A Yekke (also ''Jecke'') is a
Jew
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""Th ...
of
German-speaking origin.
German Jews are perceived in Israel as having attention to detail and punctuality.
Demography
The wave of
immigration to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s known as the
Fifth Aliyah
The Fifth Aliyah ( he, העלייה החמישית, ''HaAliyah HaHamishit'') refers to the fifth wave of the Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe and Asia between the years 1929 and 1939, with the arrival of 225,000 to 300,000 Jews. The F ...
had a large proportion of Yekkes, around 25% (55 000 immigrants). Many of them settled in the vicinity of Ben Yehuda Street in
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv-Yafo ( he, תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ, translit=Tēl-ʾĀvīv-Yāfō ; ar, تَلّ أَبِيب – يَافَا, translit=Tall ʾAbīb-Yāfā, links=no), often referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the G ...
, leading to the nickname "Ben Yehuda Strasse." Their struggle to master
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
produced a dialect known as "Yekkish." The ''Ben Yehuda Strasse Dictionary: A Dictionary of Spoken Yekkish in the Land of Israel,'' published in 2012, documents this language.
[
A significant community escaped ]Frankfurt
Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...
after Kristallnacht
() or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from ...
, and relocated to the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, where they still have a synagogue, Khal Adath Jeshurun
Khal Adath Jeshurun (KAJ) is an Orthodox German Jewish Ashkenazi congregation in the Washington Heights neighborhood, in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It has an affiliated synagogue in the heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Mons ...
, which punctiliously adheres to the Yekkish liturgical text, rituals, and melodies.
See also
*List of German Jews
The first Jewish population in the region to be later known as Germany came with the Romans to the city now known as Cologne. A "Golden Age" in the first millennium saw the emergence of the Ashkenazi Jews, while the persecution and expulsion that ...
* Chuts
*History of the Jews in Germany
The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
Machon Moreshes Ashkenaz
The American Yekkes
(Yisrael Kashkin, 2016)
K'hal Adas Yeshurun of Jerusalem Nusach Project
{{Jews and Judaism
Ashkenazi Jews topics
Jewish Austrian history
Jewish German history
Jewish Luxembourgian history
Jewish Swiss history
Yiddish words and phrases