\u201cThere are also wonderful people here, the country embraces and nurtures them; for many of them it was a complete rebirth, I myself have gone through it in a very intense way. And then: all these young people, suntanned and strong, and a rhythm of work, freedom and hope that is inspiring and quite intoxicating.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The author of the letter is the German-Jewish musicologist Edith Gerson-Kiwi, remembered today as a pioneer of Israeli musicology; one who made lasting contributions to the field, and connected Israel to the wider world.<\/p>\n It was written on September 29, 1936, and is just one of over 6,000 letters being catalogued as part of a research project at the European Center for Jewish Music (ECJM) in Hanover, Germany. They are part of the extensive Gerson-Kiwi Estate, the bulk of which is housed by the ECJM. A smaller number of documents can be found in Israel, including the Edith Gerson-Kiwi Archive<\/a> at the National Library of in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n It is the earliest known letter written by the young woman after her arrival in Palestine, and reflects that fateful turning point in her story: referring to the life she left behind, while at the same time mapping out the horizons of her future.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From Berlin to Jerusalem<\/strong><\/p>\n Edith Gerson-Kiwi was born in Berlin in 1908 into an assimilated Jewish family and enjoyed a typical bourgeois upbringing. As a young girl, she attended a humanist Gymnasium<\/em> (selective high school), and her evident musical talent was nurtured by piano and composition studies at the Stern\u02bcsche Konservatorium<\/em>, a renowned music academy. After gaining her university entrance qualification, she reads musicology, minoring in philosophy and literary history, at the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg and Leipzig.<\/p>\n One searches in vain for a Zionist socialization in this biography. The \u2018push factor\u2019 driving this young woman to the Orient is not the idealistic longing for the \u2018new Jew\u2019, but rather the increasing anti-Semitic pressure in Germany. The first thing to fall victim to this is her relationship with her non-Jewish fianc\u00e9 and fellow student Fritz Dietrich (1905\u20131945): while her parents, after initial hesitation, agree to the match, his parents do not accept her because of her Jewish identity.<\/p>\n The year 1933 finally brings the decisive turning point: while defending her dissertation in Heidelberg on January 30, the day of the transfer of power to Hitler, she hears soldiers and students clashing in the street.<\/p>\n The young musicologist no longer sees a future in Germany.<\/p>\n She goes to Bologna to study paleography and library science. Meanwhile, Fritz Dietrich gains clarity about his future aspirations, deciding in favor of an academic career in Germany and thus against a relationship with a Jewish woman.<\/p>\n A single encounter is all that is needed to prompt Gerson-Kiwi to take a big step: she meets a group of young Zionists from Palestine in the university cafeteria in Bologna and makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to immigrate there.<\/p>\n Many, if not most, Jewish immigrants from Germany who relocated to the Land of Israel after 1933 did not feel at home or even uplifted upon arrival, given that they came as refugees rather than idealists.<\/p>\n While the Land of Israel represented a place of yearning and a Jewish home for the Eastern European Jews, for assimilated German Jews it was an exile.<\/p>\n Yet, Edith Gerson-Kiwi\u2019s encounter with her old-new homeland is thoroughly positive, all the more so since \u201ceverything in my personal life suddenly became good once more\u201d: newly arrived in the country, she meets Kurt Gerson, an engineer and architect from Hamburg.<\/p>\n Four months later, they get married.<\/p>\n \u201cA Prussian island in an Oriental sea\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe live in a new garden suburb of Jerusalem that is populated by many German immigrants. [\u2026] We have a charming attic apartment on top of a brand-new complex of houses \u2013 and a large terrace as well, from where there is an extensive view over the hill country of Judea with its fantastic colors [and] scenery.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The garden city is Rehavia, Jerusalem\u2019s noble villa district, designed on the model of Berlin\u2019s Grunewald, to which chroniclers such as S.Y. Agnon and Amos Oz have created a literary monument. Built in the 1920s according to plans by German-Jewish architect Richard Kauffmann, this oasis, which was then on the outskirts of the city (though long since swallowed up by the city center), soon became the preferred place of residence for educated people and intellectuals of the German cultural world: professors and staff of the still-young Hebrew University, writers and journalists, doctors, pharmacists and lawyers, cultural workers and civil servants.<\/p>\n Quite a few of them had made their way from Berlin to Jerusalem, where this \u201cPrussian island in the Oriental sea\u201d became their home. Here they cultivated the German way of life and culture to which they were so strongly connected, yet which now had come to an end in Germany itself.<\/p>\n New paths to a new future<\/strong><\/p>\n Many Germans succumbed to the feeling of foreignness. Unable to heed the demand for integration, they retreat into their inner circles. Gerson-Kiwi, by contrast, opens herself up to the wealth of new impressions, is inspired by the Zionist spirit of optimism and enchanted by the “completely different atmosphere” of Jerusalem: this \u201cage-old capital of the world\u201d with its \u201cJews from all over the world, Persian, Bukharic, Yemeni, Moroccan, Samaritans, and others, representatives of all peoples, races, and religions\u201d.<\/p>\n After years of professional and personal hardship and disappointment, she discovers in the Land of Israel new forms and ways of being Jewish.<\/p>\n Shortly after her arrival in Palestine, she meets Robert Lachmann (1892\u20131939), who also arrived in 1935, and joins him as his assistant<\/a>. Lachmann, of the Berlin School of Comparative Musicology, has been tasked with the establishment of a phonogram archive for Oriental music in Jerusalem, and introduces Gerson-Kiwi to Middle Eastern musical cultures.<\/p>\n At the same time, she rediscovers Judaism: the writings of Gershom Scholem bring her, an assimilated Jewish woman of Berlin\u2019s educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsb\u00fcrgertum<\/em>), closer to a Judaism in its deeper, mystical form that transcends enlightened, rational thinking, \u201cin a time when I was rather in controversy with the principles of our Jewish religion\u201d (letter to Chanah Milner, June 20, 1972).<\/p>\n She finds and appreciates this mystical form of faith and thought adopted by her new neighbors, the Oriental Jews.<\/p>\n Tirelessly, she devotes herself to documenting, researching and popularizing their \u201cmelodic treasure trove<\/a>\u201d that is in danger of being lost in the modern melting pot that is the Land of Israel. In addition, other musical cultures of the Middle East attract her interest \u2013 those of Arabs, Druze, and Oriental Christians. She will make around 10,000 sound recordings during her lifetime, documenting the Land’s polyphonic soundscape.<\/p>\n Edith Gerson-Kiwi, Renaissance woman, becomes a connoisseur of Oriental music.<\/p>\n Conflicting reality<\/strong><\/p>\n Rehavia is also characterized by a climate of tolerance towards the Arab population of Palestine, resulting from the German-Jewish immigrants\u2019 own minority experience and the values of liberalism and universalism that Central European Jewry acquired with the emancipation. It is no coincidence that “Brit Shalom” was founded in Rehavia: a short-lived peace alliance (1925\u20131933), which adopted a moderate position in the Jewish-Arab conflict, respected the Arabs and their territorial claims, and advocated a binational state solution.<\/p>\n Edith Gerson-Kiwi shows solidarity with the Arabs throughout her life. As an \u201cold pioneering champion of Jewish-Arab friendship, of peace, and, above all, of intellectual awakening\u201d (letter to Hellmut Federhofer, June 29, 1973), she not only maintains memberships in institutions striving for dialogue and understanding, but also supports Arab musicians and music researchers, committing herself to the dissemination of Arab music through research and teaching.<\/p>\n Already proficient in several European languages, Gerson-Kiwi also learned the Arabic language and script.<\/p>\n And yet, from the very beginning, there was also a downside and a complexity to this new life in the Land of Israel and among its different communities. This complexity is revealed quite starkly as Gerson-Kiwi\u2019s description of the advantages of her living situation in Rehavia transition into acknowledgement of a bitter reality:<\/p>\n \u201cWe live here in a quiet and secluded environment; that\u2019s ideal for us, and it\u2019s also a consequence of the unrest. It\u2019s precisely here in and around Jerusalem that the contrasts are particularly stark, because everyone lives cheek by jowl. Almost every night there are gunshots in our area; during the day there are only a few streets in the Jewish \u2018center\u2019 where you can move freely, and for more than five months now a curfew has kept everyone at home from 6.30 in the evening. Overall, this is a severe shock and the first big challenge to be faced. But we all believe that we will meet this challenge, because we know what we are fighting for and how much blood has already been shed in this cause.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The mass influx of Jews, especially after 1933, had triggered the Arab Revolt (April 1936\u20131939), with insurgents demanding that the British Mandate government stop Jewish immigration, prohibit the transfer of Arab land to the Jews, and establish a national government.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.nli.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/eva-letter-scaled.jpg\")
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