Today the whole area around Oranienburgerstrasse pulses with Jewish life and is a magnet for Jewish yuppies. The stately New Synagogue, erected in 1861 and destroyed during the Holocaust, has been reconstituted as the Centrum Judaicum. There are Jewish cafes and restaurants, bookshops and street festivals. A new journal, Juedisches Berlin has also emerged. Published in Russian and German, the new journal is a reminder of just how much has changed since the days when the late community leader Heinz Galinski prohibited speaking Russian at the community house in the Fasanenstrasse.
Berlin has a bittersweet Jewish past.
In the 1920's Berlin was also a leading center of Jewish culture and learning and a favorite watering hole of Central and East European intellectuals who were drawn to the cosmopolitan city. Many of the most prominent Hebrew writers and actors, who later found homes in Palestine, also worked in the city. On the eve of the Nazi rise to power there were some 175,000 Jews in Berlin, more than a third of all the Jews in Germany. Berlin Jewry played an integral part in the cultural and commercial life of the city. All that came to tragic end in 1933, with the rise of Hitler.