One recent Wednesday afternoon, Walter Schnerb was doing laundry in his building's basement, right next to where he runs a bookbindery. He had taped together two broadsheets of the Wall Street Journal and spread them out on a wooden table next to the dryer. Piece by piece, he took his laundry out of the dryer and folded it on the newspaper-covered table.

"Otherwise it would get dirty," the 83-year-old explained. After he was done with his laundry, he carefully detached the two newspaper sheets, folded them and put them on top of his wagon, perhaps to reuse the pages at a later time, and wheeled it through the Bordeaux-colored door of his bindery.

Always careful and correct, polite and punctual, Schnerb is the quintessential yekke, or German Jew. He represents the old Washington Heights, which in its heyday was called Frankfurt on the Hudson, where the German-Jewish community had made its home after fleeing the Third Reich.

Friendly competitors

Schnerb shares his basement with another bookbinder, Victor Sussman, who worships at the same German-Jewish synagogue. (The community is officially called K'hal Adath Jeshurun but is also known as Breuer's, based on its first rabbi.) How do Schnerb's business and Sussman’s Bookbinders Deluxe coexist when they are both serving the same clientele? "We're friendly competitors," Sussman said. "When one of us is not here, the other one answers the phone… If someone calls on my phone, it's my customer. So he just takes a message and I call back."

It's as easy as that. Not for nothing are yekkes known for being exceedingly correct at all times. The term "law abiding citizens" is not just a cliché.

Over the last few decades, however, Jewish Washington Heights has been in sharp decline. Many of the original yekkes either died or moved away. Of Schnerb's four children, just one stayed in the area. His son Simcha, who works at the local supermarket, is one of the pillars of the Breuer's community.

Schnerb has lived on the same few blocks for more than 65 years, but when asked what has changed over time, he doesn’t have much to say. "At that time much more [Jews] and Americans lived here. No Arabs, and no black or Spanish people. There were no Hispanic people at that time."

He added, "More people were actually from Germany." In the early years, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Breuer, who had led the yekkes back in Frankfurt and then in Washington Heights, gave his sermons in German, Schnerb remembered.

Part 2: Schnerb's bar mitzvah and what happend during and after Kristallnacht

This project was brought to you by:

Ashkenews - German Jewry, then and now

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What's left of Jewish Washington Heights? Besides Schnerb's bindery, this map shows you all synagogues that are still in use, plus kosher eateries!

Audio Slide Show:

This project was conceptualized by Raphael Ahren, a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism