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AYekke (alsoJecke,Jekke[a]) is a humorous, mildly derogatory[1] reference to aGerman-speakingJew inIsrael.[2] In Germany, they were contrasted with their Eastern European counterparts, theOstjuden.
There are several suggestions on the etymology of the word, all of them being inconclusive.[3][1] In the older Yiddish dictionaries the word was translated as "German", but this meaning was not preserved, neither in Yiddish, nor Hebrew.[1] The word is productive in Yiddish and when borrowed intoHebrew it had become productive there as well, accepting Hebrew patterns of word formation. For example, in Yiddish the feminine for isyekete, feminine plural:yeketes, while in Hebrew it isyekit andyekiot, respectively.[1]
The wave ofimmigration to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s known as theFifth Aliyah had a large proportion of Yekkes, around 25% (55,000 immigrants). Many of them settled in the vicinity of Ben Yehuda Street inTel Aviv, leading to the nickname "Ben Yehuda Strasse". Their struggle to masterHebrew produced a dialect known as "Yekkish" (Yiddish:יעקיש, 'yekish'). TheBen Yehuda Strasse Dictionary: A Dictionary of Spoken Yekkish in the Land of Israel, published in 2012, documents this language.[2]
Some 60,000 German-speaking Jews immigrated to Israel in this wave, and they and their descendants made profound contributions to Israeli culture and society. Too, theirstereotypicalMiddle European formality, given the context of rough-hewnsabra culture, readily made the yekke a long-standingpunchline, the omnibuscliché being that they were "overly formal, somewhat uppity, meticulous to the extreme, and famously punctual".The cohort was featured at theHecht Museum in December 2025.[4]
A significant community escapedFrankfurt afterKristallnacht, and relocated to theWashington Heights neighborhood of New York City, where they still have a synagogue,Khal Adath Jeshurun, which punctiliously adheres to the Yekkish liturgical text, rituals, and melodies.[5]
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)
