Jews have lived in Berlin since the city was first settled in the late 1100s. However, their rights were often restricted. For example, a 1295 law prohibited wool merchants from supplying Jews with yarn. When the Black Death besieged Europe in the mid-1300s Jews’ houses were burned and they were either killed or forced to leave the city. Over the following centuries Jews continued to face restrictions on where they could live and were often required to pay extra taxes.

It was not until the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812 that Jews were recognized as citizens. The Jewish population of Berlin increased from about 3,000 in 1812 to more than 172,000 in 1925 and the city became known as a center of multiculturalism and tolerance.

In the early 1800s, the Jewish Reform movement began offering religious services in German rather than Hebrew. In contrast to more Orthodox traditions, men and women were seated together. Numerous cultural societies were founded to support the growing Jewish community including the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning founded in 1819. One of the Society’s members, the poet Heinrich Heine, wrote in 1823 that, “Where they burn books, they will also burn people.” Other Jewish organizations included the League of Jewish Women, as well as numerous religious, sport and other groups.

Men from Jewish families fought for Germany alongside their non-Jewish neighbors during World War I (1914-1918). Survivor Irma Frankel remembered that her father “went to war in 1914 and didn’t come back until 1920. He was a war prisoner in Siberia.” After the war, Germany became a representative democracy known as the Weimar Republic.

Throughout the period of the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin’s Jews made significant contributions to the thriving artistic, cultural and scientific life of the city. Albert Einstein, one of the most prominent Jewish scientists of Berlin, later emigrated to the United States.

Among survivors from Berlin, their parents’ professions ranged from furniture sales to tailoring to a linen supplier. Irma Frankel remembered growing up in “a mixed neighborhood, with both Jewish and non-Jewish businesses.” Most families spoke German at home, and were, in the words of Survivor Laure Wittner, “totally assimilated” into German life and culture.

Most Jewish children attended public school, their education often supplemented with religious instruction at a cheder (Jewish elementary school) or Hebrew school. In the 1920s Berlin had more synagogues than any other European city. Religious practices of survivors ranged from traditional Orthodox customs to more liberal Reform practices. Irma Frankel remembered, “We kept kosher and we belonged to a very nice, large synagogue… Passover was wonderful. All the relatives came.”

Although Berlin had a reputation for openness, not all residents were equally tolerant of their Jewish neighbors. In fact, the term “antisemitism” was coined by an anti-Jewish journalist in Berlin in the late 1870s. After World War I Jews were accused of deliberately sabotaging the war effort with a “stab in the back” and found themselves the victims of more frequent antisemitic attacks. Survivor Ernst Werner remembered being beaten up as a child where “I was the only ‘Jew boy’ in a school of 600 children.” Fellow Survivor Steve Landon remembered that some of his teachers “ridiculed Jews and attacked you personally if you didn’t do something right.”

The rise of Hitler in January 1933 would mean the destruction of a community that had thrived under decades of toleration. The Nuremberg laws passed in September 1935 deprived Jews of their citizenship and right to vote. Three years later, during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Survivor Benjamin Waserman remembered how his father’s clothing business was looted. He recalled watching as Nazis “broke all the glass” from the front of local businesses, throwing the merchandise “out in the street.” Between 1939 and 1943 any Jews discovered living in Berlin were deported to the concentration camps. The city was officially declared “free of Jews” on June 16, 1943.