FOUR

The Refugees’ First Years in the United States

Employment, Settlement, Congregations, and the Encounter with American Society and American Judaism

While emigration saved the lives of rabbis and scholars from Germany, their arrivals and early years in the United States were not necessarily celebratory. They experienced a difficult phase of transition and adaptation while seeking a place in both American society and American Judaism, and they encountered a new global Jewish context in which Europe, the former center of their lives, no longer played much of a role. Their efforts to adapt and reconstruct their lives were accompanied by worries about what they had left behind: their loved ones, ties to their old and increasingly dispersed communities, the course of the Second World War, and the increasingly dire information about the fate of Europe’s Jews.

While some of the rabbis enjoyed private or institutional support upon their arrival, many came to the United States with unrealistic expectations of life in general and of their profession and American Jewish religious life in particular. They had to deal with a loss of status, community, and cultural context. An essential part of the refugees’ new beginnings was becoming American in a legal sense. They needed to fix the loss of citizenship and nationality caused by Nazi racism, a humiliation they encountered in several stages starting in 1933. Since being stateless meant being vulnerable, with no protection of a nation or consular services and with limited agency as aliens in the United States, refugees needed to become American citizens to build a future, find opportunities, and resume careers or begin new ones.

Age, social capital, and access to professional networks helped to determine how quickly German refugee rabbis felt settled in the United States, as did their ability to connect with American Jews, an American congregation, and the American rabbinate. Their success in these endeavors depended on when the refugees experienced displacement and how they negotiated their complex transnational identities, backgrounds, skills, and knowledge with the contemporary needs, trends, and challenges of American Judaism.

The Challenges of Cultural Integration: Rabbinical Students and American Seminaries

The youngest of the refugees, the rabbinical students, initially reacted to the religious forms of American Jewry with awe, as Wolli Kaelter, W. Gunther Plaut, and Richard Damashek state in their publications. When Kaelter, Plaut, Alfred Wolf, Leo Lichtenberg, and Herman Schaalman arrived in Cincinnati, they were the only ones wearing head coverings, and they experienced a broad rejection of Zionism and a strong commitment to ethical universalism inside and outside the synagogue.¹ The splendor of the newly built campus of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati impressed them. It differed substantially from the simple and functional building of the Hochschule and signaled a high degree of social acceptance and pride.

Their first meeting with college president Julian Morgenstern confused them not only because it took place in the college gym—which established an unexpected dedication of a professor to athletics—but also because Morgenstern was naked and wet when he stepped out of the pool to greet them with no reservations whatsoever. The students were then invited to Nelson Glueck’s home, where they were offered bacon and eggs for breakfast, a dish that was customary at HUC but shocking for the guests from Berlin.²

Both the scholars and American rabbis at this college appeared to be shockingly different from what the students were accustomed to. Rabbi David Philipson told them to never wear hats or yarmulkes for services or elsewhere, a custom they were reluctant to give up because it was part of their Jewish identities. Rabbi Mort Cohen and particularly his wife, Sally, overwhelmed them with their style and behavior because both the rabbi and rebbetzin differed from their European counterparts, who had a spiritual and unpretentious appearance. Cohen was described by Kaelter as having a physique and appearance resembling that of Mexican American film star Ramon Novarro, which departed from the outward appearance of a modest scholar. Sally had an even greater effect on the group: they had never seen a rebbetzin (wife of a rabbi) who drove a car, let alone on the Sabbath, which is what she did when she picked them up for services. Kaelter described Sally Cohen and their trip to the synagogue as a rebbetzin beyond everything he had ever experienced, as “a buxom blonde, who looked like Jean Harlow and invited us to her lovely car for a ride to the temple. . . . The radio was blaring in her car.”³

Plaut described the encounter in his autobiography, relating the awe the boys felt when they met Sally. They came to understand that in America, the wives of rabbis could be profoundly different from the efficient and unassuming rebbetzin they knew in Germany.⁴

Ah America, what a great, marvelous and frightening land you are! How many surprises you harbor! I had seen rabbis’ wives before, but none of them looked remotely like Sally. Furthermore, I did not know a single rabbi who owned a car, let alone a rebbitzin [sic!] who would drive one. Last but not least, this was Sabbath and none of us rode on the day of rest. Whatever our background, it was simply not done at the Hochschule.

Sally discerned our embarrassment. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” she quoted—and what was there left for us, but to follow her?⁵

The band of five stood out as “Germans”⁶ among the student body of HUC during the late 1930s, and they all belonged to the Gate Club, a German refugee club in Cincinnati.⁷ Their stories and the recollections of Joshua Haberman and Nathan Peter Levinson underscore that their transition into student life at HUC and the University of Cincinnati went smoothly and was ultimately successful, despite setbacks like comments on their comparatively “Orthodox” religious practices and the academic expectations they had to fulfill.⁸

They learned English quickly during their studies, though they might have struggled with a German accent for a while. They worried about their families abroad, but Kaelter was able to bring over his mother and brother, and Plaut helped his brother Walter and his parents immigrate to the United States.⁹

Herman Schaalman was reunited with his family in the United States, and Joshua Haberman welcomed his parents in 1940 in New York, two years after his sister had joined him and found a job in Cincinnati with HUC’s support.

The college also assisted and at least partially advised the other students in the naturalization process and helped them sponsor the rescue of close relatives. Friendships with fellow students and their families generated empathy and active support. HUC student Lou Silberman befriended “the Germans”—perhaps due to curiosity about his own German background—and talked his family into providing an affidavit of support for Kaelter’s naturalization.¹⁰

The college family in Cincinnati provided a new and lifelong support system for the newcomers because the social fabric in and around HUC was highly inclusive and very supportive. Academically, the refugee students worked hard and were soon successful. Plaut, the oldest, graduated and entered the American rabbinate in 1939. His fellow students from Berlin followed him soon after.

After a trip to Cuba in the summer of 1938 to take out first papers for citizenship,¹¹ Plaut prepared for his ordination to the American rabbinate. At that time, he took another step that reinforced his sense of belonging in the United States: he fell in love. His serious romance with a young American woman, Elizabeth Strauss, a native of Cincinnati, led to their marriage in 1938 and a family of his own.¹²

The other students soon followed in his footsteps: Kaelter married Sarah Shapiro in 1938, Schaalman wed Lotte Stern in 1941, Wolf took Miriam Jean Office as his wife in 1940, and Lichtenberg tied the knot with Hilde Levor in 1939. Finding a spouse and starting a family positively affected their lives, especially if they were also able to reunite with some members of their German families. Their early arrival as well as the institutional and personal support they received from HUC in the process of immigration were key to the successful rescue of their family members.

Not everyone enjoyed the same advantages. The group’s teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, arrived in Cincinnati in March 1940 after a difficult flight via London. He entered the country on a visitor’s visa that did not allow him to sponsor family members. His status could not be changed as quickly as was necessary. Heschel learned in 1943 that his mother and sister had been killed in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he suffered greatly from that news.¹³

Both the students’ recollections and the correspondence on their admission and arrival underscore that their professors, especially Julian Morgenstern, felt a special responsibility for the new arrivals from Germany. Morgenstern and other faculty members had lived in Berlin or knew the students’ fathers. Some professors were obliged to the young men based on the recommendation of their former rector, Ismar Elbogen. Others simply felt a deep connection to the young men’s German background and great sympathy for them.

HUC in Cincinnati advocated commitment to tradition and modern Judaism, both in scholarly interests and in private relationships between the refugees and their American hosts and counterparts. The unique German history of Cincinnati as a city and the friendly openness of the American Midwest may have added to the climate of familial acceptance and integration, something that did not exist in the other two rabbinical seminaries in New York.¹⁴

A closer look at their research projects and rabbinical theses shows that these refugees proudly studied topics related to the nineteenth-century history of the German Reform movement, an area in which their fluency in German and background in European history helped them excel.¹⁵ They took on these topics not to avoid reading English literature but because they were interested in the common roots of the American Reform movement and liberal Judaism in Germany. This was acknowledged and valued in Cincinnati, and they were encouraged to make these academic contributions as an expression of being part of the extended family.¹⁶

For the students, this was an important signal. It highlighted that modern Judaism, even though it had different features and forms in the United States, was also welcomed and practiced in this country, and they could feel that same welcome and sense of belonging in America with their Jewish identities intact. This inclusiveness may also have been nurtured by their course of study and research, in which the recognition of a common past and the pursuit of a joint approach to the study of Judaism played a role. Also important was the presence of their German (refugee) professors, many of whom had also transferred to Cincinnati.

The presence and reputation of the German refugee scholars on campus provided a special context to the students who—as this fact demonstrated—did not come from the periphery of modern Judaism but from its center in the heart of Europe. Even though they had left this world behind and might have been seen as greenhorns, their origins gave them prestige, standing, and distinction in this new country. Their integration benefited from this situation, as did their motivation to take advantage of the opportunities they received as a lucky minority rescued from the Shoah. Fully aware that they were witnessing the end of an era and were an integral part of the process, they noted that they also had a future in American Judaism, which enhanced their acculturation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, HUC welcomed many German refugee students to its growing campus system. In 1950, a second campus was created in New York City through the merger with Stephen Wise’s Jewish Institute of Religion, and in 1954, the college launched a campus in Los Angeles. In all of these institutions, “the second generation” made a lasting impact and often attended several campuses during their academic careers.

In Cincinnati, many of the young men in this group were part of the student body from the 1930s to the 1960s. Their numbers continued to grow and provided the college with a strong German-Jewish flavor. Among those who attended the Cincinnati campus were Herman Schaalman, Alfred Wolf, Wolli Kaelter, Alfred Lichtenberg, W. Gunther Plaut, Walter Plaut, Joshua Haberman, Ernst Lorge, Nathan Peter Levinson (Lewinsky), Alexander Schindler, Jakob Petuchowski, Joseph Asher (Ansbacher), Steven Schwarzschild, Alfred Gottschalk, Albert Friedlander (Friedländer), Bernhard N. Cohn, Walter Jacob, Robert Lehman, Ralph Kingsley (Kissinger), Gustav Buchdahl, and Frank Fisher (Fischer). Bernhard Cohn and Alfred Gottschalk also studied on the New York campus, and Gottschalk and Hillel Cohn stayed on the Los Angeles campus of HUC, which housed twenty-three students. While some of them immigrated with their parents, others were rescued by family members (such as Walter Plaut, whose older brother W. Gunther was studying at HUC) or international student organizations (such as Ernst Lorge), or they were saved by international aid organizations (such as Jakob Petuchowski).

Petuchowski did not arrive in the United States until after the war. He had been saved by a Kindertransport (“children’s transport”) and had spent the war and immediate postwar years in Britain, where he studied with Leo Baeck and Arthur Löwenstamm in London. Coming from an Orthodox family with a long lineage of rabbis and comfortable in a German-Jewish milieu, he came to the United States in October 1948 to study at HUC for the rabbinate. He was ordained in 1952 and obtained a doctorate at the college in 1956. For several years after his ordination, he served as a rabbi. After completing his dissertation, he was offered a position as a professor of rabbinics (later theology and liturgy, then Christian-Jewish relations) at HUC in Cincinnati, where he joined the growing number of German-Jewish faculty members and was known for his dedication to scholarship in theology and Christian-Jewish relations.

Like Petuchowski, Joseph Asher came from an Orthodox background and arrived in the United States after the war. He had fled with his mother and father, Jonas Ansbacher, an Orthodox rabbi trained at the Breuer Yeshiva, to Britain. There he continued his religious education at the Orthodox Tree of Life Yeshiva and received his ordination in 1940. Interned to Australia for the duration of the war, he joined the Australian Forces, where he served as military chaplain. As in Petuchowski’s case, Asher’s encounter with Baeck during a visit to see his family in the immediate postwar years in Britain likely sparked his interest in modern Judaism and motivated him to move to the United States with his Australian wife, Fae, in 1947 and attend HUC.

There, he familiarized himself with Reform Judaism and stayed until 1948, when he started taking on small pulpits in the United States. For a long time, he and Fae felt a sense of displacement after the family’s travels and dispersion on an almost global scale.¹⁷ They were not sure where they belonged or where they should put down roots, and they even considered going back to Australia.

Most of the young men in this second generation had much easier access to American Judaism, the American congregation, the English language, and the mentality of the congregants. Growing up in American public schools, attending British or American universities, or officiating in the Australian Army, they were fluent in English at the beginning of their academic careers, or they learned it during their studies at the seminaries. Although they all may have stood out as “Germans” due to their background and culture, they mastered cultural assimilation and the transition into American Jewry.

The seminaries were an essential transmission belt of their cultural transformation and a door opener for their careers. Here they were introduced to American academic and professional culture, taught the knowledge and skills needed in the American rabbinate, and given access to social capital, group belonging, and lasting friendships, all of which were essential for building a successful future in the American rabbinate. Some of them, like Asher, Petuchowski, and Jacob, came from families with a long-standing tradition in the rabbinate and were motivated to continue this tradition. Others may have been attracted by an affordable graduate education in an institution where their history and background as Jews were known and respected and where they could immerse themselves in American Judaism—not as Germans or Americans but as Jews.

Even though they were working intensely on their American careers, these young men upheld the ethos of what it meant to enter the rabbinate in Germany. This included a strong identification with Wissenschaft, which was often reflected in their interest in teaching at colleges and universities. Their knowledge of Judaism was often deeper than that of their fellow students due to their European or family background, where such knowledge was cultivated and passed on to the next generation from an early age. But they were also shaped by the worldly and sometimes extremely progressive outlook that distinguished German Jewry. This also affected their rabbinate and their decision to earn a doctorate, which was a prerequisite to enter the rabbinate at German seminaries but was not necessary for a career as an American rabbi.

At HUC, more than at other colleges, this group’s presence in and impact on the religious movement, the college, and the rabbinical organization resonated in a unique way, as their future careers demonstrated. At HUC, their cultural differences and hybridity did not make them outsiders; rather, they were a group with an essential role and impact, a remnant of the historical relationship the college and the Reform movement had with their center in Germany. Driven by a youthful desire to understand their history, fate, and survival, many of these young students found leadership positions in American Judaism and pondered the future of modern Judaism in its new American home.

Cultural Encounters and Scholarship at the American Rabbinical Schools

The experiences of acceptance and integration of older German refugee scholars on campus were quite different from those of the younger students. By 1941, there were ten German refugee professors on campus: Samuel Atlas, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Michael Wilensky, Eugen Taeubler, Julius Lewy, Alexander Guttmann, Isaiah Sonne, Eric Werner, Franz Landsberger, and Franz Rosenthal, in addition to historian Selma Stern-Taeubler, who worked in the American Jewish Archives.

While the students acclimated fairly quickly to the differences between the academic cultures, between the Hochschule and HUC, and between liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism, the German refugee scholars struggled with the integration process and Americanization. Their lack of proficiency in English was much harder on them than it was for the students, whose youth helped them learn the language more quickly and easily. These men found their status as professors and scholarly role models undermined by being unable to teach efficiently or find the right words. Even worse, some of them, such as Michael Wilensky, were mocked for their inability to express themselves properly.¹⁸

The refugee scholars knew that the college had not only saved their lives but also welcomed them, however, they were frustrated by Americans’ indifference to the Second World War and the fate of Jews in central Europe, an issue of special concern to them that isolated them from American society.¹⁹

Except for Heschel and Rosenthal, the refugee scholars had held advanced, if not eminent positions in Germany. In America, their role was reduced to that of a visiting professor, limited in tenure and compensation. In fact, the refugees did not even officially belong to HUC faculty as long as they held temporary contracts, which meant that they were not allowed to attend faculty meetings or contribute to faculty decisions. This painful and degrading experience underscored the degree to which their careers had been affected.²⁰

Their identities never completely changed; they were scholars and teachers at home in the German university system, highly immersed in Wissenschaft, and much less concerned about skillful teaching. In ongoing complaints against the college’s standards, they expressed their frustrations with a student body from the American South and Midwest that was much younger, less academically advanced, and deficiently educated in Judaism.²¹ Many students from Germany could only be admitted to study in Cincinnati, instead of at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, because they did not have a BA degree. This fact proves that their criticism reflected two sides of the same coin and may have saved the lives of a number of students from Germany.

The “chalk and talk” teaching methods at HUC were antiquated, stiff, and unappealing to many of the students.²² As Wolli Kaelter recalled, “Subjects, rather than students were taught.”²³ This caused frustration among students and graduates who complained that they were not properly prepared for their role as rabbis in the communities. Except for Samuel Cohon, a professor of theology, none of the faculty members had ever held a pulpit. Yet it would be wrong to blame the situation exclusively on the refugee scholars because all students, including the refugees, complained bitterly about the situation. It is possible that the refugee students were particularly aware of the problem because they had been instructed in practical rabbinics in the German seminaries.

The presence of the German refugee scholars, however, added to the strong scholarly ambitions of the college and its identity as a research college rather than a place to educate rabbis. The recruitment of the refugees used funds that could have gone toward younger colleagues who might have taught practical rabbinics or changed the relationship between students and faculty as a German Seminarrabbiner (seminary rabbi) would have done. A Seminarrabbiner was typically a young faculty member with experience as a rabbi and scholar who ministered to the student body and served as the students’ mentor.²⁴ This triggered a college-wide discussion in 1943 on the value of more practical rather than scholarly training in HUC’s curriculum, and it was decided to hire someone who could serve as a mentor and confidant to the student body, ease the concerns about practical preparations for leadership in Jewish communities, and inspire students to want to teach and live Judaism.²⁵

Many of the refugees were accustomed to living and working in large urban centers in Berlin or other European cities, so acclimating to Cincinnati was difficult. Samuel Atlas and his wife spent a lot of time in New York City.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was estranged from both American Reform Judaism and Cincinnati. The city was located in the Midwest, bordered the American South, and lacked any connection to a vibrant Jewish community outside the strongly assimilated German-style college community, where he did not fit in ethnically or theologically.²⁶ Because he depended on his scholarship to build a future for himself, he stood out as being eager to please yet reluctant to attract negative attention.²⁷ Like Atlas, he was looking for a position in New York, stayed there frequently, and maintained a close relationship with Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the JTS, and Jacob Hartstein, registrar of Yeshiva University. After landing a position at the JTS in 1945, Atlas moved to New York in 1951 to continue teaching at the newly established New York campus of HUC-Jewish Institute of Religion.

A rivalry between Heschel and Atlas developed during their time in Cincinnati and involved much more than their mutual interest in relocating to New York City, one of the few US cities with a lively Jewish community and a broad variety of ethnic and theological backgrounds that was comparable to the cultural and intellectual life of European metropolises. Both men wanted to live and work there, but the older and more experienced Atlas held the more prestigious position at HUC. Nevertheless, the JTS hired the young Abraham Heschel rather than Atlas when a position opened up. At HUC, both men had competed for the same set of courses—philosophy and the Talmud—which they taught based on their very different approaches to Judaism.

Atlas was born in Lithuania, received a traditional Jewish education at the Slobodka Yeshiva, and taught at the Institute for Judaic Studies in Warsaw before moving to London. Unlike Heschel, who had a traditional Hassidic background and upbringing and continued to gravitate toward Hassidism and Jewish Orthodoxy, Atlas was an Orthodox Jew who strictly held a neo-Kantian rationalist perspective that Heschel rejected. Heschel negated the rationalist theology of Herman Cohen that Atlas upheld, and this became a source of conflict between the two men once Henschel published his dissertation.²⁸

Conflict among the scholars was not limited to teaching matters and scholarly prospects. After a period of adjustment, almost everyone at HUC was concerned about their scholarly future, their academic status, their prospects, and especially their income.

Alexander Guttmann, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at HUC in Cincinnati and a full faculty member, complained to Julian Morgenstern in October 1942 about the college’s disregard of his experience and prior academic status with regard to his salary. When he was hired as a full professor, he had been promised a salary of $3,000 a year with an annual raise of $300 until a maximum of $6,000 a year was reached. Guttmann argued that he had received “by far the lowest salary paid to full professors” and that his experience and status at the Hochschule were being ignored.²⁹ He claimed that he could not make ends meet with this salary and asked Morgenstern to submit his request for an “adjustment” of $300 to “approach the living standards of the other members of the College faculty” to the board of governors at HUC at their next meeting.³⁰

Morgenstern submitted Guttmann’s request, but the board of governors did not share Guttmann’s view and rejected his request for an adjustment of his salary.³¹ Guttmann was not the only one dissatisfied with his salary, as we learn from Morgenstern’s correspondence. Other faculty members approached him for a raise because they felt their salaries did not properly reflect their actual value and qualifications as scholars.³²

The refugees’ correspondence with Julian Morgenstern reveals even deeper conflicts not only with the college faculty but also among the refugees themselves. These conflicts originated from past irritations and affronts in the German (academic) culture. Emigration and other factors, such as the Shoah, the democratic American environment, and academic culture, distorted old hierarchies and gave new agency to those who had been suppressed in the Old World. In other cases, the new environment gave them a more promising framework and value system with which to hurt a former “enemy” and pay back the insult.

In March 1947, Eugen Taeubler gave Julian Morgenstern a memorandum for the board of governors in which he vehemently protested against “calumnies” regarding Eugen Taeubler’s person that were supposedly being spread by his colleague and fellow refugee Julius Lewy.³³ Taeubler, who belonged to the German academic establishment until 1933, informed the college of imminent legal action against Lewy for defamation and slander. In this memorandum, Taeubler details his concerns about Lewy, who had referred to Taeubler in a lecture given in 1942 or 1943 as a person suffering from a “lack of character” and as someone who “a few years ago . . . was an ardent worshipper of Hitler, today he probably adores Roosevelt.” Even worse, Taeubler argued, Lewy had tried to systematically set students and faculty against him by stating that he, Taeubler, defended known Nazis. He stressed that this type of behavior was a danger to the entire college and that Lewy should be reported to the FBI.

According to the memorandum, Lewy claimed that in Germany, Taeubler had only associated with the social classes of Junkers³⁴ and military leadership and prided himself on his connection with these Prussian elites. He stated that Taeubler also prided himself on having been the only Jew to have received an answer from the “Führer” and had only left Germany shortly before facing deportation. Lewy complained about Taeubler’s recommendations to students to return to Germany after the end of the Second World War and claimed that Taeubler had been against the promotion of Jewish professors during his tenure in Germany.³⁵

In the second part of the memorandum, Taeubler took an unequivocal stand against Lewy’s accusations, stressing that he had only met with German colleagues who were anti-Nazis, such as Hermann Ranke³⁶ and Hajo Holborn.³⁷ He also stated that his contact with those he called “Junkers” was limited to his military service during the First World War, where he had met one such aristocrat in the army. This person later enrolled at the University of Berlin, and Taeubler met with him once a semester.

Taeubler prided himself on developing a plan for the evacuation of a large number of Jews to Palestine and submitting the plan to the Reich Chancellery, meaning to Adolf Hitler himself, through contacts he had with a professor at Heidelberg University. While he received an answer from the Reich Chancellery that Hitler was interested in the project and that the plan was referred to the Minister of the Interior, Taeubler never received an answer from that department. He stressed that he never recommended to students to return to Germany and explained that he stayed in Germany until the last minute only “because he considered his work essential.”

Finally, he turned to Lewy’s accusation that he had prevented the promotion of Jewish professors. This was most likely the basis for the strained relationship between Lewy and Taeubler and the resulting antagonism. Taeubler, who was professor ordinarius (chair) at the University of Heidelberg, was involved in hiring and promotions, which included processing Lewy’s application for the position of chair at the University of Giessen. Taeubler explained that the faculty did not want to fill the position again in 1927, but decided to permit an “associated professor”³⁸ to fill this position. Lewy, at the time a Privatdozent³⁹ in Giessen, was considered. As part of the hiring process, Taeubler served as an external reviewer and claimed that he had recommended Lewy as professor extraordinarius, an advanced but still untenured rank of a professorship.⁴⁰

While Taeubler stated that he had fulfilled his collegial duties and thus demonstrated an appropriate measure of loyalty with his recommendation, Lewy may have hoped for a stronger promotion from a fellow Jew and a scholar in his field so that he might advance to a tenured full professorship or even chair at the University of Giessen. Both Lewy’s accusations and Taeubler’s explanations in his statement point to a conflict in which Taeubler’s loyalty as a fellow Jew was questioned and his social standing, class, and elitism were attacked. Taeubler made it clear in the memorandum that he was defending his “honor” and his position in the hierarchical German university system—a system in which his position was far higher than that of his colleague Lewy, who was eight years older than Taeubler.⁴¹

This episode shows that the refugees did not necessarily start anew in their American environment but continued to be plagued by old rivalries, confrontations, habits, and identities that were related to their former lives and shaped their hybrid identities. The new American environment, the Second World War, and a different academic culture at a Jewish college may have turned this old world upside down and inspired Lewy to challenge Taeubler on the grounds of what he called his “German” values and a self-understanding that no longer fit into the new American environment.

This assumption is reinforced by an official letter of apology Julius Lewy wrote to Julian Morgenstern on 22 April 1947,⁴² in which he stated: “Although certain remarks of Dr. Taeubler’s had demonstrated to me that the environment to which he had been exposed . . . had left their imprint on his way of thinking, I did not intend at all to depict him as a man who consciously advocated Hitlerite doctrines or to suggest this to anyone else.” He stressed that he regretted the misunderstandings and suspicions that had troubled Taeubler over the past six years and said he would do all he could to end the animosities.⁴³ Nevertheless, Morgenstern’s efforts to mediate the situation between the two men failed, and Taeubler never accepted the apology.⁴⁴

Taeubler’s strong attitude and arrogance can be seen in other contexts; for example, in a complaint to the historian and director of the American Jewish Archives, Jacob Rader Marcus. In a letter dated 8 October 1950, Taeubler wrote on behalf of his wife, Selma Stern-Taeubler, a highly qualified historian. Selma, who had found a position as a historian in the American Jewish Archives under Marcus, did not speak for herself. Instead, her husband complained for her, expressing his concern about how Selma’s position at the institution was described.

Selma had been listed in the most recent college catalog as an “archivist of the business manager,” a title that indicated an administrative responsibility rather than a scientific or scholarly one and completely minimized her qualifications as an advanced historian. In a letter to Jacob R. Marcus, Taeubler took this as an unbearable degradation and an affront to his wife and his “consent, to follow your [Marcus’s] wish and accept your [Marcus’s] offer,” which he felt completely ignored Selma’s actual qualifications as a highly advanced historian.⁴⁵

While at first, Taeubler seemed to be making a case for the acknowledgment of his wife’s high qualification as historian, a second look at his words reveals the double standard he was applying. Taeubler diminished his wife by referring to her in the third person and stressing that she needed his consent to accept the position in the first place—a position he considered his wife to be overqualified for. This assessment of her qualifications might have been accurate, but his statement also underscored the double standards of a classic bourgeois view on the “appropriate” gender roles to which he adhered, even though they did not match the advanced scholarly achievements of his wife.

Similarly detailed information on the integration of refugees, their challenges, and their (cultural) flaws is not available from the JTS or Yeshiva University because these colleges simply did not accept as many students and faculty as HUC did. For several decades at HUC, about a third of the faculty had a refugee background and the college continued to attract students from German refugee families.

Institutions like the JTS, located in a metropolitan environment far from any sort of German ethnic enclave and the rescue effort, were far more conscious of the potential for cultural clashes between Germans and Americans in the profession and therefore focused strictly on graduate studies.

The JTS demanded from the beginning that refugee rabbis undergo additional training for the American rabbinate in courses designed exclusively for new arrivals. Alternatively, younger rabbis could earn a doctorate at the JTS to acquaint themselves with the prevailing academic spirit as well as the new standards of the American rabbinate under the guidance of the JTS.⁴⁶ While the JTS in New York provided an important framework for the refugees in which they could find a home for their professional development, the seminary did not offer the depth and intensity of involvement experienced by the Reform movement and HUC’s German counterpart, the Hochschule, which was looked on as HUC’s sister organization to which special ties existed.

While some German refugees, such as Max Gruenewald or Julius Galliner, experienced a close relationship with the JTS, this was usually the result of an existing friendship or personal relationship. For example, Louis Finkelstein maintained a close personal and professional friendship with Saul Horovitz of Breslau (Gruenewald’s father-in-law) and Julius Galliner (Helmut’s father) at the Hochschule. Alexander Marx also cultivated a friendship with Julius Galliner and knew Esriel Erich Hildesheimer, the librarian of the Rabbinerseminar in Berlin, who was looking for a library position at the JTS. But these relationships did not involve the whole institution, as was the case at HUC.

Louis Finkelstein supported both Max Gruenewald and Julius Galliner’s son Helmut and even provided an affidavit for Gruenewald. At the same time, he did not hesitate to criticize Helmut Galliner, who proved to be a difficult guest at the JTS. Finkelstein assisted many others, but none of the refugees’ records depicted the spirit of a college family on that campus.

“The Germans” were never as large a group at the JTS as they were in Cincinnati, nor did they have a similarly lasting impact on the institution. Rather, as a minority, they were directed to comply with Americanization and the expectations of the institution. This is underscored by the experience of Max Gruenewald, who mentioned an “anti-German sentiment” in New York City, a city far more cosmopolitan in character than Cincinnati.

Gruenewald enjoyed great loyalty from the seminary, but at one point, the institution could no longer provide him with a fellowship. He had to support himself by working for other organizations, such as the American Friends of Hebrew University or the World Jewish Congress. He also received short-term funding from the Academy of Jewish Research in January 1944.⁴⁷ The JTS permanently stopped supporting him, thus setting an example that the seminary expected these men to establish a life outside the seminary; namely, to find a pulpit. In June 1944, Gruenewald finally confirmed that he had found a congregation in Millburn, New Jersey.⁴⁸ He was accepted as a substitute rabbi on weekends until the congregation asked him to substitute for his predecessor, Rabbi Kieffer on a full-time basis since the latter did not want to return to his congregation after his service in the army. Joachim Prinz, Gruenewald’s brother-in-law, who officiated in Newark, New Jersey, had brought the position to his attention.⁴⁹

There were far fewer second-generation students at the JTS than at HUC. Among them were Bernard Wechsberg, Bert Woythaler, Ludwig Nadelman, Sol Landau, Ismar Schorsch, Pessach Schindler, Hermann Dicker, Michael Leipziger from Sao Paolo, and Norbert Weinberg. Their assimilation went smoothly, and their careers were likewise promising.

This was especially true in the case of Ismar Schorsch, who was not only an outstanding scholar of modern Jewish history; he also rose to become the chancellor of his alma mater, the JTS. The ethnic and religious background of this group did not resonate in the same fashion at the seminary. The JTS understood itself as an American academic institution with links to many traditions in the Jewish world, and German-speaking central Europe did not play quite the same role as it did in the Reform movement. This was true even though Schorsch’s career in particular as a historian during this movement underscores that intellectual history and historical Judaism continued to be central to the academic and intellectual identity of the movement.⁵⁰

A lack of family spirit may have been even more true at Yeshiva University, which was situated next to the largely Orthodox German refugee community in Washington Heights in Manhattan. Despite its proximity to this community, the university had few exchanges with the refugee congregations and their leaders, especially in the university’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Rabbinical Seminary (RIETS). The school was more focused on recruiting and rescuing rabbinical leaders from Lithuania for its faculty because these activities better fit the college’s theological goals and orientation. Ironically, like the relationship of HUC in Cincinnati, RIETS was family for Lithuanian Orthodox scholars and essential to the Orthodox movement, whose reliance on the school’s assistance in saving their lives and knowledge was similar to the role played by HUC.

This does not mean that Yeshiva University was not assisting its German brethren or ignoring their plight. The university hired several German refugee scholars as faculty for Yeshiva College. Max Landau from the Rabbinerseminar was considered, but he died in an accident before he could be rescued by RIETS. Bernard Revel assisted Joseph Breuer, for whom Yeshiva University is said to have requested a nonquota visa for the whole family.⁵¹

As an institution, however, Yeshiva University felt an obligation toward and interest in aiding sages of the traditional yeshivot in eastern Europe, the centuries-old heart of European Jewish knowledge, rather than assisting the modern Orthodox minority from Germany, which was uniquely tied to its German cultural context and did not easily fit into the larger Orthodox mainstream, intellectually or ethnically.

A study on the intellectual and social integration of Orthodox European Jewish refugees at Yeshiva University or the smaller yeshivot in the New York area would no doubt contribute to the research on the Jewish knowledge transfer from Europe to the United States during and after the Shoah, but there is nothing on this topic in the historiography of European and American Jewish history.⁵²

The spirit of family that united refugees from Nazism with American institutions seems to have also played an important role at Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore. This institution had close ties with the Yeshiva Slobodka and the Yeshiva Mir, two yeshivot that deeply influenced Rabbis Samson Raphael Weiss and Herman Naftali Neuberger of Würzburg. Both men were helped by their new institution to bring twenty-three students from Würzburg to Ner Israel Rabbinical College.

Surprisingly, the second generation was almost as significant among Orthodoxy as it was in the Reform movement because of their intellectual leadership. Over fifteen young men born in Germany were educated for the rabbinate in American Orthodox institutions. Five of them—Leon Aryeh Feldman, Norbert Weinberg, Manfred Fulda, Walter Würzburger, and Shlomo Kahn—studied at RIETS, while two—Jacob Wiener and Herman Neuberger—attended Ner Israel Rabbinical College.

Ludwig Nadelman attended Yeshiva College, where he earned a BA, then switched to the JTS for rabbinical school. The other students attended smaller yeshivot in New York or were ordained by a local Orthodox rabbi.

Aaron Rabenstein received his Smicha (traditional ordination) from Eliezer Silver in Cincinnati. Unlike their older peers, who had been educated and ordained in Germany, these young men were at ease in the American Orthodox movement and had no trouble leading American Orthodox congregations.

Manfred Fulda continued his career at RIETS, where he was hired in 1956 as an expert on Gemara (the second part of the Talmud). Walter Würzburger was born in Munich, obtained a PhD at Harvard University, and combined Orthodox thought with a secular presence and scholarly spirit while promoting a stronger societal engagement of American Orthodoxy.

Born in Berlin, Leon Feldman attended the Adass Jisroel School there and a special program of the Rabbinerseminar until he graduated with Abitur in 1939. In April of that year, he fled to the United Kingdom. From there, he was deported to Canada and arrived in the United States in 1944, where he started his education at the New School for Social Research and RIETS. He was dedicated to the promotion of Jewish education and taught at Yeshiva University and Rutgers University, where he launched a Jewish studies program. Like Würzburger, he obtained doctorates from prominent secular universities—in history from Columbia University and theology from the University of Amsterdam—and established himself as a highly educated Orthodox pioneer by orchestrating theological principles with contemporary challenges.⁵³

From Gemeinde to Congregation: The Communal Rabbis

Just as the first achievements made by students and scholars in American culture depended on their acceptance to and socialization at American rabbinical colleges, so, too, was the success of the rabbis’ first years in the United States dependent on how they dealt with American Judaism and its congregations and members.

Accustomed to living within a Gemeinde (Jewish community), the refugee scholars struggled with the highly individualistic American congregation, the political role of the American rabbi, and the rabbi’s administrative and business responsibilities, for which the refugees had never been trained. In a poorly staffed congregation dependent on powerful laymen, the rabbi’s standing was undermined. Intellectual strength and scholarship were not very important; they were often not even welcome. The rabbis’ job security depended on pleasing and successfully representing their congregation, an obligation that undercut their authority as independent spiritual leaders, a role they had been trained for. Many were angered by this.⁵⁴ In addition, they were confronted with ethnically diverse congregations and the role ethnicity played in American Judaism, an issue they were unfamiliar with and one that challenged them more or less, depending on the religious movement they joined.

Many of the refugee rabbis struggled to relaunch their careers in the United States. They discovered that to lead an American congregation, it was crucial to master English to meet the congregation’s expectations of social and political leadership and to conduct the service and deliver the sermon with dignity.

Language and cultural adaptation were major hurdles in the refugees’ careers, especially those over age fifty, such as Leo Baerwald, Jehuda Leo Breslauer, Hartwig N. Carlebach, and Siegmund Hanover. These rabbis found careers outside of American Judaism within the world of “ethnic religion” (imported religion of immigrants preserving the religious rituals and forms from their home country) in congregations founded by refugees in the United States. Most of these congregations stood outside the three movements of American Judaism.

Only the Reform movement was likely to admit refugee congregations. These refugees, often members of the rabbis’ former German communities, were grateful that this vital part of their lives could be transplanted to America because it provided essential emotional and cultural support and community at a time of displacement, as historian Steven Lowenstein describes in his study on Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan.⁵⁵

Most German refugee congregations preferred not to live in ethnic communities because of their ideal of social integration. But in cities with a dense refugee population, separate neighborhoods like Washington Heights in Manhattan naturally emerged. Here refugees shared an Orthodox identity and lifestyle, came often from small-town Germany—mostly from the German south—and clustered in an ethnic neighborhood that allowed them to reinvent themselves and deal with Americanization at their own pace. Living in an ethnic enclave facilitated the complicated transformation of their German and Jewish identities.

Not surprisingly, these communities were dominated by Conservative or Orthodox German Jews who lived and worked there and needed the facilities of an organized community more than their liberal brethren since they adhered to an observant lifestyle. Here they maintained their German-Jewish traditions; continued to speak German; published their own papers, such as the Jewish Way;⁵⁶ and re-created a microcosm with a strong Old World atmosphere and culinary traditions, although the word “German” was removed from the names of their favorite foods and replaced with local references or labeled as “homemade.”⁵⁷

Their congregations and synagogues followed the south German rites and prayer books and were typically organized around local traditions similar to landsmanshaftn (immigrant organizations defined by the traditions and regional origins of their members) that functioned as a tie between the past and present. Congregants and rabbis continued to speak and preach in German. Many rabbis completed their careers to retirement age in this environment. These institutions were not built to last for more than one or two generations, at which point the inevitable Americanization and integration into American Judaism would lead to their collapse. Such a community and its services would likely not appeal to the refugees’ children, or the congregation failed to recruit a spiritual leader or members from this population.

Among the many small congregations in Washington Heights, Kahal Adass Jeshurun mastered the transition to the United States as an informed, proud, and forward-thinking group under the leadership of Joseph Breuer, who was almost sixty when he arrived in New York City. This congregation’s success was likely due to the large number of former members who reassembled under its new roof, and Joseph Breuer, who expended an enormous amount of energy and ambition to rebuild not only a synagogue but a kahal, a community and governing body that provided services in a mikvah (ritual bathing place), a yeshiva, a public school, adult education, supervision in kashruth (dietary laws), and a school for women. Favoring the importance of education, knowledge, and the Torah over outward appearance and decorum, Breuer used the congregation’s resources wisely to reestablish an attitude of self-awareness and knowledge for the next generation. He did this long before he invested in a synagogue edifice, which was not built until 1952 and was never particularly representative aesthetically as some American synagogues were.⁵⁸

Nevertheless, by providing a full community and services to German-Jewish Orthodoxy, Kahal Adass Jeshurun became an important institution in Washington Heights. It attracted other German Orthodox groups and small congregations, who benefited from the Breuer congregation’s services and features, such as educational institutions, social groups, hometown traditions, and a kosher delicatessen. A network-oriented study on the rescue and resettlement of the Breuer community to New York and its growth, prosperity, and effect on the Orthodox refugee community in that city might be revealing, even if that kahal was similar to (but not exactly the same as) a center for German Orthodoxy in that it provided a community network, a family lifestyle, and a cultural home even for those who did not share the same specific religious convictions and orientations.

Unlike in German Orthodoxy, formerly liberal refugee congregations found support and tolerance within the American Reform movement, which helped integrate them into their new environment over time. Typically, these refugees lived outside an ethnic neighborhood, and their congregation recruited a spiritual leader who had established himself in Germany.

One example is Congregation Habonim in Manhattan, led by Hugo Hahn, a rabbi from Essen who was forty-seven when he took on the pulpit of this refugee congregation. He remained its leader until 1965. The congregation—one of the few that still thrives today—found a very suitable successor in Bernhard Cohn, the son of Emil Moses Cohn, who was killed in a tragic car accident in Los Angeles in February 1948.

Bernhard Cohn finished high school in New York City in 1941 and then followed his parents to California, where he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the US Army from 1943 to 1946. After the Second World War, he followed his father in the rabbinate and studied from 1948 to 1953 at HUC-Jewish Institute of Religion (JIR) in New York. It was there that he started dating Hugo Hahn’s daughter, whom he eventually married.

In 1965, Bernhard Cohn, quite familiar with New York City and the German families in the congregation, followed his father-in-law as the leader of Habonim. For the next generation, Cohn’s presence secured the congregation’s survival and continuity because he encouraged the members to change and adapt, such as learning the English language.

In 1995, the congregation switched to the Conservative movement in American Judaism and thereby uncovered a dilemma that many liberal German Jews were facing in the United States: while the Reform movement had its origins in Germany, liberal Judaism was far more conservative in practice than its American counterpart and felt perhaps even more at home in the American Conservative movement. Yet at the same time, German spiritual leaders struggled in the movement, which ethnically had a strong east European leaning.

However, Karl Rosenthal, who had officiated in Berlin’s only Reform Temple, failed to integrate into American Reform Judaism for a variety of reasons that were linked to serious Holocaust and personal trauma as well as substantial cultural and religious discrepancies between the two Reform movements.

After Kristallnacht, Rosenthal fled from Berlin to Britain, where he stayed until after the Second World War ended. Like many of his colleagues, he had to leave Germany quickly and was therefore separated from his wife, Trudie, and his two sons, Georg and Klaus, who did not want to follow him because they did not speak English well enough. While his older son Klaus managed to leave Germany in time and get a job in the family business of relatives in Wisconsin, Trudie and Georg were arrested in Amsterdam during the German occupation. Georg was deported to Mauthausen camp in 1941, where he died by the end of the year; Trudie was arrested a little later and taken to Bergen-Belsen.

Limited in agency and movement as a refugee in Britain, Rosenthal tried everything to save his wife. After years of effort, he was able to purchase a South American passport for her with the assistance of aid organizations. She was liberated in 1944 and taken to Switzerland as part of an exchange for German prisoners of war. A few weeks later, she relocated to a UN camp in Algiers for the duration of the war.⁵⁹

The trauma involved in the family’s attempts to flee from Germany and the separation and tragic loss of their son Georg overwhelmed the parents. After seven years, in late 1945, Karl and Trudie reunited in Philadelphia, where Karl had found a position.

At this first meeting, Trudie reported that Karl looked ill and was psychologically scarred. Over the following years, he held several short-term positions, first in Fredericksburg, Maryland, then as the rabbi of Temple Brith Sholom in Springfield, Illinois, and finally a two-year employment in Wilmington, North Carolina. There, suffering from severe heart disease, Karl died in 1952, only a short time after the couple’s surviving son Klaus met an untimely death caused by an infection.⁶⁰

Oral histories by former congregants in Springfield, Illinois, reveal that this Reform rabbi from the metropolitan and progressive background of Berlin, who had gone through the painful experiences of flight, separation, displacement, loss, and the Holocaust, was a controversial figure to a petty Reform congregation in small-town America. Rosenthal and his wife stood out in many ways. For one, the couple raised serious doubts because they rode on the bus on Shabbat and did not own a car when they first arrived. The American middle-class status symbol was expected from a spiritual leader, and the congregation made sure that the couple purchased a car in their second year at Springfield.

Other problems arose: the Rosenthals were not “observant” in the exact same way their congregants expected. Karl did not object to a Christmas tree in a Jewish home, occasionally ate pork, and permitted the children of the congregation to eat doughnuts on Passover.

The congregation was almost torn apart by the conflicts triggered by the German Reform rabbi. His liberal lifestyle challenged Jewish conventions that he did not understand to be contrary to being a Reform Jew. This, unsurprisingly, affected the degree to which the Rosenthals were accepted and caused Karl great distress. Under continuing financial pressures after many years of flight, displacement, and temporary employment, Karl was unable to retire and take care of his health. His heart disease progressed, and he suffered a heart attack during Shabbat services in Springfield before the couple left for Wilmington, North Carolina.⁶¹

Financial pressures and the loss of status and social standing were major concerns of the refugees, as Rabbi Hans Enoch Kronheim’s correspondence illustrates. The rabbi secured positions in the United States and even expanded his tenure in his first pulpit in Jamestown, New York, to seven years before he found a permanent place in the merger of Mayfield Temple and Congregation Shaarey Tikvah in Cleveland, Ohio, where he concluded his career. After arriving in America, one of Kronheim’s former congregants wrote a letter of support to Rabbi Samuel Cohen of the United Synagogue of America, saying that it was quite difficult “to earn a living in the profession for which he was best fitted.”

While we can only guess at Kronheim’s initial salary range from the nonquota visa arrangements, which usually provided an annual salary of around $2,000, the Kronheim collection details how these salaries developed. The contract for his position in Cleveland in 1952 lists an annual salary of $4,400.⁶²

There is little documentation of other cases in which serious problems developed with congregations similar to that of the Rosenthals, the database German Refugee Rabbis in the United States after 1933 documents a number of rabbis who struggled in their early years to find a good fit with a congregation or religious movement. This is reflected by the multiple congregations they served, the changes in their religious affiliations, and the alternatives they found or the additional tasks they took on to make ends meet or reach out to a larger community of Jews.

Even prominent rabbis like Joachim Prinz, who left Germany before the pogrom of 9 November 1938, struggled to find a suitable position that would support him and his family. Originally hired by the United Palestine Appeal as a public lecturer, Prinz was quite irritated by the challenges of effective public speaking in the United States, the different expectations of the audiences, and the tendency of American Jews to cluster in their ethnic communities.

Perceiving American rabbis as intellectually mediocre and in their Jewishness unfit to lead a congregation appropriately, Prinz did not want to take on a pulpit. However, as financial pressures rose and his family grew, he was forced to compromise and accept a position as rabbi of the independent congregation at Temple B’nai Abraham in Newark, New Jersey, a town that experienced rapid social change after the Second World War, the consequences of which also resonated in the community.

With a beginning salary of $6,000, he felt he was well paid, even though he stressed that this position did not equal the situation that German rabbis had once enjoyed in which they were well compensated by the state, employed for life, and could count on a pension.

Prinz accepted the offer from this congregation, which previously had only had a cantor as its “rabbi,” a person whose intellectual leadership Prinz questioned. B’nai Abraham acquainted him with a new type of congregant and the social reality of gang life in New Jersey, a completely new experience even for Prinz and quite distant from the middle-class life he had known in Berlin with scholarly and bourgeois Jewish elites.⁶³

Data shows that the integration of refugee rabbis was the smoothest in the American Reform movement, even without a special training strategy to prepare German rabbis for American congregations. The movement, particularly strong in the American South and West, benefited from placing the newcomers in small congregations in more remote areas of the country. For example, Max Nussbaum’s first congregation was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, before he became a substitute rabbi for Morton Bauman, who served in the army during the Second World War, at Temple Israel in Hollywood, California, a position Nussbaum never left. These congregations regarded the rescue of German rabbis not only as a special mitzvah (a religious duty) but also as a chance for them to recruit a rabbi at a time when American rabbis were difficult to find, partly because many of these spiritual leaders were joining the army.

The movement also placed refugees alongside a more experienced American rabbi in a larger congregation, where the former gained experience serving as an “assistant rabbi” and could explore the American rabbinate and congregation with an experienced partner, often someone he had known before his flight from Germany. One such pair was Emil Moses Cohn and Stephen Wise at the Free Synagogue in New York City.

The Conservative movement offered classes and sometimes additional funding to German refugees to help them pursue a doctorate at the JTS in preparation for an American career.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, there were still problems with congregations and the transition into the American rabbinate. As mentioned before, the refugees were prepared for a profession in which the rabbi was a scholar and spiritual leader of a Gemeinde, and his position therein was reflected by his status, job security, and scholarship, which underscored his leadership role. The Gemeinde and its staff provided services and an administration around the synagogue and assisted its leader, who focused largely on his intellectual and spiritual guidance within the Gemeinde, not within a specific synagogue. This American synagogue, however, functioned as a single congregation in a religious environment that challenged the rabbi in different ways. There was little job security and not enough staff to run the congregation, but it was controlled by a uniquely powerful lay leadership. The American rabbi depended on the lay leadership’s approval and could easily be fired if he did not meet expectations. A rabbi’s fit with the congregation depended on ethnicity, cultural background, and how the congregation felt it should be represented in society. Therefore, the role of the American rabbi was an obviously political one. In Germany, such a role was rejected until the Nazi years permitted that a younger generation of rabbis who had already developed political attitudes in the 1920s was able to officially step up and express them in the Gemeinde. Many of the tasks of managing a congregation fell to the rabbi himself, as the congregations were frequently understaffed. This included fundraising and other administrative challenges the refugees had never been prepared for. Altogether, they felt that their congregants had little or only superficial Jewish knowledge and that the rabbis’ scholarship was not appreciated. As newcomers facing a language barrier, they immediately felt a loss of status and security and were challenged by having to accommodate the three religious movements by which American congregations defined themselves, unless they chose a refugee congregation outside the realm of American Judaism.

Ismar Schorsch, the son of Emil Schorsch, formerly the rabbi of Hannover, remembers when his father arrived in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, with his family as rabbi of a Conservative Hungarian congregation. Those early days were fraught with tension among the ethnically different congregation, and only his father’s persistence solved the problems because he knew that he had to succeed in this position to make a living. Like other German refugees, Ismar noted that the professional profile and status of the German rabbi differed from his American counterpart.

With an excellent Jewish and secular education, Emil Schorsch was not intellectually satisfied with his rabbinate in Pottstown, for he had been well trained and had even studied psychology to fulfill his duties. Both as a chaplain and a rabbi, he showed a certain gravitas in his office that prompted respect. His choice to enter the rabbinate was the result of his experience with and active participation in the First World War, his confrontation with the collapse of society after the war, and his intellectual desire to find answers to the questions posed by these events in the postwar years. However, he simply could not find the same professional and intellectual identity among his American colleagues, and so he never attended the national conventions of the Rabbinical Assembly.⁶⁵

According to historian Eli Faber, his father, Salamon Faber, one of the last graduates of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, went through a number of congregations to find the right fit for his rabbinate in the Conservative movement of American Judaism.

Faber, who grew up in a small town near Nowy Sącz in Poland, did not struggle with the ethnic sensibilities of east European congregants and was very comfortable in a German environment, but he was challenged by the American congregation and what it expected of its rabbi.

Coming from a Hassidic background and extremely well trained in traditional Jewish texts and the Talmud from an early age, Faber obtained a secular education in Poland, then studied at the seminary in Breslau and later at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, where he was trained for the modern “German” rabbinate, after having already received a Smicha in Dobra near Novy Sacz in 1934.

His ordination document from Breslau was dated 10 November 1938 and was likely dated after the students had taken their last exams in December of that year in their professors’ homes. Some of the administrators must have rescued the exam forms and the seal of the seminary to make these emergency graduations possible for the students who were still in Breslau after the closing of the seminary following the pogrom. Many of them were foreigners, at the time, not as targeted as the German Jews, and were spared by the events of the pogrom, as Salamon was.

After he arrived in the United States, Salamon began a two-year contract at Congregation Shaarey Shamayim in Philadelphia, an ethnically mixed congregation where he met his wife. This was followed by another two years in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, with an American congregation. This was “not a happy marriage” because its members were not very well educated in matters of the Jewish faith, his son explained.

The third two-year contract took Salamon Faber to San Antonio in Texas, an environment where his new wife was unhappy. Ultimately, he returned to Philadelphia to his first congregation.

After an intermediate stay in Pittsburgh as the educational director of a Jewish day school, Faber found a pulpit in Warren, Ohio, in 1949, his first success in the American rabbinate. Here he was included in the social life of the town, joined the Rotary Club, found many friends and supporters among Christians and Jews, and got along very well with the Conservative congregation. Over time, however, he did miss a more Jewish environment and opportunities for his children, which prompted him to relocate to Anshe Shalom in Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, in 1954.

The Anshe Shalom congregation was composed of American-born Jews and German and European refugees. They represented an extremely well-educated, elegant, and intellectual crowd. Salamon Faber finally felt at home and held this position until he retired. Among the congregation, he was lovingly referred to as “our rabbi,” and he enjoyed the beautiful organ music of the service, much of which was composed by the notable German-Jewish composer Louis Lewandowski.⁶⁶

If rabbis could not find a place with an American congregation or rejected its doctrines, they found alternatives in the Hillel movement. This was true of Alfred Jospe, Frank Fisher, and Erwin Zimet, who joined Hillel campus ministries. They often found positions that allowed them to combine their academic skills and an interest in Jewish studies with an innovative ministry on campus.

Others found a home in a different community or additional income as military chaplains, civilian chaplains (such as Emil Schorsch, who found more intellectual stimulation in the Valley Forge Army Hospital environment), or social workers (the Orthodox Ralph Neuhaus) in a wide range of institutions that catered to American Jewish people.

There were two rabbis who left their positions and any affiliation with Jewish institutions after a few years in American congregations. Luitpold Wallach turned to a full-time academic career, specializing in medieval history, a profession that took him back to Germany many times after 1945. Harry May graduated from the Breslau seminary with a PhD from Charles University in Prague. The JTS had expended enormous amounts of time and energy to carry out his complicated rescue, yet later in his life, May ran a profitable junk business with his father-in-law.⁶⁷

It was the German Orthodox rabbis who had the hardest time finding a place in the American Jewish religious environment. Data from the database German Refugee Rabbis in the United States after 1933 show a significant shift in their careers after emigration, and it is not known if Orthodox seminaries tried to retrain them or facilitate their integration into the American rabbinate. Unlike those who joined the Reform and Conservative movements, these rabbis did not seem to have a strong link to a specific American rabbinical college or institution that would support them in assimilating into American Judaism. This and their desire to be part of wider society led many of them to continue their careers either in the Conservative movement of American Judaism (like Felix Aber, Helmut Frank, and Hermann Dicker, who was a military chaplain) or the Reform movement (like Leo Trepp, Jakob Petuchowski, Arthur Bluhm, Joseph Asher, and Selig Auerbach).

They seem to have struggled specifically with leading Orthodox congregations in the United States because many of them ended up working long-term administrative positions in educational institutions, Jewish day schools, religious organizations, the kosher food industry, or publishing houses.

This was also true even for some young men representing the second generation, such as Ludwig Nadelman. He attended Yeshiva College at Yeshiva University to obtain his bachelor of arts but did not stay for rabbinical training, choosing instead to train at the JTS in New York and Columbia University. Although he was a rabbi at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism and served only briefly as a rabbi in a congregation, he turned to Reconstructionism, a new religious movement in American Judaism that combined historical Judaism with a strong commitment to Jewish cultural and ethnic identity. In this new movement, he made his mark as an intellectual leader and professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s.⁶⁸

Among the German Orthodox rabbis who had officiated in Germany and sought integration into American Judaism, Samson Raphael Weiss had perhaps the biggest impact on American Orthodoxy. He taught for the obligatory visa-related two years at Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore. This did not seem to be a good permanent fit for him so he left to lead an Orthodox congregation in Detroit and taught at Yeshiva Beth Yehuda in that city. In 1944, the energetic and charismatic Orthodox leader and intellectual returned to a congregation in New York City until he found a position that allowed him to leave the American congregation and focus on larger educational and scholarly matters at the Young Israel Institute for Jewish Studies in New York. There he founded Torah U’mesorah, the umbrella organization of Orthodox Jewish day schools, served as the vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, and dedicated his energies to advancing higher education and scholarship in the Orthodox world by founding Torah University in Los Angeles. Subsequently, he served as dean of Jewish studies at Touro College in New York. His influence at these two institutions enhanced Orthodoxy’s exchange with secular knowledge in the post-Holocaust world.

Kurt Klappholz, retrained at the JTS in New York, ultimately turned to the Orthodox movement and served in an administrative position at the Central Yeshiva Beth Joseph in Brooklyn.

Ezekiel Landau worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and ministered to several congregations in New York City.

Ralph Neuhaus took up social work in the Jewish Welfare Society, HIAS, and the National Refugee Service after leading a small congregation. These professional choices underscore his continued dedication to the refugee milieu.⁶⁹

Rabbi Tuvia Lasdun found long-term employment with Feldheim Publishers, an Orthodox publishing company in New York.

Helmut Frank, who held positions at several small congregations in Philadelphia, supported himself for years by working as a typesetter for a publisher and as an army chaplain until he began leading the small German Orthodox congregation Agudath Achim, where he stayed until 1973.

Rabbi Michael (Yehiel) Munk was an Orthodox rabbi born to a prominent German-Jewish family in Berlin. He spent three years in Britain before he came to the United States on a nonquota visa in 1941. Munk deliberately turned away from the American congregation. In an interview with the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration in 1972, he explained his motivation for this move as being “because I did not want to sell my soul.” He pointed to the short-lived nature of an American rabbi’s employment, the lack of respect congregants had for the office, the dependency of a rabbi on the congregation, and the lack of status and business-related responsibilities as issues that he did not want to deal with. As a result, Munk continued his career as an educator in the Orthodox education system: as a founder of the Beth Jacob School in Brooklyn, director of the Yeshiva Samson Raphael Hirsch, and founder of the Orthodox summer camp “Camp Munk.” He also worked as a therapist, counselor, and shechita (ritual slaughter) supervisor in the wider American Orthodox community.⁷⁰

Aaron Rabenstein of Cincinnati, who grew up in the United States and was ordained by Eliezer Silver in Cincinnati, maintained his strong ethnic and religious ties to New Hope, the German Orthodox congregation of that city, where his father was an important lay leader. He had never felt at home in American Orthodoxy but spent most of his life in the Orthodox education and day-school system of Cincinnati.⁷¹

It was the very same Orthodox German-Jewish Congregation New Hope, the one that never hired a rabbi as leader, that attracted members who played a promising and later essential role at the city’s Reform seminary. Interestingly, one such person who was attracted by the Orthodox congregation New Hope in Cincinnati was Jakob Petuchowski, who, although professionally committed to Reform Judaism, chose to join this Orthodox German congregation with his family.

The Petuchowski family had been rooted for many generations in the German Orthodox tradition with a long lineage of Orthodox rabbis, all of whom perished during the Holocaust. Petuchowski found the spirit and style of this lost German Gemeinde in Congregation New Hope from 1965 to 1975. Despite his professional affiliation with the Reform movement, Petuchowski’s membership was not only tolerated but highly valued by the congregation because of his family’s reputation and academic achievement. It was ten years before dissent among the congregation over halachic law brought it to the brink of collapse, and Petuchowski was at the center of the conflict because he criticized the idea of absolute rabbinical authority that these congregants had embraced.

This was the moment when the bonds of ethnic religion revealed their limitations, and Petuchowski criticized that the congregation was committed to “a Judaism of a different time and different place,” a Judaism of the past that separated him from the other congregants and was contrary to his commitment to a progressive Judaism. The episode ended with the Petuchowski family leaving the congregation.⁷²

A New Beginning: From Statelessness to American Citizenship

Hand in hand with acculturation and integration went the legal process of “becoming American,” a process that corrected a sensitive and painful problem in the lives of the refugees; namely, the restitution of their nationality and citizenship. Citizenship and nationality were two separate legal categories in German legislation, each anchored in the different speeds of the development of nationality and the German nation-state on the one hand, and the enfranchisement of Germans as citizens within this nation-state on the other.⁷³ From 1933 on, expatriation had been a common tool of the Nazi government to rid itself of both unwanted political opposition and its Jewish population.

In July 1933, the Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivations of German Citizenship (Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit) introduced into the German legal system a wicked tool for both denaturalization and forced expatriation and gave the Nazi Party a means with which to realize its racial visions of an ethnically homogeneous nation.⁷⁴ This legislation triggered the subsequent review of all cases of naturalization in Germany since 1918 and thus hurt many foreign-born citizens who had lived in Germany for decades before their actual naturalization.

But the real targets of this law were recently naturalized east European Jews, who suffered disproportionately from the loss of nationality, as that meant economic and social exclusion. The new legislation created widespread statelessness, which increased among “foreign” Jews, meaning those not born as Germans in Germany, from 10 percent in 1933 to over 50 percent in 1939 in Germany.⁷⁵ The law ultimately turned against all Germans who lived abroad, including émigrés who had fled the Hitler regime for political reasons and distanced themselves from Nazi Germany. Furthermore the law provided for their expatriation and for the seizure of their property in Germany.⁷⁶

In 1935, the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and the removal of German citizenship stripped Jews of political rights and added to the fragility of their legal status. They were left solely with a category called “German nationality” (Staatsangehörigkeit) and thus were reduced to the minimum status of national belonging (without civil rights), according to the Nazis’ racist thinking.⁷⁷ Once they left Germany, these Jews lost access to consular protection and administrative services, and their passports were not renewed.

Finally, in November 1941, German legislation expatriated all former German citizens abroad. This mass expatriation was meant to rid the country permanently of the stream of refugees from Nazism.⁷⁸ If German-Jewish refugees had not been officially stateless and vulnerable earlier, they certainly were so from this point on,⁷⁹ a circumstance that was reflected in the rabbis’ biographies. Not only were many of them born outside of the contemporary German Reich; some did not have German citizenship or had only recently become naturalized citizens.

A close evaluation of their exact legal status and its changes between 1919 and 1941 would provide great insight into the question of the availability of Jewish agency during flight and expulsion for German rabbis. Such a study would also give a clearer picture of the practices of Nazi exclusion and its connection with German citizenship and immigration legislation.

We know that prominent rabbis like Jacob Hoffmann—who fled to the United States in 1938 and was a dual citizen of Hungary and Germany, naturalized in 1929—had their naturalization revoked in 1934 on the grounds of the abovementioned legislation. Left with only his Hungarian citizenship and as a prominent Orthodox Jew in Germany, he was in a vulnerable position. When Hoffmann was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1937, it was only due to the Hungarian government’s intervention that he was released from prison, which gave him a chance to escape Germany. Officially, he was expelled from Germany and declared an “enemy of the state.” This experience alarmed Hoffmann and kept him from accepting the position of chief rabbi of Vienna, which was his first destination upon fleeing. However, he foresaw Austria falling under the influence of Nazi Germany and quickly moved to the United States.⁸⁰

Other well-documented cases reflecting the practice of expulsion include those of Joachim Prinz, Michael Munk, and Ira Sud. Prinz, although German-born, was expelled in 1937 for his political outspokenness and Jewish leadership.⁸¹ Munk, also German-born, was refused a signature on his passport, which was the same as confiscating that passport. Thus he had to cross the border to Holland illegally and with no travel documents. There he received a “Nansen passport.”⁸² In November 1938, Sud was expelled from the Sudetenland, the German ethnic area in the Czech Republic, which Germany occupied in September 1938.⁸³

In the United States, the growing fear concerning Axis spies and the advent of the Second World War meant that some refugees were faced with yet another problem, being considered “Germans” in the public eye. The passing of the Enemy Alien Act on 7 October 1941 in the United States heightened the suspicion toward all supposed “Germans,” including German-Jewish refugees.⁸⁴

With no regard to their background as refugees from Nazism or as victims of persecution and flight, Americans who considered them “German immigrants” first perceived them as “enemy aliens,” especially in hot spots of pro-Nazi activity, like New York City, where Max Gruenewald reported strong anti-German sentiments during the war.⁸⁵ In this way, Jewish refugees were placed on the same shelf as Nazi-friendly immigrants of the interwar period and followers of the German-American Bund, an organization that actively spread Nazism and antisemitism in the German-speaking community in the United States during these years. These refugees had to register with the US government as potential agents of Nazi Germany, a grotesque situation that eased only after some time and created significant tension among ethnic Germans during the war years.⁸⁶

The serious effects of such uninformed rejection by “old-stock” Americans were noticed by Rabbi Simon Schwab and his family in Baltimore. Their application for naturalization had been rejected in 1941 by a local judge under the pretext that their “German citizenship” made them subject to the legislation applicable to “enemy aliens.” Schwab, who had raised over $1,000 for war bonds in his congregation, went to court to appeal this denial of citizenship, and a lengthy and humiliating legal case ensued. Not until 1944 was a final decision handed down in Schwab’s favor, and the family were able to become American citizens.⁸⁷

After these trials and tribulations, it was no surprise that the reestablishment of nationality and citizenship, of legally belonging to a society and nation-state was of vital importance in the lives of the refugee rabbis. It was a significant part of recovering from years of humiliation, reasserting their self-esteem, and healing their souls.

Some of them accelerated the naturalization process by taking advantage of the Second World War Powers Act of 1942,⁸⁸ which expedited the naturalization process to two years instead of five for those who served in the military of their newly adopted country.

The study of many records, autobiographies, and interviews revealed how intensely almost all of the rabbis remembered the date of their naturalization as that of a new beginning. Their conversion to a new citizenship opened up opportunities, put them back on track in life, renewed their dignity, and bestowed on them civil and political rights. Naturalization was far from just an administrative formality; it was an essential point in the process of gaining back agency, pride, and status.⁸⁹