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(Jewish Group) Babylon Berlin is famous for its attention to detail -- did it get its Jewish story right? SPOILERS
SPOILERS AHEAD(If you haven't seen this series, CHECK IT OUT! Season 4 is almost over. )
After Shabbat dinner at a home in the Jewish quarter of Berlin, a visitor from New York watches the street below.
He is meant to meet a man to recover a stolen family heirloom, but his hosts, relatives he hasn’t seen in years, won’t let him leave their apartment. Abe Gold — who changed his name from Avrum Goldstein and now lives large as a gangster in America — is instead made to witness a family singalong.
Gathered together around a piano, his cousins, aunts and uncles sing a Yiddish tune with the one-word refrain of “glik,” luck.
Gold is lucky that his family took him in. Parting the curtain of the window, Gold sees police under the streetlamps — he is wanted for kidnapping two women related to the man who stole his father’s diamond.
His uncle, observing the trap he avoided, says “our ancestors were not stupid; on Shabbos you stay home.”
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I can't imagine Grammie allowing piano playing or secular music at Passover or New Years.
“The mixed singing at home in the family, especially of zmirot,” Jewish hymns, “is quite likely,” Michael Meyer, a renowned scholar of German Jewish history, wrote in an email. Secular songs, like the one sung by Gold’s family, would have been less likely, though not out of the question, Meyer said. “On the other hand, piano playing in a traditional home after the entry of Shabbat strikes me as most unlikely.”
“To play a piano definitely was not proper for an Orthodox family on Shabbat,” Hanno Loewy, director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems in Austria said in an email. Singing was kosher, “but secular songs I also would not expect.”
“To play a piano definitely was not proper for an Orthodox family on Shabbat,” Hanno Loewy, director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems in Austria said in an email. Singing was kosher, “but secular songs I also would not expect.”
But, that said - we did get a scene immediately preceding the Shoah in the Weimar Republic that re-humanizes the people murdered by the Nazis.
Haven't watched episode 10 yet - even though it is available. I'm going to go back and watch episode 8 through the eyes of the folks interviewed in this article.
And I loved Gold placing the rocks on his father's grave.
My husband did not understand the tradition. See - I learned something at the JCC's day camp! 
