Pastry shop and café Moritz Dobrin

Moritz Dobrin (1872-1951) arrived in the booming Reich capital from East Prussia as a young man and quickly expanded after opening his first café at Alexanderstraße 14c. He advertised in the Jewish press and also explicitly addressed a Jewish clientele who bought kosher products. Thus the barches, the yeast pastries available in his stores on Fridays for Shabbat and holidays, or matzos for Passover. His cafes and stores offered a wide selection of the most delicious pastries and desserts - a price list, a copy of which has been preserved in the Jewish Museum Berlin, lists them all! Moritz's brother, Isidor Dobrin also ran a few cafés in Berlin under his name, and both wives of the store owners worked in the businesses. The Dobrin cafés were well-known and popular in the city, quite a few postcards of them have survived. In November 1938, the cafés and stores were destroyed during the "Kristallnacht", and the owners were dispossessed. Both brothers with their wives were deported, Moritz and Helene Dobrin to Theresienstadt, where only Moritz survived. Isidor and Rosalie Dobrin perished in Auschwitz.