Roi Talmor, 25, is better known as D.J. Poingi, a break-core (a school of techno) disc jockey who says he comes from IsraHell. He lives in what was East Berlin, in a walk-up he shares with a photographer friend. The apartment is small and unrenovated, a holdout in the hipster neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, where every building is undergoing a facelift. Paint is peeling from the walls, and there is a shower in the kitchen. His room is a music studio, a bedroom and a lounge area — all in one — with a coal oven in the corner.

Talmor has been here for a little more than six months now, one of a growing number of young Israelis who have moved to Berlin. They each came for different, yet intersecting, reasons: Some because they couldn't tolerate the state of constant war; others for a free education, but all because of some unconscious cultural draw.

But some say that the Israeli and German cultures are not so different, after all. Naomi Rolef, a 29-year-old student of comparative literature and cinema studies from Tel Aviv, has been in Berlin for a year now. She actually has German citizenship based on “right of return” given to the descendents of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany, as her grandfather did in 1939. She said that for her, the place feels like home.

“I don't know if it is because of my German origin or if there is some kind of similarity between Israeli society and the German society,” she said. - Frank Hudec, Letter from Berlin, The Forward

Für alle angehenden Romanciers da draußen: das allein ist schon ein halber Romanentwurf: In Umkehrung von S.J. Agnons Gestern, vorgestern (billig erstanden, noch immer nicht über die ersten paar Seiten hinausgelesen) beginnt alles In Tel Aviv, dann mit dem Schiff nach Triest und mit der Bahn nach Berlin; Held des Romans ist ein junger Nichtsnutz, der auf der Uni herumhängt und sich die Idee einfängt, nach Berlin zu ziehen. Weil ihn seine Eltern los werden wollen, nehmen sie ihn beim Wort und schicken ihn hin. Er erzählt einem seiner Professoren davon, der auch die ganze Zeit davon spricht, sich in der alten Heimat (wie er es nennt) einmal umzusehen, seine akademische Karriere aber für wichtiger hält; durch diesen lernt er kurz vor seiner Abreise noch die high society kennen.