Hillel Kempler on the Scheunenviertel
Hillel Kempler on the Scheunenviertel
Now we’re going to use a very short excerpt from Hillel Kempler, someone we interviewed in the early 2000s in Israel. Hillel grew up right around here and his father had a café in one of these doorways.“So from the street-level you would go down two or three steps. There were two rooms with tables for guests, then two more rooms, and in one was the bakery with the machines. A Communist group met regularly in our pastry shop. Some were Jewish—I mean, look where we lived—and some were not Jewish.They would meet and discuss matters and they would also play games. I can still hear them calling to me: ‘Hey, Hillel, come and play dominoes with us!’They drank beer and coffee and those communists ate a lot of cheesecake but then, I have to say my father’s cheesecake was pretty well known. And these Communists, they always paid for everything.”By now you should be on Oranienburgerstrasse, so turn right, and even if you’re now hungry for cheesecake, keep going a bit farther. You are about to see the most impressive Jewish site in all of Germany.
As seen on
Centropa Jewish Berlin Tour
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