Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un frammento della Berlino anni Venti

a Tel Aviv
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233050205106&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
The girls
Jan. 29, 2009
Shula Kopf , THE JERUSALEM POST
The "girls," as the waitresses call them, are a group of Yekke (German
Jewish) ladies in their late 80s who have been meeting almost every
day for decades at Tel Aviv's Café Mersand. Recently, much to their
surprise, they have become quite an item for the German press.
Journalists come to the café to interview the "Ashkenazi damen," as
they were described in one article. German tourists from nearby hotels
strike up conversations. Even the celebrated host of the German
version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Günther Jauch, named by
Stern magazine as the most famous German person in the world, made a
special trip here just to meet them. He read in one of the articles
that they are ardent fans and planned to surprise them.
"I told him not to surprise them and to let them know he was coming so
that they would not faint, and also to give them a chance to put on
their jewelry," says Charlotte Misselwitz, who wrote the article for
the Berliner Zeitung.
In a telephone conversation from Germany, she remembers them fondly.
"It was amazing to be with them and talk with them and see them as
just being the same kind of people that I'm used to in Germany, much
like my grandparents. It was striking. They have the same kind of
culture, the same sense of humor and the same habits."
Jauch was also affected by his meeting and since his visit has sent
them several long, heart-felt letters.
"It's a hot day in Germany and it brings back memories of my visit
with you in Café Mersand," he wrote in a recent letter. "The article
about you has made a lot of waves. Many people talked about it, and
for others it opened old wounds."
According to Micah Limor, editor of Yakiton, a monthly for Yekkes
published since 1932, German journalists discovered the Yekke
community while looking for a new angle on Israel's 60th birthday
celebrations. Today's Yekkes are the children of Jews who fled Germany
in the 1930s and came to Palestine where they contributed greatly to
industry, science, higher education, medicine, jurisprudence and many
other fields.
"If in previous years there were a handful of German journalists, in
the last year at least one or two have contacted me every month and
asked to meet to hear stories. There have been at least 30 such
newspaper articles this year," says Limor.
Ruthi Ofek, manager and chief curator of German-Speaking Jewry
Heritage Museum in Tefen, also reports a rising interest in Yekkes by
the German press.
"I think they recognize today what they have lost," she says. "It is
hard to imagine the contributions of Jews to Germany in culture,
science and in every field. Now these journalists can find in Israel
what they can't find anymore in Germany. The Yekkes kept the style of
life the way it was once in Germany, and you can hear it in their
language, and the way they live with some traditional behavior that no
longer exists in Germany because times have changed. Language has
evolved, and here it's been preserved as it was 70 or more years ago.
The Yekkes still meet each other regularly in their own coffee shops."
MERSAND IS one of the few historic Tel Aviv cafes that has survived
with its original retro décor intact amid the ubiquitous modern chain
cafes that have cropped up in the past decade. The café, which
straddles the corner of Ben-Yehuda and Frishman streets, was founded
in 1955 by Walter Mersand, a newcomer from Germany, who yearned for
the civilized kaffeehaus of Berlin and Vienna with the wood paneling,
the cultured conversation and the daily newspaper on a wooden stick.
He hired a like-minded architect and Café Mersand became the meeting
point for Tel Aviv's German Jews.
His son, Mike, took over, and four years ago, Boaz Tregerman bought
the place and decided to keep it exactly as it was, with the dark,
wooden paneling, the small Formica-covered tables, the low stools and
a long, wooden bench covered with numerous scuffs and scratches
accrued over the years. The "girls" came with the café.
Tregerman gladly accords them the VIP treatment to which they have
grown accustomed over the years - their own corner table by the
window.
"If somebody sits at their table I ask him politely to move. Sometimes
people are offended, but I don't care. It's their table," says
Tregerman, who bears a red lipstick mark on his cheek from a kiss
smacked on his face by Haya Florentine, one of the Yekke regulars.
In Hebrew slang a Yekke is a Jew whose family originated from Germany.
The word apparently comes from the word for "jacket," referring to the
jacket and tie German Jews wore even in the sweltering heat of the
Middle East. According to folklore they even wore jackets for work in
the orange groves and building sites handing boxes and building
materials to one another with a polite "bitte schön" and "danke
schön." Today the word Yekke is also used as an adjective to describe
any person, not necessarily of German origin, who is pedantic,
punctual and meticulous.
On a recent Friday, at 10 sharp, dressed impeccably with discreet
jewelry to match, the women meet for two hours of pleasant
conversation, mostly in German. One of them, Else Junes, 88, never
learned Hebrew despite having lived here for more than 70 years, so
the group converses in German for her sake. ("Her Yemenite maid of 50
years has learned to speak German, but Else never learned Hebrew,"
points out one of the women as an aside.)
Beneath the chit-chat lies a subtext that is not discussed - the
relatives and friends that stayed behind in Germany, the husbands that
have passed away.
Mimi Frons and Haya Florentine, both 87, are two of the regulars. They
have known each other since their childhoods in Berlin, where their
parents were friends. They lived on the same street and when
Florentine's family arrived in Palestine in 1934, Frons's family soon
followed.
"It was difficult. We lived five in a room, the roof was corrugated
tin, but we were happy because we escaped death," says Florentine.
Today the two women still live on the same street, a short walk away
from Mersand, and their friendship transcends the generations and
continues with their children and grandchildren.
"My husband used to meet here with his friends, and after he died I
started coming here, and that's how it all started," says Frons.
Even though there was a time that Yekkes were the butts of jokes and
speaking German in public was frowned upon, the women are proud of
their heritage.
"We were brought up with etiquette, order, punctuality and good
manners, and those things have remained and that's good," says Trude
Appel, 88, from Vienna.
The women agree that their grandchildren are typical sabras and that
not much of the strict upbringing of their own childhoods has trickled
down to the new generation. When a young woman passes by the café with
arms covered with tattoos, the women cluck their disapproval.
At Café Mersand the conversation drifts to one of the favorite topics,
the latest episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, that aired on
RTL, the German language television station, the previous day. The
general consensus is that the contender, a philosopher, was more of an
idiot than a philosopher for having given up the chance to go home
with 150,000 euros.
Their eyes light up when they talk about the host, Jauch.
"He spent two hours with us and we were surprised when he sent us all
a beautiful letter," says Frons. "When we received a second letter, we
were stunned."
Exactly at noon, the ladies leave. One buys the weekly apricot cake to
take home for Shabbat. Another goes for her weekly appointment at the
hair salon. Some go home by themselves, perhaps with the aid of a
cane. Filipino caretakers help others. Since it is impossible for the
"girls" to sit on the café's low stools, Tergerman keeps white plastic
chairs with high backrests in a storage room just for them. As soon as
they leave the plastic chairs are stacked and carried back to the
storage room, the music is turned way up and Tel Aviv's trendy young
people take over.
---
"non presenta rischi di rilievo per la popolazione" (Luca Logi /
rodewalder / Golda Meir, febbraio 2008)
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2009/01/certo-che-i-qassam-sono-pericolosi_05.html


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233050205106&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
proud to be a Yekke :-))))