Beth Hebrew, a mid-century synagogue in Phoenix, encapsulates the story of rescue, resistance and renewal of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Among its founders were the Loewy family, who rescued 1,500 people from a Vichy camp and fought in the French resistance. Their story can be read as a search for a Jewish place of safety, spirituality and material security, which culminated in Beth Hebrew. Placed in a deeply segregated city, Beth Hebrew also became a place of safety and self-empowerment for the Mexican-American Pentecostal Church and the Black Teatre roupe that used the building later.

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.