If Shuli Aviad had been told when she was growing up in Tel Aviv that her second son would be born in the Charité in Berlin, she would never have dared to believe it. “Raphael was born ninety years earlier in the pediatric department headed by my grandfather Oscar Wolfsberg. He worked there until 1933, when a friend alerted him that he had been blacklisted and advised him to leave immediately with his family. They left the country within two days,” she says emotionally. His grandfather later served as a diplomat for Israel.
Wolf, a variant of Wolfsberg, is the name Shuli chose when she changed her last name on her taxi app. A fear reflex that has been widespread among Israelis in Berlin since the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent increase in anti-Semitic attacks.
In her apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, Shuli Aviad talks at full speed about everything she has been through since that date. The horror of the videos, the constant exchange with his family in Israel, the impression of being there mentally. Here too you could feel the new concern. As if he had to tell everything very quickly for fear of getting lost in the intensity of these dramatic moments and the memories of his family's past. “Now I avoid speaking Hebrew with my children on the street. I thought about changing our name on the door downstairs. It's terrifying, we feel what my grandparents must have felt. Even in the third generation, we are all afraid that something like this could happen again. However, and this is contradictory, I think we are in one of the safest cities in the world for Jews. I would rather be here than in London or the United States. »
Shuli Aviad, who arrived 10 years ago with her tech entrepreneur husband, is not the only one to sense this dizzying paradox among Israelis living in the German capital. Rotem von Oppenheim, who has lived there since 2015, avoids certain neighborhoods with his children. She also changed her name in her taxi application, but still asked her parents to temporarily live in the family apartment. “They refuse, despite the sirens in Tel Aviv,” she said. I personally can't imagine returning to Israel; I feel more comfortable here. »
Multicultural city
In Berlin, on the one hand, there is a resurgence of attacks on people, the Molotov cocktails thrown against a Jewish cultural center in the Mitte district, the Stars of David painted on houses, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations with sometimes violent slogans against the Jewish state.
You still have 75% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.