“Visit Berlin’s Yiddishland” Walking Tour

Until 1938, Berlin’s Yiddish Quarter (known in German as the Scheunenviertel) was the most visible Jewish place in the city. Many of its residents were immigrants and refugees from Eastern Europe. Here in the land of their Ashkenazi ancestors, where the Yiddish language was born in the Middle Ages, these working-class Jews scraped by as peddlars or tailors, ate barley soup at Yantl’s, acted and sang in Yiddish operettas and variety shows, prayed in tiny rooms by candlelight, got drunk with wagon drivers in smoky bars, plotted revolutions, and recorded hit songs in their native language.

Finally, after decades of activism to make this history more visible, ten Yiddish street signs have been installed around the Yiddish Quarter. Yet its residents, their lives and their language, remain very marginalized within German “memory culture,” which almost exclusively commemorates assimilated, German-speaking, middle- and upper-class Jews, perpetuating old prejudices against Jewish culture. Indeed, most Jews in Germany today are also immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the Yiddish language is still alive in this city – although almost invisible.

On this twilight walking tour full of local music and family stories, which I first gave in Yiddish in 2022, we will try to reimagine Jewish life on these once bustling streets and, together, bring it back.