“We Are Not Animals in a Cage That Need to Be Protected”

Some people wait for the light, others light candles.

Normal life in this city of freedom means that Jews pass a police officer in his booth who greets them warmly. They walk past heavy bollards under the watchful lenses of cameras and enter a security checkpoint similar to those at airports. Bags are placed on the conveyor belt and X-rayed. Beside it, people pass through a body scanner. Afterwards, they open the door and walk a few metres to the synagogue. A quiet, spiritual calm fills the space. There is a quiet rustling, and one man whispers to ask about another man’s back problem.

Men have gathered in the synagogue for the daily morning prayer, Shacharit. They wear tefillin on their arms and heads, as is customary on weekdays. One leather box is placed above the forehead, another on the arm. Inside are parchment texts. Some of the men in the synagogue are standing, others are sitting or bent over their prayer books. But they are all praying in one direction: Jerusalem. Here, the day begins with gratitude. Even before their working day begins, the men thank God and try to collect their thoughts.

“You can’t get rid of darkness with a broom”

On the floor above, Yehuda Teichtal (53) welcomes us with open arms in a meeting room. He is chairman and chief rabbi of the Jewish community Chabad Berlin. “We are one of the fastest-growing Jewish communities in Germany, celebrating our 30th anniversary this month,” says Teichtal. For him, it is a very special occasion. And he looks to the future with complete confidence. His language is positive. He corrects words such as “difficult” to “challenging”. He speaks rapidly in German, occasionally slipping into English. He has brought community brochures. Teichtal proudly talks about the roughly 3,800 members that the Jewish community Chabad Berlin now has. He attributes this in part to his approach of building bridges and living Jewish life with awareness and openness: focusing not on problems, but on solutions. “My grandma always told me: ‘Yehuda, you can’t get rid of darkness with a broom, only with light.’”

Sixty-three members of the Teichtal family were murdered in the Holocaust. His great-grandfather, Rabbi Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal, was a well-known figure and was murdered by the Nazis on January 27, 1945, on the death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen. The family emigrated to the USA. Yehuda Teichtal was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1972 and grew up in the borough where Menachem Mendel Schneerson lived. Before the Nazis seized power, Schneerson had studied in Berlin for five years, survived the Holocaust and, from 1950, was the spiritual leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in New York. The “Lubavitcher Rebbe” was regarded as a leading thinker and the most influential figure in modern Judaism. His idea was to send young couples around the world to support Jewish life. It was an idea that lived on after his death in 1994 and eventually reached Yehuda Teichtal.

Yehuda and Leah Teichtal arrive in Berlin on August 6, 1996

After reunification, tens of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union came to Germany. This was made possible by an admission programme for Jewish quota refugees introduced in 1991. The influx caused Jewish communities across Germany to grow. As a result, there was an enormous need for religious, social and educational infrastructure for people of Jewish faith in Germany and Berlin. In the mid-1990s, the Jewish organisation Chabad-Lubavitch asked Teichtal whether he wanted to help build Jewish life in Berlin. In earlier accounts, Teichtal spoke of his initial scepticism. But his grandfather is said to have told him: “Go to Berlin. It is the strongest revenge against Hitler if we return to the place where he tried to kill the Jews.” Yehuda Teichtal and his wife Leah packed their bags and bought one-way tickets to Berlin.

On Tuesday, August 6, 1996, they arrived in the city knowing no one and speaking no German. They booked themselves into a guesthouse on Pariser Straße. Before going to bed, Teichtal went outside once more and found a telephone booth. He put in some coins and called his parents to tell them they had arrived safely in Berlin. When he hung up, he noticed a diner called “Route 66”. Teichtal remembers people asking him what he was doing there. He answered by asking them the same question. That was how they first got to know people in Berlin. The next day, his wife asked him to go to the dry cleaner’s. He went in with the same openness and warmth he still exudes today.

Although he was aware that people with beards and kippahs were not exactly part of everyday life in Berlin at the time. “If we sit in New York and talk about the Germans, how are we supposed to reconcile and build a future together?” Teichtal asks. Later, he bought a small notebook and wrote down the name of every person he met and invited them to the weekly Jewish day of rest: “Come to us for Shabbat.”

Yes, rock the boat
Yehuda Teichtal, Chairman of the Jewish Community Chabad Berlin

And yet there were also doubters among people of Jewish faith. In 2003, the Jewish community Chabad Berlin lit the Hanukkah menorah at the Brandenburg Gate for the first time. Beforehand, Teichtal recounts, someone said to him: “Don’t rock the boat.” At that time, Jewish life largely took place behind the scenes. Teichtal says he replied: “Yes, rock the boat.” Because how else are people supposed to start talking to one another? Since then, the Hanukkah menorah has stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate every year.

Over three decades, the small notebook from those days grew into an institution. The community now has almost 4,000 members, has organised holiday camps, built synagogues and, in 2023, opened the seven-storey Pears Jewish Campus in Wilmersdorf.

The “blue house” in Berlin

The centre of the Jewish community Chabad Berlin lies between Münstersche Straße and Westfälische Straße. When you leave the synagogue, you enter an open-air courtyard. There is a small pitch with football goals and basketball hoops. A man appears to be kicking a ball around with his son. The pitch is fenced in and can only be accessed with a key, while cameras keep watch. Behind it stands the “blue house”, as they call the campus here. The name comes from its blue façade. Architect Sergei Tchoban said at the time that the building, with its rounded shape, was inviting, less monumental and reflected the “modern spirit” of a school that reaches out to people and welcomes them.

In the entrance area, workers push wooden panels and tools on a handcart into the lift. The doors close and they disappear. Nearby, David Flek (37) is talking to a woman. He is wearing a dark T-shirt and stands out because of the tattoo on his arm. “I’m not really religious,” he says. But he found friends and a sense of belonging here. He now works as events manager for the Jewish community Chabad Berlin. Today, however, he is not here primarily for work. He wants to show us something and takes the stairs up to the third floor of the building. Then he opens the large doors to the sports hall. A large stage has been set up in the middle. The scene is reminiscent of a large school graduation ceremony, where teachers hand out Abitur certificates. Nearby, the workers unload wooden panels and hurry through the room. “On Sunday, I’m celebrating my wedding here,” says Flek. They want to dance, have fun and celebrate together – something they like doing in the community anyway. “That’s also a big part of it for me,” says Flek. It also helps strengthen the sense of community among people, and that is why he feels comfortable here.

The community wants to continue growing

While preparations for David Flek’s wedding are in full swing on the third floor, it is quiet on the fifth floor, at the top of the building. The cinema, which also occasionally hosts readings and other events, is empty, partly because it was the final days of the school holidays. A door leads to the rooftop terrace, from which you can look down onto the courtyard and the football pitch beside the open-air synagogue. This is where the Jewish community Chabad Berlin wants to build an extension in the coming years. The synagogue in which prayers were held that morning is to be expanded from 250 to 600 seats. Back inside the blue house, we head down from the rooftop terrace and through the building.

Almost 2,200 antisemitic incidents in Berlin

Jewish people in this city have experienced difficult times far too often in recent years. Last weekend, a group of young men subjected a 30-year-old man to antisemitic insults and threats on the U-Bahn not far from the campus. The man fled at a station and pressed the emergency call button. It is one case among so many others. The Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism Berlin (RIAS) recorded a total of 2,197 antisemitic incidents in the city in 2025. Although this represents a slight decline compared with the previous year (2,521 incidents), the number of cases has remained high since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. In the years before that, the figure was around 1,000. Almost half of the incidents take place online, one third on the street. There have also been cases of extreme violence such as the knife attack by an Islamist at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in February 2025. The convicted perpetrator, a 19-year-old Syrian, believed his victim was Jewish and critically injured a Spanish tourist.

Back in the meeting room with Teichtal. For the first time, his open, loud manner fades. Teichtal now speaks more slowly and quietly. “No day is easy, every day comes with many challenges.” He himself has been the target of antisemitic attacks. He talks about an assault around seven years ago. After the service, he was on his way home with one of his sons, who was not yet in first grade. Two men allegedly insulted him in Arabic on the street and then spat at him. “That was traumatic for a child,” Teichtal says in a very quiet voice. The next day, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited him as a sign of solidarity. But sometimes you ask yourself: Where does this hatred in society end? Women come to him and ask him whether they have a future here, Teichtal says. “We owe it to the six million murdered Jews not to allow ourselves to be intimidated, not to leave the narrative to those who want to preach hatred in society,” says Teichtal.

We are not animals in a cage that need to be protected
Yehuda Teichtal

Especially in recent weeks, almost all the leading candidates running to become Berlin’s Governing Mayor on September 20 have visited him. And all of them assured him that they wanted to protect Jewish life in Berlin. “We are not animals in a cage that need to be protected,” says Teichtal. His goal is not for Jewish life to need protection. “We are here, and Jewish life must be supported,” he says.

Teichtal came to Berlin as a rabbi with the small notebook in which he recorded every encounter. He started at the very bottom, as he himself puts it. Today, his contacts extend to the highest offices of state in the country. The Federal President visits him at home. He also maintains contact with the Federal Chancellor and the Governing Mayor. In May, the CDU presidium met on the campus. Afterwards, Friedrich Merz reaffirmed: “Jewish life belongs to Germany.” Teichtal knows them all, and they all visit regularly. And yet he recently received a message that affected him deeply. It concerns support for the main Hanukkah celebration at the Brandenburg Gate. “Recently, we received a rejection. We applied for funding from the fund for combating antisemitism,” says Teichtal. Specifically, it concerned the Action Fund to Support Projects Against Antisemitism. According to Teichtal, the amount involved was 100,000 euros. But the fund’s money is going to 33 other projects. Support alone is not always enough: the Jewish community Chabad Berlin needs security, says Teichtal — and by that he does not mean bollards or police officers. “We need a state treaty,” he says. “That would be a commitment for the future.”

There are other Jewish communities in Berlin as well. The largest in terms of membership is the Jewish Community of Berlin, with around 8,000 members. Since November 19, 1993, a state treaty has regulated the relationship between the community and the State of Berlin. This means that the Jewish Community of Berlin is no longer dependent on annual funding decisions, but receives permanent state payments. In 2024, for example, the Jewish Community of Berlin received around 16.8 million euros in subsidies, with state funding accounting for around 8.9 million euros. Teichtal stresses several times that he fully supports the funding received by the Jewish Community of Berlin. But his demand is clear: the Jewish community Chabad Berlin needs its own state treaty.

Even without a state treaty, however, Teichtal and his wife came to Berlin 30 years ago to stay. The planned extension of the synagogue is also meant to underline that commitment. Not only will there be additional seats, but also a community hall, a study house and a children’s synagogue. The building is to be completed by 2030. “Those who build, stay,” says Teichtal, his voice relaxed once again. Before the excavators roll in for this project, the community wants to celebrate first. On Sunday, there will be a wedding in the “blue house”.