Jewish Cuisine in Berlin

From gefilte fish to shakshuka, Anne Thomas tracks down the best Jewish food the German capital has to offer…

One of the three themes at this year’s Jewish Film Festival in Berlin – alongside 50 years of German-Israeli relations and the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two – was “Jews and Food”. The Holocaust and food might seem unlikely bedfellows at first glance but, as the event made clear through its various screenings, it was partly through culinary traditions that survivors were able to maintain elements of their identity.

In Heddy Honigmann’s short documentary Food For Love – A Shtetl That’s No Longer There, the Peruvian-born Dutch director shows her mother making Yiddish vrennekes just like the latter’s own mother used to make them in the Polish village of Grabowiec where she was raised.

As the coquettish elderly lady gives instructions on ingredients and how to knead the dough for these potato-filled dumplings, she relates the story of her flight from the Nazis (to Peru) and the tragic fate of those relatives and friends who stayed behind. The memory of the shtetl is in the vrennekes, which are also edible affirmation that the Nazis did not succeed in their mission to exterminate Jewish life throughout Europe.

Also screening was Jerusalem on a Plate with Yotam Ottolenghi, in which the London-based Israeli chef responsible for revolutionising Britain’s culinary culture talks with locals in Jerusalem about their traditions and ancestors. “Entire Jewish communities were transplanted from all over the diaspora,” explains Ottolenghi in the film. “Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia brought a taste for gefilte fish and goulash, while the Sephardi Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans brought a taste for herbs and exotic spices.” 

I salivated as I watched, praying that one day Ottolenghi would open a restaurant in Berlin. And the irony was not lost on me that these films were screening at Kino Babylon, a wonderful and historic cinema in a part of Mitte that was once the Scheunenviertel or “Barn Quarter”, the beating heart of Jewish culture in Berlin. Most of the area’s Jewish inhabitants arrived from Eastern Europe in the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries, fleeing pogroms, poverty and – later – the deathly chaos of the Russian Revolution.