You walk down the street – past people of all ages advertising colorful tattoos and piercings, others in natty suits while holding briefcases. A dizzying array of Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, vegan, German and other dining options confuse the yearning palette. Cafes are busy with friends and family dining, drinking from teeny espresso cups and quaffing liters of beer. Underneath the little red guy on the street sign a crowd gathers to wait for his inevitable transition to green – no jaywalking here. The tram glides by as bicyclists keep to their lane, of which you better be aware. And the architecture offers 18th century buildings with carved statues adjacent to structures sporting the neatly angled chrome and steel of the 21st century. A glance down reveals shiny goldish squares with German writing, one of the city’s 11,000 stolpersteines (stumbling blocks), markings of where Nazi thugs dragged people away to likely death.

Welcome to 5 p.m. on a Tuesday in Berlin, Germany.

After a week traversing the city’s remarkable array of historical offerings – the old Jewish Quarter, the Berlin Wall’s remnant, the East Germany Museum, imperial palaces financed by court Jews, and abundant spots that witnessed modernity’s greatest human deprivation. There’s one word for it: Complex.

After a month in Israel, the goal was to visit Berlin to investigate Jewish life BEFORE and AFTER the Holocaust. Berlin – legendary for both permissiveness and being the heart of the failed 1,000-year Reich – is not surprisingly a venue of continual contrast, ancient and contemporary. It’s also where modern Jewish studies reached their zenith in the first few decades of the 20th century, housing in its university lecture halls giants such as Heschel, Schneerson, Soloveitchik, Buber, Rosensweig, Scholem and more. It offered the first female rabbi in Regina Jonas – murdered in the Kingdom of Death. It’s fair to say that without 20th century Berlin, 21st century global Jewish life would be sans significant Jewish philosophy, theology and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)