23 March to 15 July 2012 Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in the 1920s
Jewish People’s Home
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- Present-day Max-Beer-Strasse 5 (formerly Dragonerstr. 10) in spring 2012 © Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Gelia Eisert
Dragonerstrasse in the Berlin district of Mitte – which was located in East Germany before German reunification – did not receive its current name, Max-Beer-Strasse, until 1951. It was renamed to commemorate Max Beer, the Austrian-Jewish journalist, socialist and historian.
The listed building at Dragonerstrasse 10/Max-Beer-Strasse 5 was once home to the Jüdisches Volksheim, or Jewish People’s Home. Founded by Siegfried Lehmann, the home served as a meeting place for poor Jews from Eastern Europe in the Scheunenviertel. It was officially opened on May 18, 1916.
The Jewish People's Home was based on a concept from the English settlement movement. The central idea in this social reform movement was to overcome social barriers by creating places where people from wealthy and working class backgrounds could meet, get to know each other through joint work and life experiences, and learn from each other.
The main goal of the Jewish People’s Home was to found »Jewish settlements« – first in Berlin and then in other cities in Germany. These settlements were intended not only to provide aid to the poor people living in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, but also to serve as educational centers for immigrants and German Jews, for adults and children alike.
At lectures and evening events, a sense of community was emphasized, and social and socialist ideas were also part of the home’s philosophy.
The educator Siegfried Lehmann/Salomon Lehnert (1892–1952), who co-founded the Jewish People’s Home, believed that German Jews could broaden their knowledge of Judaism in encounters with Jews from Eastern Europe. At the same time, these encounters could help Jewish immigrants integrate into German society.
Salomon Lehnert on ethnic Jewish culture
»We will teach the children of the Ostjuden to delight in the sun and flowers, to love beauty and uprightness, while the Ostjuden will teach us vestiges of religious introspection and the values that emerged in the Jewish past. An ethnic Jewish culture in Germany that is cultivated by an intellectual elite will always be an artificial product as long as we fail to draw from the source and experience of this ethnic culture in communion with its actual practitioners. A Yiddish folk song sung by German boys in a German forest gives us not a hint of the Jewish soul from which this folk song sprang.« Siegfried Lehmann, 1916
Salomon Lehnert (i.e. Siegfried Lehmann), Jüdische Volksarbeit, Der Jude 1, no. 2 (May 1916)
Salomon Lehnert, Jüdische Volksarbeit, Der Jude 1, no. 2 (May 1916). Speaker: Jeffrey Mittleman
The ideas of the Jewish People’s Home were not uncontroversial among German Jews.
The religious philosopher Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) described the home’s activists as »Western European Jews who almost exclusively had national Jewish attitudes and leaned toward Zionism but who had only an embryonic knowledge of Jewish matters.«
Scholem took a critical view of the »cult of the Eastern European Jew«, which in his view had emerged at the Jewish People’s Home. Instead of uncritically adopting allegedly Jewish values through »such nonsense and literary drivel«, he recommended that the activists learn Hebrew and read source texts. His dispute with Siegfried Lehmann/Salomon Lehnert eventually led him to break with the home.
Gershom Scholem on the Jewish People’s Home:
»When I visited the Jewish People’s Home for the first time in September 1917, I was greeted by a strange sight. The assistants and visitors were sitting on chairs; the young girls were gathered picturesquely around Gertrude on the floor, their skirts draped in a highly aesthetic manner.[...] Siegfried Lehmann was reading from a book of Franz Werfel’s poetry, and I can still hear the ›Talk at the Wall of Paradise‹ in my ears – certainly not one of Werfel’s worst poems. But I was shocked. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of aesthetic ecstasy, probably the last thing I had expected find. [...]
I went again and was again displeased, not only by the atmosphere, but also by a seriously intended discussion about the question – which I regarded as a joke – of whether a reproduction of a famous painting of the Virgin Mary could be hung in the People’s Home’s rooms – a home, I might add, where the children of poor, yet strictly orthodox Jewish families from Eastern Europe spent the day and would be picked up by their parents in the afternoon.«
From: Gershom Scholem, Jugenderinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 83–85.
Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), a theorist of anarchism and a politician in the Munich Soviet Republic, described the Jewish People’s Home in a letter to his daughter.
Gustav Landauer to his daughter Charlotte:
»May 19, 1916. My dear Lotte!! [...] The Jewish People’s Home was officially opened on Dragonerstrasse yesterday and I read a self-contained version of my concluding lecture on socialism at the opening. A large crowd turned out, with around two hundred people pressing into the three or four rooms, which weren’t too large. A small group of young people had created an attractive space there with relatively little money. The apartment is furnished in a delightful way – pleasant, cozy and serious at the same time. Students, businesspeople and workers of both sexes will meet there for informative talks and lectures, mothers will receive counseling, a day nursery is planned, and two rooms will be set up as workshops for carpentry, etc., which is quite valuable for Eastern European Jews, who often have learned only peddling or other similar occupations.«
From: Gustav Landauer, An Charlotte Landauer, in Gustav Landauer: Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, ed. Martin Buber (Frankfurt/Main, 1929), 136f.
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