Albert Einstein, director Billy Wilder, Nobel Prize laureates Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Nelly Sachs, philosopher Martin Buber, Chabad leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, artists like Max Lieberman and many others, all lived in Berlin in the period between 1900-1933. They all choose to leave the "Old Jewish Quarter". The new community in western Berlin brought to the world not only remarkable thinkers and cultural giants but also introduced two of the most important theories today in the Jewish thought - Reform Judaism and Zionism. Both theories were centred in Berlin until 1933.
Jewish life in Berlin emerged straight after the Second World War and the Holocaust. Friday Prayers took place just three days after Germany capitulated, in the new Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. Over 5,000 survived the war in Berlin and began building a new community (sometime under real danger – this time from the Soviets). The centre of the new community that emerged from the ashes was in West Berlin.
We will visit the "New Jewish Quarter", the only daily active synagogue, the centre of the Jewish community in Berlin (with the only kosher restaurant in Berlin), "Yeshiva" - Jewish higher education school, the Jewish books shop, memorials and famous Jewish Institutions, the houses of Billy Wilder and Albert Einstein and much more.
Please do not forget to bring a valid I.D. (with a photo)
If you are interested in Berlin's Jewish history, you might want to support the Stolpersteine Project
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