If Shuli Aviad had been told, when she was growing up in Tel Aviv, that her second son would be born at a charity hospital in Berlin, she would never have dared to believe it. “Raphael was born ninety years ago in the pediatric department headed by my grandfather, Oskar Wolfsburg. He worked there until 1933, when a friend warned him that he had been blacklisted and advised him to leave with his family immediately. They left the country in two days. She says, moved. His grandfather later served as a diplomat for Israel.
Wolf, a variation of Wolfsburg, is the name Shuli chose when she changed her last name on her taxi application. The Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023 and the escalation of anti-Semitic acts that followed them, mirrored the fear that has become widespread among Israelis in Berlin.
In her apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, Shuli Aviad talks at full speed about everything she’s been through since that date. The horror of the video, the constant exchanges with his family in Israel, the impression of being there mentally. New anxiety was felt here too. As if he had to say everything, too quickly, for fear of losing himself in the intensity of these dramatic moments and memories of his family’s past. “Now I avoid speaking Hebrew to my children on the street. I thought about changing our name on the bottom door. It’s horrible, we think what my grandparents must have experienced. Even in the third generation, we all have the fear that this could happen again. However, and this is paradoxical, I think we are in one of the safest cities in the world for Jews. I prefer to live here than in London or the United States. »
Shuli Aviad, who arrived ten years ago with her tech entrepreneur husband, is not the only one to experience this stark contrast among Israelis living in the German capital. Rotem von Oppenheim, who has lived there since 2015, avoids certain neighborhoods with her children. She also changed her name on her taxi application, but she still asked her parents to come and temporarily stay in the family apartment. “They refuse, despite the sirens in Tel Aviv, She said that. I myself can’t imagine coming back to Israel, I feel more at home here. »
A multicultural city
In Berlin, on the one hand, there is a resurgence of attacks on people, Molotov cocktails thrown in front of a Jewish cultural center in the Mitte district, stars of David painted on houses, pro-Palestinian demonstrations with sometimes violent slogans against Jews. State
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