Stories
SHALOM.BERLIN im Museumsshop der Neuen Synagoge Berlin
Ab sofort gibt’s eine kleine Auswahl von SHALOM.BERLIN-Shirts im Museumsshop des Centrum Judaicum in der Neuen Synagoge Berlin. Besucherinnen und Besucher können dort drei ausgewählte Shirts direkt vor Ort entdecken – mitten in einem der bedeutendsten Orte jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur in Deutschland.
Für unsere kleine Love Brand ist das weit mehr als ein neuer Touchpoint. Es ist eine besondere Auszeichnung und ein Zeichen des Vertrauens, über das wir uns sehr freuen!
Wer den Museumsshop besucht, erhält zudem einen exklusiven Rabattcode für den SHALOM.BERLIN-Webshop. So lässt sich die Kollektion auch nach dem Museumsbesuch weiter entdecken.
Seit dem Launch unseres Webshops im September 2025 verfolgt SHALOM.BERLIN eine einfache Idee: deutsche Wörter jiddischer Herkunft auf Shirts zu bringen.
Dass diese Idee nun auch im Museumsshop der Neuen Synagoge ihren Platz gefunden hat, macht uns stolz.
Unser herzlicher Dank gilt dem Team der Stiftung Centrum Judaicum für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit.
Wir freuen uns auf viele Besucherinnen und Besucher – im Museumsshop an der Oranienburger Straße und natürlich auch auf SHALOM.BERLIN.
Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin are wearing Yiddish. But not in the same way.
Yiddish words are back on the street.
On T-shirts, caps and sweatshirts. On jewellery, postcards and keychains. Sometimes even on jars of pickles.
At first glance, the idea may seem similar. Look a little closer, however, and three very different stories begin to emerge.
In Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin, three independent labels are working with Yiddish language, Jewish culture and contemporary clothing.
They may share a few words.
Perhaps even a few customers.
But they do not share the same perspective.
Los Angeles: a family story
Meshugge was created in honour of the founder’s grandfather, Mendy: a native New Yorker whose independence, creativity, eccentricity and sense of humour continue to shape the brand.
The label is designed in Los Angeles, but its emotional home is unmistakably New York.
Meshugge describes itself as a Jewish clothing brand existing at the intersection of Yiddish culture and premium casualwear. At the same time, it presents itself as an open invitation to anyone who wants to become part of the story.
Its collections carry names such as MENSCH, SCHMUCK, MESHUGGE and OY VEY CLUB.
Many of the designs work almost like wearable dictionary entries: a Yiddish term, its meaning and different linguistic variations. Clothing is accompanied by jewellery, artwork and Judaica.
The communication feels warm, personal and accessible.
It begins with one family story and expands into a broader invitation:
Let’s keep something alive together.
And because this is an American brand, that invitation is communicated quite directly through drops, collections and offers.
Heritage meets retail.
Paris: a living culture
The Yiddish Club begins somewhere else.
“For some, it’s a dead language. For us, it’s a living culture.”
This sentence is more than a slogan.
It is the entire concept.
For The Yiddish Club, Yiddish does not live in words alone. It lives in the smell of strudel, the taste of kreplach, an accent, a joke, a memory, an object and a certain sense of style.
The brand wants to make that heritage visible, alive and desirable.
Accordingly, The Yiddish Club does not simply sell clothes.
It creates a world.
That world includes Boubé’s recipes, playlists moving between old delis, dirty rap, smoky jazz and Miami in 1987. It includes pickles, postcards and collaborations with places connected to Jewish life and culture in Paris.
For a collaboration with Florence Kahn, an institution in the Marais, even a sandwich was treated as a piece of cultural heritage.
The accompanying shirt tells a story about pastrami, the Pletzl, family recipes and a historic shop in the Rue des Écouffes.
The communication is poetic, sensual and carefully curated.
A little shtetl.
A little Lower East Side.
A great deal of Paris.
You are not simply buying a T-shirt.
You are joining a club.
Berlin: the word is the design
SHALOM.BERLIN takes a different approach again.
We are not dealing with Yiddish as a closed or historical language. Nor are we creating Jewish fashion in the traditional sense.
We are dealing with words.
Words of Yiddish origin that have long since become part of everyday German.
Words such as MENSCH, SCHLAMASSEL, CHUZPE, PLEITE or MALOCHER.
They are used every day, often by people who no longer know where they came from.
SHALOM.BERLIN does not take these words out of a museum.
We put them back on the street.
Reduced to one expression and one short comment:
be a MENSCH
don’t be a SCHMOCK
MALOCHER — stay dirty
PLEITE — berlin standard
No dictionary definitions.
No folklore.
No nostalgic reconstruction.
Just language, irony and Berlin.
The visual language follows the same principle: clear typography, a limited colour palette, short sentences and real locations across the city.
Where Meshugge continues a family story and The Yiddish Club creates an entire cultural world, SHALOM.BERLIN points towards something that is already here: the Yiddish sound within the German language.
You only have to listen closely.
Same roots? Different stories.
Perhaps the three perspectives can be summed up like this:
Los Angeles wears memory.
Paris turns culture into a world.
Berlin puts words back on the street.
Meshugge seems to say: Let’s preserve this heritage.
The Yiddish Club says: Let’s live inside it.
SHALOM.BERLIN says: It is already part of our everyday lives.
None of these perspectives is more correct than the others.
They simply begin in different places:
with a person,
with a culture,
and with a language.
Perhaps that is exactly what makes them interesting.
Yiddish does not appear here as one uniform retro trend.
It is developing new forms, new images and new accents.
In Los Angeles.
In Paris.
In Berlin.
Same roots?
Maybe.
Same style?
Not at all.
Good.
Ein Jahr SHALOM.BERLIN. Geburtstagsshirt PLEITE.
Vor einem Jahr ging der Webshop von SHALOM.BERLIN online.
Seitdem ist einiges passiert. Das feiern wir mit einem Geburtstagsshirt:
PLEITE
berlin standard
Navyblau. Goldener Print.
Denn wenn schon pleite, dann wenigstens mit Stil.
Being broke never looked so glamorous.
Danke an alle, die unsere kleine Love Brand im ersten Jahr begleitet, getragen, geteilt, empfohlen oder einfach gut gefunden haben.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you're broke.
To celebrate one year of SHALOM.BERLIN, our most Berlin design returns as a special GOLDEN anniversary edition: navy cotton with a gold print. Yes!
Because if you're going to be pleite, at least do it in style.
Being broke never looked so glamorous.
Made from premium organic cotton. Unisex fit. Designed in Berlin.
Limited Anniversary Edition.
Worte finden Verbündete
Auf der Website von SHALOM.BERLIN steht: For people with brain and backbone.
Natürlich war das nie als Zugangsvoraussetzung gemeint. Niemand muss einen Intelligenztest bestehen, um eines unserer T-Shirts zu tragen.
Und trotzdem stellen wir nach knapp einem Jahr fest: In diesem Satz steckt mehr Wahrheit, als wir ursprünglich gedacht haben.
Denn die Community von SHALOM.BERLIN besteht aus bemerkenswert vielen Menschen mit Neugier, Haltung und Interesse an Sprache.
Menschen, die wissen möchten, woher Wörter kommen.
Menschen, die sich für Kultur interessieren.
Menschen, die Humor schätzen.
Menschen, die keine Angst vor Differenzierung haben.
Wer sich für Begriffe wie SCHLAMASSEL, CHUZPE oder MALOCHER begeistert, interessiert sich meist auch für Geschichte, Herkunft und Zusammenhänge.
Deshalb freuen wir uns besonders über die Unterstützung von Orten, die genau dafür stehen.
Zum Beispiel die Buchhandlung Braun & Hassenpflug.
Dort gibt es sehr gute Bücher. Dort arbeiten kluge Menschen. Und deswegen liegen dort auch SHALOM.BERLIN-Flyer sowie eines unserer Shirts aus.
Das freut uns nicht nur, weil dadurch mehr Menschen von der Marke erfahren.
Sondern weil es sich richtig anfühlt.
Zwischen Büchern, Gedanken und Gesprächen ist SHALOM.BERLIN bestens aufgehoben.
Vielleicht passt das alles sogar besser zusammen, als es auf den ersten Blick scheint.
Denn wer liest, begegnet anderen Perspektiven.
Wer liest, erweitert seinen Wortschatz.
Wer liest, entdeckt Geschichten.
Und manchmal entdeckt man dabei sogar, dass jiddische Wörter wie SCHLAMASSEL oder CHUZPE Teil der deutschen Sprache sind.
Lesen bildet.
Vielen Dank an Ulrike und Matthias von Braun & Hassenpflug für die Unterstützung.
Und an alle Menschen mit brain and backbone, die SHALOM.BERLIN bisher begleitet haben.
Koscheres Steetfood Festival
SHALOM.BERLIN had its very first pop-up at the Kosher Streetfood Festival in Berlin.
What we hoped for was a nice day, a few conversations and some interest in the shirts.
What we got was much more than that.
Throughout the day, people stopped by to say hello because they already knew SHALOM.BERLIN from Instagram. Others discovered the brand for the first time and stayed for conversations about Yiddish words, Berlin, language and culture.
For us, it was a powerful reminder that brand building is community building.
Without a marketing budget, SHALOM.BERLIN has grown entirely through people who shared posts, recommended shirts, started conversations and brought others along.
Meeting many of these people in person felt like a genuine proof of concept.
What started as an idea less than a year ago suddenly became something tangible: a community.
A huge thank you to the Jewish Community of Berlin for organising the festival and for giving us the opportunity to be part of it.
We'll definitely be back.
Until then:
don't be a SCHMOCK. be a MENSCH.
the kids are alright
A warm evening around Oberbaumbrücke.
Three people.
9 shirts.
Several words old enough to survive Berlin.
Somewhere between golden hour, concrete and passing trains, we photographed the first edition of our new BERLINBOOK editorial series.
Featuring one unexpectedly photogenic Labrador.
View the full AI-generated editorial nonsense and the very real Berlin pictures here:
Hevenu TeBe
Wir so: „Shalom, Freunde"!“
TeBe so: „Hevenu TeBe!“
Freitag: “Lass mal ein gemeinsames Shirt machen.”
Mittwoch: “Fertig.”
Aber ist das auch gut genug für die Fans? Taugt das für’s Stadion?
Hallo Fans: Sagt Ihr es uns auf Insta.
Wir hatten noch eine andere Idee.
In unserem Stil, ohne Designvorgaben und ohne Vereins-Logo.
Einfach so für die Fans von TeBe. Aber nicht nur.
Und das gibt’s jetzt bei uns im Shop für 39,90€ zzgl. Versand.
We’re at Hackesche Höfe
A little bit MESCHUGGE – in the best way.
Right in the heart of Berlin, the Hackesche Höfe have been a hub of Jewish life for centuries. Today, that spirit lives on in a new form: streetwear.
SHALOM.BERLIN has arrived at Levy’s Contor in Hof 7 – bringing bold T-shirts, caps and jackets with Yiddish attitude to the streets. It’s about language, culture, and a wink of irony. A little chutzpah. A little truth. Straight talk.
If you want to experience SHALOM.BERLIN offline, this is the place.
Don’t be a SCHMOCK. Come by.
SHALOM.BERLIN goes US. And Israel.
Germany first.
The US second.
So we decided to ship care packages across the ocean.
From Berlin to far away
We checked our website traffic.
Germany was first. But then — the US.
That caught us off guard.
Turns out, Jeremy mentioned SHALOM.BERLIN in his newsletter.
Across the ocean. Into inboxes we’ve never seen.
Jeremy Minsberg is the “Berlin Expert” offering Private Jewish Berlin Tours
So — welcome.
From Berlin, with a bit of chutzpah, we start packing.
Care packages.
Crossing borders.
If you’re ordering from the US: go one or two sizes up.
(Trust us. No offense.)
Shipping details are right here.
Hope it arrives well.
Hope you wear it loud.
Be a MENSCH. Don’t be a SCHMOCK.
KOSCHER sometimes
Berlin is where cuisines, cultures and stories meet.
Where food is never just food, but a way of understanding the city.
You can walk one street and hear five languages.
You can eat in one evening what others grow up with in a lifetime.
Nothing here stays pure.
Everything becomes mixed.
And that is exactly the point.
food as language
In Berlin, food is not only about taste.
It’s about memory. Migration. Curiosity.
Recipes travel.
Ingredients adapt.
Traditions shift.
And suddenly, what once had strict rules becomes something personal.
Sometimes it’s koscher.
Sometimes it’s just honest food.
how this collaboration happened
SHALOM.BERLIN and Elements of Food didn’t meet through marketing.
We met through perspective.
Both brands look at food not as a product, but as culture.
Not as trend, but as story.
elements of food doesn’t sell dishes.
They explore where they come from.
And that approach felt familiar.
the sentence
KOSCHER sometimes was never meant as provocation.
It is not about breaking rules.
It is about acknowledging reality.
It describes how people live.
How they eat.
How they move between traditions and everyday life.
That sentence didn’t want to be explained.
It wanted to exist.
the shirt
So we printed it.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
And we decided:
This shirt only exists together with the Elements of Food logo.
Not as branding.
As belonging.
Because this sentence belongs to a context.