Berlin 1945. American soldiers, male and female, occupy every available seat in the auditorium dominated by an American flag. The room barely stirs. A young chaplain draped in a tallit, the sort they all wore at their bar mitzvahs, stands behind a lectern placed off to the side. Approaching from the right, a young private…
I park my bicycle in front of the organic grocery store and lock it among the others. I’m proud of my bike, a Gudereit Fantasy Classic, which together with the lock and child seat cost around eight hundred euros or close to a thousand dollars. Among the other bikes stationed there it is nothing special….
(JTA) — Berlin’s mayor will block the use of city venues and funds by groups or event organizers that support the boycott movement against Israel. The move, announced Wednesday, followed pressure by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which had threatened to put Berlin Mayor Michael Müller on its annual list of 10 worst anti-Semitic incidents…
BERLIN (Reuters) – Two aging Holocaust survivors joined forces with a younger Israeli singer to perform songs of hope at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on Wednesday at a time when Germany is seeing a rise in anti-Semitism. Saul Dreier, a drummer aged 92, and Reuwen “Ruby” Sosnowicz, an 89-year-old accordionist, backed up Gad Elbaz at a…
(JTA) — Berlin’s mayor, many local Jewish leaders agree, could do more to counter the city’s vocal BDS movement. But does that make him an anti-Semite? A report that the California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center may include Mayor Michael Müller on its annual list of the world’s 10 worst cases of anti-Semitic activity has perplexed prominent…
BERLIN (JTA) – Hitler continues to fascinate, and a new exhibit in Berlin is proof with its most sensational attraction: a reconstruction of the bunker where Hitler took his life in April 1945. Meant to show the dangers of dictatorship, the exhibit – called “How Could It Happen” – also contains thousands of documents, photos and objects that tell…
More than 70 years after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in the final days of World War Two, an exhibition in the capital examines how he became a Nazi and what turned ordinary Germans into murderers during the Third Reich. The exhibition “Hitler – how could it happen” is set in a…
Before World War II, according to a German news site, there were about 2,800 synagogues in Germany. Now there are around 130. It’s a grim statistic, but there is cause for optimism. Since reunification Germans have a renewed interest in the Jewish history of their country. They’ve also welcomed an influx of Jews, mainly from…
