We’ve been working in earnest on the realisation of our Café Atara project for 4 months now. This period has mainly involved intensive research on all possible levels into the history of German Jewish experience in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. Through the research the discoveries that we have made have been both surprising and fascinating at the same time. We hadn’t expected to find so much antipathy and distrust towards the German Jewish exiles /immigrants from the East European Jews that had already settled in Palestine with their Zionist visions. “ Kommen Sie aus Überzeugung oder aus Deutschland ? “ was the greeting which awaited the 60-70,000 refugees from the Third Reich. The promised land didn’t seem to be so promising at all.
We have finally settled on 5 personalities who will be our protagonists. The acting group will deal with Gershom Sholem , Arnold Zweig, Eric Mendelsohn, Else Lasker Schüler and Beatrice Zweig. Kane and myself will be the Atara waiters with a special relationship to Mascha Kaléko and Sammy Gronemann. So they will be there too.
Even at this very early stage - the actual presentations of Atara are planned for the beginning of December- the reactions to our project have been incredibly positive. Our research has put us into contact with the leading international experts in the field of German Jewish studies, in Germany, England and Israel. All of them are very enthusiastic not only about the project itself but also about the possibilities of cooperating with us on the Atara process. For example, the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem are very interested in bringing our Atara back to Jerusalem. This would be excellent.
We are very encouraged and excited. More to follow soon.
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