This is a photograph taken in 1925 of Liebe Kempler, her daughters, Gusti and Miriam, and her son, Hillel, who is in the pram. They are standing in front of the family’s cafe and cake shop in Berlin, Germany. Above the shop door is a large sign which reads, “D. Kempler,” and on both sides of the sign are two more signs, one in Yiddish and one in German, with additional information about the cafe and pastry store. The store was located at 20 Grenadierstrasse (now 20 Almstadtstrasse) and was called the Krakow Cafe and Cake Shop. To the left of the door, written on the wall in large black letters is the name “Krakow Cafe and Cake Shop” and the words “Breakfast” and “Dinner.” A Magen David (star of David) with the word “kosher” written in the middle in Hebrew is etched into the wall.
The Kempler family were originally from Ukraine. After World War I, the family moved to Berlin hoping for a better life. Hillel was born in Berlin in 1925. The family had a modern Orthodox lifestyle and lived in Scheunenviertel, a Jewish neighbourhood where both religious and secular Jews lived, many of whom were of Eastern European origin. They opened a pastry shop, which Hillel describes in an interview to Centropa:
The pastry shop was pretty small. From the street-level you would go down two or three steps, since the place was in the half-basement. In my father’s pastry shop there were some baked goods – they would also be delivered from the shop – and you could eat breakfast and supper there.
The stop was in Grenadierstrasse, a Jewish area of Berlin which was home to a wide variety of Jews:
There were a lot of very religious Jews with payot and shawls, modern Jews like my father and his friends, workers, and businesspeople. In the shop there was coffee and a variety of cakes: cheesecake, apple cake, strudel, and such things, there was also ice cream and beer.
Hillel explains that the shop was a popular meeting place for a group of Communists, even though his father was not involved in the Communist party. In the years before the Nazi’s rise to power, Hillel describes his family as religious but also as a “real Berlin family” who enjoyed the markets, circus, cinema, and ice-skating. They had a good relationship with their non-Jewish neighbours and didn’t experience anti-Semitism. He says: “If Hitler hadn't come we definitely would have stayed in Berlin.”
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, life changed for the Kempler family. Nazi thugs started rioting in the streets. After narrowly missing being arrested by the Gestapo, Hillel’s father realised that he needed to leave Germany. He went into hiding, until his wife got him a tourist visa for Israel. The tourist visa required him to return to Germany after a few months, but he never did. The rest of the Kempler family remained in Germany. Despite not managing to obtain visas to enter Israel, Hillel’s mother decided to make her way to Israel with her children. The family traveled through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, and Lebanon and were finally smuggled into Israel. Bewildered in the new country, she was passing through Tel Aviv when someone recognised her and the family were reunited.
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Jews in Nazi Germany (Pre-World War II) – The Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933. After World War I, Germany was faced with military defeat, social unrest and an economic crisis. Many Germans blamed the Jews for these disasters. The difficult situation in Germany and the ever- present anti-Semitic sentiments resulted in a rise in the popularity of the Nazi party, and on January 20, 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Immediately, the Jewish community experienced organised attacks, and anti-Jewish law were passed. Jews were prohibited from working in certain professions, participating in cultural events, purchasing products during certain hours, and even attending school. Jewish businesses were boycotted and looted, and many Jewish people lost their businesses or jobs. The first concentration camp was opened in Dachau, and many Jews were arrested and sent there and to other camps. In 1935 the Nuremberg laws were passed, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Jews lost legal protection and were left with all of the obligations but few of the rights of German citizenship. Persecution varied from city to city and peaked in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, in which thousands of Jews throughout Nazi Germany were attacked or arrested and thousands of Jewish-owned shops or businesses were looted and destroyed. Many Jews chose to flee Germany, and, until October 1941, German policy encouraged Jewish emigration. Jews moved to any country that would take them, including other European countries where many were later killed as the Nazis captured new territories, as well as the United States, England, and Israel.
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.
