Tel Aviv on the Spree

 

Some 15,000 Israelis live in Berlin, including a particularly large number of young creative workers.

 

The guests at the Sababa restaurant in Berlin’s Kastanienallee reverently dip their chunks of unleavened bread in the hummus paste that is served here on white plates, garnished with sprigs of parsley and arranged around a little mound of chickpeas. They listen to the young, Hebrew-speaking bar staff, savouring the sound of the unfamiliar language along with the hummus. The waiters talk to the guests in English. That’s no problem in Kastanienallee – the customers here are mainly young, cosmopolitan Berliners and tourists. The Sababa is also popular with Israelis living in Berlin. Beside the door is a newspaper rack containing dailies and magazines, with the first issue of Berlin’s Hebrew-language city magazine Spitz taking pride of place. The cover shows the globe of Berlin’s Television Tower floating beside a little white cloud in a blue sky, a picture that might have been taken from a children’s book.

 

The young Israelis in Berlin give the impression of making their way around the city’s hip districts unencumbered by history. The city they have chosen to live in is young and laid-back, with rich cultural scenes. Rents and the cost of living are still relatively low compared with other European metropolises, though they have been rising noticeably of late. That’s something that for years has made Berlin an attractive destination for young people from all over the world. The Berliners – who often grumble about the city’s summers being too wet 
and the cakes too dry, the tourists too slow and the cyclists too fast – have long realized that this is a city where the action can really heat up. No less astounding, for all that, are the Tel Aviv Beach Parties on the banks of the river Spree, the Meschugge-tagged club nights, the German-Israeli radio programme Kol Berlin and trendy restaurants like the Sababa, where Berliners and visitors from all over the world discover dishes like Iranian Love Bombs – beef meatballs served with tomatoes and aubergines – or End of the Road, a type of hummus made of minced beef and cinnamon. That’s Tel Aviv on the Spree.

 

Thirty-four-year-old Nirit Bialer has come along to the Sababa. She’s been living in Berlin since 2006. Together with seven friends, Nirit Bialer has created Habait – which means “the house” in Hebrew – an initiative that seeks to bring Israeli culture to Germany. “It’s struck me again and again that interest in Israel is quite strong in Germany, but Germans tend to have a rather distorted view of the country. That’s why we wanted to set up a house where we can invite Israeli artists. But we didn’t have enough money, so we devised a series of events and told ourselves that home is wherever one of the events is held.”

Since 2011, Habait’s imaginative logo, which depicts a hand-drawn doorbell sign, has been stuck on various houses in Berlin – to indicate that a Habait event is being held there. It was first to be seen on the walls of DOCK 11, the fringe theatre where Markus Flohr read from his book “Wo samstags immer Sonntag ist: Ein deutscher Student in Israel” (Where It’s Always Sunday on Saturdays: A German Student in Israel). After the reading, there was a concert featuring singer Sivan Shavit. Then one event followed the other. Habait invited best-selling writer 
Eshkol Nevo to Berlin, organized a get-together with filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger and a performance with artist Natan Ornan – not forgetting the Tel Aviv Beach Party in August 2012 that featured the bands Jachzen Bachzen and Terry Poison. The eight members of Habait’s team organized all these events in their spare time and on a low budget.

 

Nirit Bialer is no stranger to Berlin. She came here for the first time in 1995. She was 17 years old at the time and had been learning German for four years in Israel. Why on earth German, many of her friends and relatives wanted to know. Nirit Bialer’s paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. But it was precisely questions about the Holocaust and German-Jewish history that had aroused Nirit’s interest in the German language. “Back in those days it was no easy matter to find a German course in Israel,” she says. “Today there are waiting lists for such courses at the Goethe Institutes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Israelis’ attitude towards Germany has changed completely.”

As recently as 2006, there were just 3,000-odd Israelis living in Berlin. Nirit Bialer was seen as a rather exotic creature at the time. “These days, when I’m travelling on an underground train and talking on the phone in Hebrew, I can be sure there’ll be somebody who understands what I’m saying.” The Israeli Embassy now puts the number of Israelis living in Berlin at 15,000. They include lots of artists and creative workers, especially young people, as well as entrepreneurs with good ideas and students, academics and scientists who have been drawn to one of the city’s prestigious universities or research institutes. Many of them use the Hebrew-language Facebook group Israelis in Berlin to share with others their positive and negative experiences in their adopted city. Nirit Bialer and one of her female friends have also started a regulars’ table for Israelis in Berlin.

 

She feels rather wistful about Berlin’s having lost its sense of melancholy that she found so charming back in the 1990s. She could well imagine returning to Israel one day – or to some other place on the globe. But for the time being she’s staying put: the person she loves is a Berliner. She lives with her boyfriend not far from the Sababa, right in the heart of Berlin’s popular Prenzlauer Berg district. Sometimes, at night, she hears groups of Israeli tourists in the street flocking to the clubs and restaurants. “When I moved to Berlin in 2006, some of my friends declared they’d never come to Germany to visit me. Since then, they’ve all been here.”