Hongkou is a district of Shanghai where many Jewish emigrants who had fledfrom Nazi Germany and Austria, especially between 1938 and 1939, were able to settle. In 1943, the Japanese Occupation Forces established a special zone there to which the emigrants had to move. This zone, later called the Shanghai Ghetto, is still regarded today as the symbol of a Jewish survival space for around 18,000 Jewish emigrants. This article examines this Jewish space in East Asia from a micro-historical perspective, with special emphasis on housing conditions.

Israelis in Germany are of interest. But for who? And why? Who are these Israelis? How can one grasp their migration to Germany, and their life-worlds in Germany theoretically and methodologically? These are the questions that this essay endeavours to explore. It bases on the data collected for “The Migration of Israeli Jews to Germany since 1990“ (GIF 1186), but ventures beyond these datasets. To justice to the diversity of the life-worlds of Israelis in Germany, the data collection was conducted within the framework of a multi-stited ethnography. This essay will introduce the pre-project research, the course of the project, and the framing, pursuant it will venture into discourses about Israelis and then into empirical data about them to test the myths for a potential kernel of truth, and to indicate which questions follow from the project results and how important long-term, non-project based research is to understand social, societal, and historic dynamics.

This study features the American Rabbi and controversial Israeli politician Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defence League in New York in the late 1960s. The League fought for the emigration of Jews from the USSR to Israel and established itself as an irreconcilable opponent of the communist Superpower. Heavily criticized in the US due to his radicalism and inclination towards extremism, and apprehended in Israel due to his racist and anti-democratic tendencies, Kahane has became one of the most important targets of the Soviet anti-Israel propaganda. The latter has brought up the enemy image of a “fascist Rabbi” Kahane and didn’t shy away from defamations and falsifications. This villainized reporting was received by many Soviet Jews who – especially the ones criticizing the regime and willing to leave the country – looked up to Kahane and considered him a hero.

The present article sheds light on a small but valuable collection of manuscripts belonged to the German-Jewish collector, Sigmund Nauheim (1874-1935). While his large collection of silver Jewish ceremonial objects is today preserved in the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt-am-Main, his manuscripts and books are housed in the National Library of Israel (Jerusalem). Besides describing the manuscripts, the article will put the Nauheim collection in the context of the trade and collection of Hebraica and Judaica in the interwar period.