This is a picture from 1937 depicting Erna Goldmann, a new immigrant from Germany to pre-state Israel, in Tel Aviv in 1937. Erna is wearing a dark skirt and white blouse and is holding a jacket. In the background is a shack with a large sign for the local cigarette company Atid.
Erna Guggenheim was born in Frankfurt, Germany to a wealthy Jewish family with a large house and servants. Her father was a successful businessman but was badly affected by the hyperinflation of the 1920s in Germany. Erna’s grandparents were religious Jews, who attended synagogue, ate kosher, and observed Shabbat and the festivals. Nevertheless, her grandfather bought a Christmas tree for the non-Jewish staff and gave them Christmas presents. Her parents kept kosher but were less observant, as she states: “They were good Jews, but they were not religious,” and also identified as Germans. Erna attended the Jewish Samson Raphael Hirsch School which had both a religious and secular curriculum. After school she would meet her friends, take dance lessons, and attend meetings of the Zionist youth movement Blau-Wiess (Blue-White). This is where Erna met Moshe Goldmann, her future husband, who came from an Eastern-European family that had immigrated to Germany. At the time there was a wide rift between the Western Europeans and the so-called ostjuden, the Jews from the East. When the Nazis gained power, the situation for the Jews deteriorated and Erna together with other family members received a certificate to immigrate to Israel; fortunately, all of her close family managed to escape from Europe before the outbreak of World War II.
Erna arrived in Israel in 1937, where Moshe, her then boyfriend, and her brother were already living. Once married, Erna and Moshe settled in Tel Aviv. In her oral history interview she recalls her experience of the city:
You could find everything you needed in Tel Aviv in 1937: streets, movie theaters, cafés. We sat together with friends, talked and drank coffee. I was feeling great. I could go to the beach in shorts and meet friends. The whole Ben Yehuda Street spoke German!
She relates that everything in Israel was different in those times:
But when I think about it today: everything was so primitive! … But it seemed natural to me. I adapted, and I knew that this is how it was and that there wouldn’t be anything else.
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The Fifth Aliyah – The Fifth Aliyah refers to the nearly 250,000 Jews who moved to Israel between the years 1929 and 1939 as a result of the Nazi party’s rise to power in Germany in 1933. As anti-Semitic laws were passed and life for Jews in Germany became unbearable, approximately half of all German Jews left the country. Most fled to the United States, but many went to other countries including Israel. It is estimated that 60,000 German Jews came to Israel during this period, along with 30,000 more who came from German-speaking countries such as Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The Jewish Community of Germany – The first evidence of Jews living in Germany is from the early Middle Ages. As in other European countries, the Jews in Germany prospered in trade, industry, agriculture, and money lending but were also victims of persecution, false accusations, and massacres. The cities of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms were great centres of Jewish learning, but at the time of the Crusades, entire communities were murdered there. In the fourteenth century, Jews were blamed for the outbreak of the Black Death, and following mass slaughter, many fled to Poland. In the following centuries the persecution of German Jews continued, despite the changes of the renaissance period. Change came towards the end of the eighteenth century with new ideas of religious equality and Moses Mendelssohn’s steps to promote integration and a Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) and to create bonds with the Christian society. The nineteenth century brought pogroms known as the Hep-Hep riots but also gradual emancipation. Jews became increasingly integrated into the German society, and many became part of the intellectual, financial, and political elite of the country. In 1933 more than half a million Jews lived in Germany. However, anti-Semitism was on the rise, and the Nazi party grew in strength. More than 300,000 German Jews fled the country in the early years of the Nazi regime, while the Jews who stayed were victim to pogroms such as the November Pogrom (named by the Nazis Kristallnacht), anti-Jewish laws, and ultimately deportation to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe. During the Holocaust more than 130,000 German Jews were murdered. After the war, the Jewish community of Germany slowly began to rebuild itself, and in the 1990s many Jews from the former Soviet Union arrived in the country, such that today the majority of Jews in Germany are of Russian origin. The estimated number of Jews in Germany today is approximately 250,000.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa – Founded in 1909 by a small group of Jews on the outskirts of old Jaffa, Tel Aviv is now Israel’s second largest city and the cultural, financial, and technological centre of the country. It is located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the heart of the Gush Dan Metropolitan area. The original founders of Tel Aviv were looking for a healthier environment outside of the crowded city of Jaffa. With the help of the Jewish National Fund, they purchased 12 acres of sand dunes and called their new city Tel Aviv (spring hill). “Tel Aviv” was the name given by Nahum Sokolow to his Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl’s classic, Altneuland. Meir Dizengoff was the first mayor of Tel Aviv and served for 25 years. In 1917, the Ottoman rulers expelled most of the Jewish community from Tel Aviv. With the end of World War I and the start of British rule the following year, the Jews were invited back to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is sometimes called the “White City” due to the 4000 or more buildings built in the Bauhaus style. The mostly white Bauhaus buildings were built in the 1930s by German Jewish architects who immigrated to pre-state Israel during the British Mandate after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Tel Aviv has the largest number of Bauhaus buildings of any city in the world. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared in the art museum that was located in Dizengoff House. By 1950, the city of Tel Aviv had grown and expanded, and it was renamed Tel Aviv-Jaffa to reflect the unified city and to preserve the historical name of Jaffa. Tel Aviv is the home of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the financial capital of Israel. It is also the centre of high-tech and start-up companies and a major centre of culture and entertainment, known for its active nightlife and the variety and quality of its restaurants.
