For years, I skirted around Berlin. Trips to Europe took me to Denmark, Holland and France, but never to their neighbor. When a friend finally convinced me to visit this spring, I got one of two responses from all of my Jewish friends: “Oh, I love Berlin! It’s like Brooklyn. I’ve been thinking about moving.”…
This past May, a Jewish delicatessen opened in Mitte, Berlin’s central (and rather trendy) district. Founded by two disc jockeys in their 30s, Oskar Melzer (who is Jewish) and Paul Mogg (who is not), and serving up house-cured pastrami, chicken liver brulée, challah and matzo ball soup in a sleekly designed space, Mogg & Melzer…
Artist Shimon Attie is probably best known for “Sites Unseen,” his 1990s series of temporary installations in Europe, in which he projected photographic images of a lost Jewish past onto actual sites. For “Writing on the Wall,” (1991–1993), Attie, living in Berlin at the time, was haunted by the lack of any past signs of…
A member of Berlin’s Jewish community with family in hard-hit Staten Island, N.Y. has started a clothing drive for those affected by superstorm Sandy. Berliners have been encouraged to bring clothing and small toys to the Chabad center in Berlin on Tuesday and Wednesday. The items will be brought to the American Embassy and Red…
Jews and Muslims in Berlin demonstrated for the right to carry out ritual circumcisions, a right that has been endangered in Germany. Under the slogan “On Knife’s Edge: Religious Freedom,” some 300 demonstrators rallied Saturday at Bebelplatz, the site of the 1933 Nazi book burnings, to protest the May ruling in a Cologne court that…
One of Germany’s 16 states has declared circumcision legal. Berlin, Germany’s capital and itself a state, is the first to declare the practice legal following Cologne court ruled in June that non-medical circumcisions on children amounted to a criminal offense, according to DPA, a German news wire. National legislation is also pending to legalize circumcision….
Jewish school girls were verbally assaulted with anti-Semitic slurs in Berlin on Monday, in the second attack on Jews reported in the German capital in less than a week. Last week, Daniel Alter, a Berlin rabbi, was assaulted by youths in West Berlin in a suspected anti-Semitic attack, witnessed by his 6-year-old daughter. Alter told…
“Berlin wears a yarmulke,” the popular BZ local newspaper declared to its readers on Saturday. The reason: the front page presented a photo of five Berlin celebrities posing with skullcaps – including Mayor Klaus Wowereit, one of the best known gay politicians in Europe. The city’s residents decided to show their solidarity with the city’s…
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