Entrance to the Konditorei Kempler and the "Krakauer Café" on Grenadierstraße, Berlin 1926
© Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Hillel Kempler

As a hub connecting East and West, Berlin was a place of refuge and a way station for tens of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe starting in the late nineteenth century, and particularly after the First World War. Most of them were refugees from Russia, Lithuania, and Galicia, escaping war, pogroms, or revolution. The city remained a center of Jewish emigration in Europe for more than a decade. With its multilingualism and complex internal networks, the community of Eastern European immigrants brought about a heyday of Jewish culture in Berlin. Many of the poor Jewish immigrants lived in the Scheunenviertel section near Alexanderplatz, others in middle-class Charlottenburg, a district of the city referred to as "Charlottengrad" on account of the high proportion of Russians who lived there.

The exhibition was developed in cooperation with the research project "Charlottengrad and Scheunenviertel: Jewish Immigrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s" at the Eastern Europe Institute of the Free University of Berlin.