In January 2022, the three hundred and twelfth issue of the magazine MB Yakinton was sent to the homes of its 2,000 subscribers around Israel, in addition to being published online. Some of its readers had emigrated from German-speaking regions in Central Europe to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s after the rise of Nazism. Most, however, were the descendants of those immigrants, their children and grandchildren.

The name of the organization to which the magazine belongs is printed in blue on the top of the issue’s cover – Irgun Yotzei Merkaz Europa (IYME) – along with its English name, The Association of Israelis of Central European Origin, and the German translation, Die Vereinigung der Israelis mitteleuropäischer Herkunft. The issue marks the nineteenth anniversary of IYME and its magazine. Both commenced their activities in 1932, the former under the name Hitachdut Olej Germania (HOG) and the latter as Mitteilungsblatt (MB). The blue title on the white background of the cover serves as a kind of implicit expression of the connection between these two institutions and the State of Israel.

While the top part of the cover, in white and blue, presents the future, the bottom part, in shades of grey, takes the reader back in time to the past. This section features an illustration by the Israeli artist Yair Noam (1922–2021) that captures the moment when a man disembarks from the ship that had brought him to a new place. With a clenched and alert expression, he holds onto a suitcase with one hand and the handrail of the stairs with the other so as not to fall on his new path. At the dock, a man and a woman are facing and waving to him. The German inscription “Fredchens Ankunft” (Fredchen’s Arrival) indicates that the man is probably a German speaker. Given the biography of Noam, who was born in Berlin as Manfred (Fred) Nomburg and fled to Mandatory Palestine in 1938 – we can assume that “Fredchen” had immigrated there as well around that time. Noam may have drawn his own moment of arrival in Mandatory Palestine.

Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 90,000 German-speaking Jews fled their homeland in Europe and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine to seek shelter from the persecution they had experienced by the Nazis. Upon their arrival, they had to struggle with cultural, linguistic, occupational, and other hardships that accompanied their new life in this foreign land, utterly different from the landscapes of their previous lives in Europe, to which they were accustomed and of which they felt an inseparable part. They discovered practical assistance and a spiritual sense of continuity of their cultural and linguistic connection to the German Sprachraum within the framework of the organization and its magazine.

More than seven decades later, both continue to support the German-speaking Jewish community and preserve their heritage in Israel. To this day, IYME and MB Yakinton are the two most important diasporic institutions for the Yekkes in Israel.