German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City

By Thomas Sparr and Stephen Brown

The fascinating history of German Jews who built a community just outside Jerusalem.

In the 1920s, before the establishment of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighborhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. In German Jerusalem, Thomas Sparr opens up the history of this remarkable community and the forgotten borderland they called home.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781912208623

Book preview

memorial.

The Journey to London

Anna Maria Jokl set out in 1977 from Jerusalem to London. She had left London twenty-seven years earlier to move to Berlin – more precisely, to East Berlin, the capital of the then newly founded German Democratic Republic. Looking back, Jokl said that she had lived six lives, by which she meant her life had had six locations. She was born in Vienna on 23 January 1911 and would retain its inflections for her entire life. She moved to Berlin in 1928 after the death of her father, to be with her mother and her mother’s new husband. There she worked through the last of the Roaring Twenties in theatre, radio and newspapers and was politically active as well, left-leaning. In 1933, being a Jewish woman, she fled Nazi Berlin for Prague – ‘yes, the Czechs’ – for whom all her life she retained a special affection. After six years in Prague, she set sail just in time for London via Danzig and its harbour city Gdynia, arriving on 1 May 1939. There she scraped a living working as a shorthand typist until, just over a decade later, she emigrated to East Berlin, from where she was expelled by the authorities, causing her to land up in West Berlin, where she worked as a psychotherapist at the Jewish Hospital before moving in 1965 into her sixth life – in Israel.

Six locations; six lives.

‘To move from one house to another costs you a shirt; / From one place to another – a life.’ Jokl put this Jewish proverb at the front of her book The Journey to London, her memoir recalling her years in the British capital and, frequently, her five other lives as well. Jokl was just twenty-two years old when she managed to flee from Berlin to Prague. She stayed there six years and wrote a book, The Colour of Mother of Pearl, which could not be published in German until years later.

In the story of German-Jewish emigration, Berlin, London and Jerusalem form a historical triangle. London stands in the middle – not geographically, but historically.

Gabriele Tergit made her way from Jerusalem to the British capital in 1938. This Berliner author, born Elise Hirschmann in 1894, the daughter of a German-Jewish family who grew up in the solidly middle-class Tiergarten area, made her name in the 1920s with her court reporting. As a young woman journalist, Tergit attended trials in the criminal courts in Moabit, a poor, proletarian district of Berlin. The testimonies of the accused – thieves, pimps, sex workers, petty criminals – and of the witnesses – caretakers, lower-middle-class people of all kinds – as well as the prosecutors’ indictments and the judges’ judgements gave in her articles a picture of Berlin society as graphic as the offences in question, the frauds and brazen muggings, murders and sex crimes. Even the guardians of order who intervened to stop them, the police, became unwitting chroniclers of their time. Using the pseudonym Gabriele Tergit and under the influence of Karl Kraus, she remade the genre of court reporting from simple reportage into the story of its time: of poor and rich, of the fault lines in society and the political tensions of the Weimar Republic. Her novel Käsebier Takes Berlin, published in 1931, centres on the overnight celebrity of the singer Käsebier in Berlin’s sensation-hungry newspapers in the winter of 1929. Eighty-five years after its original publication, Tergit’s novel had a glittering comeback, finding a new audience by offering a slice of Babylon Berlin (the hit TV series about Weimar Berlin, broadcast from 2017). In November 1933 Tergit and her husband, the architect Heinz Reifenberg, emigrated to Jerusalem, where she became a chronicler of her new city and country.

In 1938 she moved finally to London, where she lived until her death in 1982. Thus a piece of Berlin made its way to the Thames, as she recalls in her memoir Definitely Somewhat Unusual:

In the summer of 1946 I met a woman from St Petersburg who had come to London via Berlin and German philosophy. In a room as wretched as the most wretched of emigrée rooms she had conducted a ‘salon’ at which Monty Jacobs, features editor of the Vossische Zeitung, and Professor Hermann Friedmann met and founded Club 43, which exists still. The Club held lectures in German by well-known personalities, even as the German ‘wonder weapons’ the V1 and V2 were falling, and thus offered respite, stimulus and relaxation to hundreds, for next to no charge.

German emigrants who had landed up in London met at Club 43 pretty much every Monday evening from its founding in 1943. They listened to lectures and discussed the world situation, almost always in German – and this in the middle of the Second World War. We do not know whether the paths of Gabriele Tergit and Anna Maria Jokl crossed there at some point in the 1940s, nor whether they met each other later in Berlin, where Tergit travelled back to many times. From 1945 to 1949 Tergit wrote ‘Letters from London’ for the newly founded Tagesspiegel newspaper, reporting from the city that for her had become home. And yet the fixed point in her thinking and her feelings remained Berlin.

It was the same for Erich Mendelsohn, who after 1933 designed buildings in both London and Jerusalem, and carried on his Berlin work from both cities. He co-designed the Bexhill Pavilion on the Sussex coast. Later he decided to move entirely to Jerusalem, and took possession of Rehavia’s windmill, the district’s landmark, the first thing you see as you enter Rehavia. In the narrow spaces of the windmill Mendelsohn set up his studio and a flat.

It was there in 1935 that another Berliner, the young architect Julius Posener, met him. For Posener, too, London would later become an important staging post. Decades later, back in Berlin, Posener would recall his encounter with Mendelsohn in Rehavia. The two had quarrelled until Mendelsohn repaired the situation by putting one of Beethoven’s late string quartets onto the record