SIX

Refugee Returns

Transatlantic Encounters and the Legacy of the “Last Generation of the German Rabbinate”

Refugee returns to the country of their birth, to the country of their persecution, and ultimately to the places of their expulsion have been studied by historians and sociologists. For many refugees, the journey to return was a milestone in their life cycle,¹ typically taking place in middle to later life at a time when they sought explanations for their experiences and trying to heal from the ruptures caused by persecution and flight.² These later-in-life encounters led to a new and important phase in their lives. The passage of time facilitated satisfying conversations with the perpetrators or their children and helped mend the painful biographical fractures, if not the general pain, associated with the missing pieces in a history that has caused enormous suffering due to the actions of Nazism and the events of the Holocaust. However, this was only possible if the injustices that led to their persecution and expulsion were recognized by Germans and an effort was made from that side to initiate indemnification and reconciliation and to learn from the past.

Refugee Returns—Completing the Life Cycle

Holocaust memory studies have addressed questions of memory, transnationalism, and the hybrid identities that flight, survival, and relocation have generated.³ Since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, there has even been discussion of “Holocaust tourism,” which would allow access to the largely Polish sites of German atrocities during the Holocaust.⁴

Few studies, however, have focused on the return of refugee rabbis to (West) Germany in the postwar years.⁵ Although this area of research has been largely neglected by scholars of American Jewish history and German history, its study provides insight into the attempts to explore the chances for continuity and change within a framework of larger cultural and diplomatic changes in the postwar world order. The lack of data on this subject might be because there were a few surviving German-Jewish refugees or that the interpretation of their culture and identity required knowledge of German history and Jewish history. The many German historians who have researched postwar German-American relations may not have recognized the soft skills and the morally and religiously motivated concerns and the significance they had for postwar German-American relations, because they lacked experience with Jewish history and focused only on classical diplomatic history.

Furthermore, for American Jews, the idea of Jews returning to Germany may have been highly controversial, if not unthinkable in the post-Holocaust Jewish world. Nevertheless, research indicates that many refugees had an ongoing interest in Germany, for better or worse, and continued their relationship with the country of their birth. Starting from the Second World War, their journeys back to Germany, even if short visits, were a part of their personal and professional experiences, involving them once again in a direct encounter with their past. Their returns were an essential element in the generation-building process as the “last generation of the German rabbinate” and highlighted the massive changes that had occurred in the Jewish communities of Germany.

Refugee Rabbis in the American Army

The first group of refugees who returned to Germany were active participants in the American war effort. Several of the second-generation refugee rabbis enlisted in the US Army with the expressed desire to fight Nazism in person. Their motivation, cultural background, familiarity with the situation in Germany, and proficiency in German were useful to the army during the invasion and later, during the administration of Germany. Among the young refugee rabbis who enlisted and served as chaplains were W. Gunther Plaut, Alexander Schindler, Herman Dicker, Sol Landau, and Ernst Lorge.

While they came as Americans, they brought with them their unique experience and special understanding of the situation. They knew they could have been among the survivors or victims of the concentration camps if they had not been able to leave Germany a few years earlier. Their presence as Jewish chaplains flagging the Magen David (Star of David) amid American forces liberating concentration camp survivors demonstrated that the Jewish people had withstood the Nazis’ efforts to eliminate them in Europe and signaled hope and spiritual support to the most fragile of the survivors. While the liberated concentration camp survivors suffered from malnutrition and other symptoms of horrific physical abuse, the returning rabbis pointed out that their spiritual needs were just as urgent. Meeting a rabbi for the first time in six years, saying a prayer together, attending services, and mourning the dead—these were among the first spiritual services provided by the rabbis. In addition, the rabbi as military chaplain was the first Jew in uniform the survivors had seen—a Jew with secular authority who could inspire pride in a new Jewish identity among these downtrodden souls who had suffered years of physical mistreatment, mental torture, humiliation, and loss. This spiritual guidance was far more essential for the survivors than any material goods. In addition, military chaplains helped the Jewish survivors to re-create a sense of identity, establish a functioning community, provide protection, and assist them in a number of areas.

The chaplains assisted the survivors in a number of ways: searching for surviving family members, helping with the emigration process, and supporting them through the challenges faced by displaced persons (DPs). These were refugees who had been relocated to Germany as a result of the war and the Holocaust during the years immediately after the Second World War in the three Western-occupied zones of Germany. They received help with medical issues, getting an education or vocational training, communicating with surviving family members, and finding a place to live and work.⁶

Their experience with Germany as the epicenter of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the crimes committed by Germans across Europe was extremely emotional for all the Jewish returnees. It often triggered a personal evaluation of the antisemitism that their families had encountered there and raised questions about the state of humanity in general. Alexander Schindler, born in 1925 in Munich, visited his former hometown while serving in the Alpine division of the US Army when he was stationed in the area. The shocking destruction he witnessed in the Jewish community and among his family in Munich moved the young man to abandon his engineering studies to enter the rabbinate instead.⁷

Postwar Encounters: New Communities, but No Continuity

At the time, few of the returning refugees considered permanently relocating to central Europe, even though the number of Jews in the larger postwar setting of the Western zones of Germany was growing and their presence and services were urgently needed. Jewish life in the Western occupation zones had transformed dramatically under the shadow of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. German Jewry, with its identity, modernity, and special place in German society, had either been destroyed by the Holocaust or had fled Nazism and relocated elsewhere before 1941.

Only about ten thousand former German Jews had managed to survive in what became the territory of West Germany after the Second World War. They were mostly intermarried Jews, or so-called half-Jews, who had not been deported because their family supported them, they were used as wartime forced labor, or they went into hiding with the help of non-Jewish family members. The majority of these German Jews lived in the north and west of West Germany and in Berlin, while the southern and central part of Germany, overlapping with the American occupation zone, was dominated by a growing number of Jewish DPs of east European background, a community that continued to grow in the aftermath of the war.

Most of German Jewry’s communities and institutions had been destroyed. What was left was largely in the hands of a new and growing Jewish community, one with an entirely different ethnic composition and religious background: wartime slave laborers and the survivors of concentration camp death marches during the final days of the war were responsible for the influx of largely eastern European Jews into Germany. Liberation from the camps made these eastern European Jews resurface into German public life as Jewish DPs because they could not and did not want to return to their former home countries after the war. They had lost not only their communities but also their families.

They also refused to return because of the strict policies of the Soviet army regarding supposed “collaboration” with Nazism, an accusation often made against those who had been captured by the Germans and were forced into labor.⁸ These circumstances and newly rising antisemitism triggered additional Jewish emigration from east Europe in the immediate postwar years. There were approximately three hundred thousand Jewish DPs in the Western occupation zones of Germany, part of the even larger group of non-Jewish DPs, which totaled around nine million people.

This migration reestablished an unexpected Jewish presence, one that differed culturally and religiously from German Jewry and completely altered the identity and culture of the resident Jewish community in Germany. In areas with a strong DP presence, like in the American zone, the people’s east European Jewish identities rapidly transformed Jewish life in Germany and changed the manner of observance to that of traditional east European Orthodox communities, which had little in common with German Jewish life as it was before 1941. Unlike their German-born brethren who were still culturally connected with Germany, the liberated east European survivors of German extermination camps despised Germany and the Germans for their cruel and dehumanizing treatment during the Shoah. Finally, their legal status under the postwar Allied administration differed. As a result of Allied policies,⁹ Jewish Germans were classified as German citizens, and non-German Jews were classified as Jewish DPs. The former group was subject to the same administration as non-Jewish Germans, and the latter was given an exclusive status.¹⁰

Except for several rabbis who were involved with the DPs and served them as rabbis after liberation and remigration, there was little overlap and continuity between these two Jewish groups and their religious traditions. Among the first rabbis to return to the pulpits in Germany was a small group of students and rabbis who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in Germany, had been held in concentration camps, or had survived behind the German lines in eastern Europe and returned shortly after liberation.

One of the first to return was Wolfgang Hamburger, who had continued studying with Baeck until 1942. As the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, he was forced to perform slave labor in Berlin from 1941 on and survived only because he escaped and hid outside the capital in the Stettin area on the Baltic Sea, with the help of his mother. By 1946, he was back in Berlin and enrolled as a student at the reopened Humboldt University, where he also started to work as a “preacher” in the Berlin Jewish community. By 1947, he left Germany and continued his education and professional plans as a student for the rabbinate in Cincinnati, where he was formally ordained in 1952 before beginning his rabbinic career in the United States.¹¹

Like Hamburger, Rabbi Ralph Neuhaus returned to his former pulpit after liberation in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Neuhaus had been rabbi of Mühlheim (Ruhr) until 1933, then moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he served the Jewish community as rabbi, preacher, and director of the local Philanthropin, an elementary Jewish school. In August 1942, he and his wife were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where he worked side by side with Leo Baeck as rabbi of the Magdeburger Kaserne (Magdeburg Barracks, a quarter in Theresienstadt) and as a member of the Jewish Council.

Right after liberation, he returned to his former pulpit in Frankfurt, where he was assigned by the American military government in charge of civil and religious affairs to reestablish the Jewish community with the surviving five hundred German Jews living in the city at the time. Neuhaus quickly became a central figure in the re-emergence of Jewish life there, starting in late 1945, when he was elected chairman of the provisional executive board of that community, launched a paper that communicated the concerns and needs of the Jewish communities within the American occupation zone, and reorganized the Jewish elder care home in that city. He officially headed an interest group of Jewish communities working with the American military government. After the emergence of a Hessian state government, he continued to serve as commissioner of Jewish affairs to that government, a position that overlapped with the newly established Hessian Chief Rabbinate, a prestigious office hence unknown to German Jewry. In mid-1946, Neuhaus, who was already sixty-seven, joined his son Ralph in the United States. There he continued his rabbinate at Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim in Detroit until his death in 1954.¹²

Rabbi Neuhaus was succeeded by Rabbi William Weinberg, a former student of the Hochschule in Berlin, whose difficult flight from Nazism had taken him eastward, far behind the Soviet lines, where he was rescued under challenging circumstances. After the war ended, he traveled to Austria and then to the American occupation zone of Germany. He first officiated in a DP camp in Hallein near Salzburg, where he also helped launch a DP university¹³ to help young survivors receive an education and professional training. From there Weinberg moved to Frankfurt, where he became chief rabbi of Hesse from 1948 until his eventual immigration to the United States in 1951. His activities in the postwar setting as chief rabbi included the rededication of the synagogues still standing as Jewish houses of worship, including the Salzburg synagogue and, in 1950, Frankfurt’s main synagogue, which became the first permanently established synagogue operating in Hesse after the war. It had been destroyed in 1938, but after its restoration, it once again provided space for one thousand congregants. Despite these positive achievements, Weinberg’s recollections, as shared by his son Norbert, make clear that antisemitism continued to prevail among the majority of the German population¹⁴ and the survivors did not see a future for themselves in central Europe. Weinberg hung a plaque in the Salzburg synagogue in honor of its rededication right after the war that admonished future generations of Jews in Hebrew and German to “Remember what Amalek did to you / Jew do not forget the concentration camp!”¹⁵

To remember and to bring to justice the perpetrators of the crimes against Jews during Nazism motivated the refugee rabbis to get involved in postwar German and Allied legal proceedings, even though they could not travel there. In their efforts to testify, they may have been supported by the Allied occupation forces. Rabbi Felix Aber and Rabbi Siegmund Hanover, two men who had suffered greatly with their communities under the Nazis before they emigrated from Germany, served as witnesses—Aber in Bremen and Hanover in Würzburg—in several legal cases between 1945 and 1949 regarding Nazi crimes and the restitution of Jewish property.¹⁶

Other refugee rabbis may have contributed similarly to attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice. These efforts were taken very seriously and deserve more systematic exploration than can be done within the framework of this book. A study on these activities would provide a better understanding of the agency the refugees gained as witnesses in postwar trials. The fractured and inconsistent nature of the legal system in Germany at the time prevents a thorough examination of this topic, but a database of related legal cases in the archives of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich provides information related to these issues.¹⁷

During the immediate postwar years, refugee rabbis coming back on visits from the United States also tried to help the survivors of their former communities and come to grips with the reality of the remaining civilization they had left behind in their hasty flight. International Jewish aid organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which traditionally catered to the needs of Jewish refugees globally, were instrumental in facilitating the return of former German rabbis to assist their brethren in Germany. The JDC worked hand in hand with the Central British Fund for German Jewry in London and, in late 1944, set up the Council for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation, which organized the task of providing for the religious and spiritual needs of the liberated and growing Jewish community in Germany.

However, soon after the council was established, competing ideological views of the nature of the Orthodox representation created serious tensions among Mizrachi (religious Zionists), Zionists, non-Zionists, and Agudists (members of the Agudah Israel, a political movement of Orthodox Jewry founded in 1912 in Kattowitz). This ultimately led to the withdrawal of Rabbi Elie Munk, who had struggled with having “only” been nominated as the alternate representative to H. A. Goodman.¹⁸ Nevertheless, his younger brother, Michael Munk, who arrived in New York after finding temporary refuge in England, returned to Berlin’s Jewish community for a year in 1947 with the assistance of the JDC and was among the first of several refugee rabbis who were sent there.

Although Munk claimed that he was the first rabbi in the city, he actually followed Conservative rabbi Moritz Freier, who had been exiled to Great Britain in 1938 and returned to Berlin nine years later, where he remained into the early 1950s.¹⁹ Munk’s arrival in Berlin marked his return to the city, where he had officiated as rabbi of the Adass Jisroel community. His return indicated a deep emotional attachment to his former community. In an interview with the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, Munk stated that he would have liked to stay longer but had to return to New York to be with his family, who could not join him in Germany because of the difficult circumstances there.

While in Berlin, he served as a rabbi for the whole community and explained how he tried to smooth over the differences among the factions of that newly assembled community, including those in the DP camps, and to reduce the tensions between the old and new members of that group.²⁰ This involved collecting information on the numbers and needs of surviving German Jews and their communities and institutions and determining whether some sort of religious revival in central Europe was possible, even if only temporary.

These same issues also concerned the liberal German refugee rabbinate. The World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ), centered in Britain, represented liberal Judaism worldwide and believed itself to be the leader in protecting the remnants of the Jewish community in Germany. Its administrators tried to find information on the state of Jewish life in the country, asking questions similar to those of Munk. Leo Baeck, liberated from the Theresienstadt ghetto, had reunited with his family in England in 1945 and resumed his presidency of the WUPJ, a natural center of the dispersed global community. Under his guidance and in concert with Lily Montagu, the WUPJ decided to send a capable representative to occupied postwar Germany to explore the possibilities for religious revival there.²¹

The person chosen for this difficult and delicate mission was the young Orthodox-trained rabbi Joseph Asher. He had just returned to England from Australia—where he had served as a chaplain in the Australian army—to reunite with his parents. Once in London, he met Leo Baeck and other liberal German Jews who must have stimulated his interest in liberal Judaism. The milieu of refugee rabbis there and the guidance of Leo Baeck set the stage for him to develop an interest in liberal Judaism and to continue his studies at the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, starting in the fall of 1947. However, before Asher left for Cincinnati, he was picked as the ideal representative for the WUPJ in Germany. He spent two months there in the summer of 1947.

Young, healthy, motivated, a native German speaker, and a military man, Asher spent most of his time in the British-occupied zone. Upon his return to England, he described with great frustration the complete destruction of Judaism as a culture and the loss of Jewish civilization in Germany. He complained about the emergence of a mere “Paket-Judentum” or “parcel Judaism,” meaning a Judaism lacking inner motivation and dedication, committed only to material interest in the contents of parcels or care packages from brethren abroad, which became a currency on the black market. In this context, he also addressed the problem of “corruption” in the newly emerging Jewish community of postwar Europe led by DPs. Facing a community that had lost its values, self-respect, and religious commitment in the concentration camps, Asher made a strong point to develop a long-term program for their moral and spiritual restitution so they might become “normal citizens in whatever country they may eventually settle.” He asked, “What are we doing to re-establish these [Jewish] values so that we can be assured of normal citizens to emerge from the ruins of Europe?”²²

The WUPJ decided to follow Asher’s advice. In 1948, in the first elections of the Berlin Jewish community, 80 percent of the vote was in favor of liberal Judaism, which encouraged the WUPJ to send the very first liberal rabbi to Berlin on its behalf. The organization chose Rabbi Steven Schwarzschild, born in 1924 in Frankfurt am Main and a recent and promising graduate from HUC in Cincinnati. His first pulpit had been in Berlin’s postwar Jewish community with a membership of ten thousand Jews under challenging circumstances. After one year there, his reports on the situation in Berlin underscored that—unlike earlier arrivals in Germany—he saw a future for a small yet permanent Jewish community in Germany. He felt that a community like this could evolve from the large number of migrant Jews in the country who were prepared to leave as soon as they were permitted to do so. He estimated that about twenty-five thousand Jews might stay permanently in Germany and would need and deserve the support of liberal Jews in Britain, the United States, and Israel to survive and lead a Jewish life again. Under these circumstances, this Jewry might take on a significant and productive role in central Europe, which, if successful, would prove that Adolf Hitler’s goal of exterminating European Jews had failed.²³

During his mission, Schwarzschild had to deal with the complete absence of any Jewish infrastructure, educational materials, and institutions in a highly diverse community. He also had to handle conflicts over illegal black-market trading, antisemitic stereotyping, and policing that created tension between the German civilian authorities and the military police, which was exclusively responsible for handling any legal infractions by DPs.

Schwarzschild was also confronted with a significant demand for questionable conversions. Those applying for a religious transformation were usually the children or spouses of Jews who had been persecuted as Jews during the Nazi era and wanted to undo an earlier conversion to Christianity that had failed to protect them. Others who wanted to convert had opportunistic motives, such as finding a way to emigrate quickly or better food rations or administrative treatment. With almost three thousand individuals asking to be converted in Berlin alone, Schwarzschild was quite challenged as a young liberal rabbi. He had to work under the critical eyes of his Orthodox colleagues, where he had established new and revolutionary standards to permit conversion, a ritual that was more the exception than the rule in Judaism and raised the suspicion of his colleagues. Schwarzschild’s success and reports were evaluated at the meeting of the WUPJ’s governing body in London in July 1949. Although the community frequently referred to him as “chief rabbi” in Berlin—a title that was foreign to German Jews and may have been introduced by British or Orthodox elements—Schwarzschild rejected it, and the WUPJ urged the disuse of it. At the same time, the WUPJ wanted to send a second emissary permanently to West Germany and urged its leadership to raise the necessary funds.²⁴

Steven Schwarzschild returned to the United States in 1950 to take on a pulpit in Fargo, North Dakota. His liberal rabbinate in Berlin continued after he left and after Germany’s difficult and insecure postwar situation had created two separate German states with Berlin under Allied administration. Emigration to the newly founded state of Israel and North America caused a rapid reduction in the number of Jews living in Germany, which continued to have only one Jewish community. This community needed to define its role and place in the new political order as embodied by the two newly founded German states: the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

This was a difficult task for many reasons: the ongoing rivalry among the various branches of Judaism, the condemnation faced by Jews in Germany from Jews in other countries who disapproved of their decision to stay in Germany, and the lack of funds to rebuild an infrastructure to facilitate Jewish life in Germany, such as synagogues, hospitals, elder care homes, and schools. The lack of means was due to the small number of community members but also to the restitution of Jewish property as stipulated by the Luxembourg Agreement in 1952 among West Germany, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (hereinafter Claims Conference), and the state of Israel. The agreement did not support the rebuilding of Jewish life in West Germany.²⁵

These circumstances were considered by the WUPJ during the meeting of its governing body in February 1950. Participants emphasized that the organization’s perspective on Jewish life in Germany differed from that of the larger Jewish community and that it intended to explore the expansion of a Jewish presence and to facilitate Jewish life there. In light of the criticism it faced internationally, the organization made its stance clear: “The World Union for Progressive Judaism, as the organization of liberal Jews all over the world, strongly believes that Jews have the right to live and work as Jews in all places and at all times.”²⁶

Financial considerations weighed heavily on the communities, as is reflected in the discussion accompanying the selection of Schwarzschild’s successor in Berlin. This position was given to another refugee rabbi and graduate from HUC in Cincinnati, Nathan Peter Levinson. Levinson, born and raised in Berlin, was twenty-nine and an officer of the US Army Reserve. He had officiated as a rabbi in Selma, Alabama, before the WUPJ sent him to Berlin after challenging negotiations with the Central British Fund for German Jewry to sponsor a liberal rabbi in addition to the Orthodox colleague who was already there.²⁷

In his memoirs, Levinson explains in detail the difficult state faced by the community. His description of the challenges confronting the rabbinate in the form of black marketeers, military police, old and new antisemitism, and reestablished German authorities are reminiscent of Joachim Prinz’s descriptions of a Jewish milieu in New Jersey, one that was not free of corruption. However, Levinson also explained that he enjoyed the vibrant cultural and political life of Berlin as a city that was at the center of global attention. Levinson and his family felt at home in Berlin and believed that Jewish life had a future there, even though few Jews lived there at the time.

Returning as American Army Chaplain: Nathan Peter Levinson

Nathan Peter Levinson’s wife, Helga, began studying medicine there while her husband explored the possibility of using his status as a reserve officer at the American Army Headquarters in Wiesbaden to stay in the country. This plan met with mixed success because the advice he received took him back to the United States in 1953 to enter a program for military chaplains. However, after completing his education, he was deployed not to Germany in 1955 but to Japan.²⁸

Levinson returned from Japan with a new deployment from the Jewish Welfare Board to the US air base in Ramstein, West Germany, in 1958. The Levinsons used their time in the Palatinate region of Germany in multiple ways. Helga completed her preliminary exams in medicine, and Nathan continued his chaplaincy in the US Army, awaiting his next deployment. Their uncertainty about how long they would remain in Germany posed a serious challenge to the completion of Helga’s studies and became the reason, Levinson claimed in his autobiography, why he tried to find ways to stay in Germany more permanently by seeking employment outside the army.²⁹ In 1961, Levinson was appointed as rabbi of Mannheim, and then became Landesrabbiner (chief rabbi) of the state of Baden in 1963, at which time the family moved to the larger university town of Heidelberg.³⁰

While Levinson did not describe anything like normality in his memoirs, the reality of Jewish life in Germany in the late 1940s clearly differed from that of the late 1950s. While the processes of political cleansing, restitution, and reflection on German crimes against Jews during the Nazi era were far from being completed, the new West German government took significant steps toward acknowledging German guilt (if not collective guilt), securing restitution and indemnification of Holocaust victims, and legally persecuting the perpetrators of Nazi crimes.³¹ German postwar democracy was not perfect and must be criticized for many reasons, including the continuity of political and legal elites; still, the majority of political leaders wanted to demonstrate that the “new” Germany had clearly departed from the patterns of Nazi Germany.

During the early 1950s, the framework and fabric of German-Jewish relations gradually started to change. Even though no official relations between Germany and the state of Israel existed before 1965, a successful working relationship emerged from the settlement and practical application of indemnification and restitution agreements. American Jews also participated in this relationship in conjunction with the Claims Conference. The diasporic German-Jewish refugee community and its organizations were not benefiting from the restitution payments Germany made on “heirless property,” such as the real estate property of the former German-Jewish community. Therefore, refugees appealed directly to the German government—specifically, the German diplomatic representatives abroad—for compensation and assistance, a move that created a new relationship between the German refugee community and West Germany.³²

The correspondence between the German consulates in the United States and the Political Department of the German Foreign Office in Bonn reveals how such close relationships developed and were used to strengthen ties with the refugees.

The Federal Republic of Germany and German Refugee Rabbis: Launching Personal Dialogues and Exchanges

As early as April 1956, the consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Atlanta, Georgia, reported to the Foreign Office in Bonn on a visit by a German consular representative to Rabbi Dr. Max Landman, a refugee rabbi in Florida who had obviously contacted the German consulate in his area with questions about restitution and other matters in preparation for a trip to Germany. During the conversation, the rabbi introduced the German diplomat to the board members of his temple, and they openly discussed the events of the Third Reich as well as the efforts of the Federal Republic to deal with the Nazi inheritance. Rabbi Landman, who planned to visit Germany in June, asked for assistance in learning more about the two siblings he had left behind in Germany before the war and who perished in the Shoah.

The German report emphasized the positive tone of the conversation, which was conducted in a friendly atmosphere, even though, or perhaps because, everyone was aware of the historical burdens in this relationship. At the end of the conversation, the rabbi invited the German diplomat to address West German postwar development before his congregation sometime in the future. In return, the Atlanta-based diplomat offered to inform the Foreign Office in Bonn of Rabbi Landman’s trip, request assistance for his research on the fate of his relatives, and put the rabbi in touch with officials who were involved in the restitution agreement with Israel. The friendly offer encouraged the rabbi to ask for a recommendation as to where he could address a German audience about American Jewry’s attitudes toward and concerns about postwar Germany. The German Foreign Office happily agreed to support this request, recognizing the potential for a productive exchange that might contribute to a valuable dialogue.

By the time Landman arrived in Germany, the Foreign Office had helped arrange for him to give a talk at the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Bonn and to meet a number of West German parliamentarians, including Professor Dr. Franz Böhm, who headed the society in Frankfurt and was a chief negotiator of the reparations agreement.³³

How far-reaching and broad these contacts were was apparent in the correspondence of German-Jewish congregations in the United States who asked German consulates for financial aid to build new synagogues because they had not received sufficient funds from the restitution agreement. Among these congregations were the Orthodox German-Jewish congregation New Hope in Cincinnati and Congregation Shaarey Tikvah in Cleveland, which asked the German consulate in Cleveland for a contribution to the Enoch Kronheim Memorial Fund. The West German government’s decision to make a contribution was motivated by its desire to seize the opportunity to restore Germany’s public image among Jews in the United States and open up a dialogue with them. It seemed best to start with those American Jews who were native German speakers.³⁴

The conversation between the West German government and the refugee rabbis about the refugees’ experiences and Germany’s future in the democratic West was rewarding for both parties, and the publicity it generated had great potential for multiplication in both the German and the American Jewish press.

By 1960, if not earlier, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany was dealing with an increasing number of neo-Nazi voters and concerns for the survival of the young democracy. Under pressure to promote a better image of the republic and antisemitism, the West German government sought the cooperation and ongoing dialogue with those who would and could judge the progress of the country and who would be above any criticism of moral weakness because they had been in Germany until 1938 or later, had suffered from the Nazis themselves, now represented an articulate Jewish elite in the United States, yet still demonstrated a critical but constructive willingness to work with the Germans to address the joint past and the long history of antisemitic and racist attitudes in Germany’s history.

The Federal Republic’s government began to support the refugee rabbis’ trips to Germany for guest lectures, joint commemorations, dedication or rededication ceremonies for renovated synagogues, and other purposes through a program that was publicized in the United States by the Jewish Chautauqua Society in New York. For many rabbis, including Cuno Lehrman, Kurt Metzger, and Max Nussbaum, this program facilitated their first return to their former synagogues and communities, starting in the late 1950s and continuing throughout the 1980s.

Based on the success of these programs, German cities began developing plans to bring back refugees and Jewish community leaders. These invitations demonstrated that West Germany had not forgotten the injustices or expulsions and that the presence and voices of these refugees were appreciated and welcomed in the “new” Germany. In return, they provided guidance as to what American Jews felt was needed to progress in this difficult relationship. This was part of a larger German-American alliance in the Cold War that also offered a unique opportunity for personal contacts, ongoing exchanges, and the moral recognition of West Germany’s activities on behalf of reconciliation.³⁵

The refugee rabbis were often extremely emotional on these visits, and they sometimes criticized what they saw and expressed serious concerns. However, the personal encounters and exchanges allowed both sides to learn from each other’s perspectives and experiences. In addition, the rabbis relayed their experiences with the “new” Germany back to their congregations, religious organizations, and the American public, a mechanism the Political Department of the German Foreign Office was very interested in and recorded in their files. The engagement of these returning rabbis in West German politics and society sometimes caused difficulties, exposed a lack of understanding, or was driven by a concern that West Germany was falling back into old antidemocratic and antisemitic patterns, even as the economy was recovering and the country was regaining political influence. The way to reconciliation could not be found solely by overplaying the dark chapters of Germany’s history or by granting financial restitution to the victims of the Holocaust. Rather, the key to the success of this process would be an active discourse and the acknowledgment of the harsh facts in Germany’s recent history.³⁶ The rabbis’ visits became a platform they used to communicate the past to the future from the perspective of the last generation of the German rabbinate. Many of the refugee rabbis visited their former communities and hometowns, and it was there that they were particularly identified in the press, their explanations, and the perception of the German public as the “last rabbi” of their former town or community. In no other context was the fact of their past lives and traditions more striking in terms of what had happened to them and how they resurfaced as American rabbis. In this environment, their intense exchanges explored ways to remember, overcome, and prevent situations similar to what they had experienced and to work with the Germans to keep these events from ever happening again.

These efforts were most evident in the well-recorded and publicized appearances of more prominent refugee rabbis, such as Joachim Prinz. In July 1959, Prinz returned many times to Germany as president of the American Jewish Congress and the director of the Claims Conference. Before this trip, Prinz strategically announced via the German Embassy in Washington, DC, that he sought a personal face-to-face exchange with West Germany’s president and asked him to send an official message to the Jewish World Congress, an event that Prinz would attend in Stockholm following his visit to Germany.³⁷

Prinz felt that the Germans were still unable to fully grasp the recent past and their complicity, and he detected a lack of democratic practice in their political attitudes and perceptions. His opinions were printed in the American press and surfaced in a World Jewish Congress (WJC) report on antisemitism in Germany, which not only surprised the German Central Council of Jews, which felt they should be the only judges of Germany and the Germans; it may also have shocked some German diplomats.³⁸

These comments by Prinz and other returnees were detrimental to the self-righteous postwar self-perception of West Germany, a prodigy of a country that had risen to become America’s closest ally during the Cold War and felt that the problems of the past had already been overcome. However, Prinz and others, including Max Nussbaum, visited West Germany regularly and encouraged the country to address its past rather than belittle it in the country’s quest to successfully and sustainably embrace democracy.

In January 1963, Prinz shared his thoughts with journalist and historian Joachim Fest after a meeting with the conservative American Council for Germany, a centrally positioned group of business and political leaders in the transatlantic relationship:

The discussions, particularly those conducted by the American delegates, were very disturbing. It was an attempt to say that everything in Germany is marvelous, that Hitler was after all only one of the many totalitarian leaders, that all Nazi remnants have been eliminated and that Germany is now a shining example of a wonderful democracy. The Germans who participated were much better, but the whole thing was a distinct attempt to disregard the moral issue which calls for a brave and decent, honest confrontation with the facts, and with an effort to deal with these problems of the past in terms of education for the present . . . I would have very much liked to discuss all these matters with you because I am looking for a group of people in Germany who would be willing to participate in an honest give-and-take which would refrain from any kind of cliché and propaganda, but which would try to understand the problem. I hope that if I find such a group some of us could come to Germany and discuss these matters seriously.³⁹

The difficulty of assembling a group like this is reflected in Prinz’s correspondence with Werner Steltzer, director of the Information Center of the City of Berlin. In July 1966, he wrote with great frustration about the failed attempt to gather the necessary people for a discussion of the abovementioned issues. In general, all who were invited applauded the idea and its intention but reacted not as individuals (as had been expected and desired) but as functionaries of the groups they represented. In the end, each invitee declined by claiming that they did not think they were the best choice to participate in such a dialogue—a reaction that completely undermined the project.⁴⁰

While the envisioned group had perhaps never been imagined as a standing group, the American Jewish Congress was becoming increasingly impatient with the lack of progress. So, too, was Prinz, who, as president at the time, was the driving force behind the involvement in West Germany. In February 1966, Will Maslow, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, wrote to Prinz: “We simply must begin to move on the Dialogue.”⁴¹

Eager to make progress, especially in light of the rising public support in West Germany in the mid-1960s for the Nationaldemokratische Partei (National Democratic Party), Prinz addressed the appropriate people on a one-to-one basis. Among them were Kurt Eberhardt, managing director of the Ecumenical Council of the City of Berlin in 1966; Chancellor Konrad Adenauer; Christian Democratic Union politician Rainer Barzel, whom he had met during Barzel’s trip to the United States; and Pater Dr. Stephan Schaller of the Benedictine Monastery in Ettal, Bavaria, who had asked Prinz for advice when revising the text of the Passion Play to the satisfaction of both Catholics and Jews. Prinz also tried to hold an early exhibit in New York City on Auschwitz and Birkenau, but he struggled to raise the funds for that endeavor, even though the WJC supported the project.⁴²

He also introduced a dialogue to educational institutions with the support of Abraham Sachar, president of Brandeis University, who invited him to meet with Axel Springer, a highly influential German publisher who was visiting the university. Unfortunately, Prinz could not accept the invitation because of other obligations. However, in February 1966, the German ambassador in Washington, DC, Heinrich Knappstein, met with Prinz for a public discussion titled “Germans and Jews—Is There a Bridge?” The event, which pioneered public discourse between Germans and Jews in the United States, was evaluated as a great success by historian Abraham Sachar, who turned to Prinz after the meeting and said, “I am gratified, Joachim, that the healing process we hope to see has begun here. Now we must carry it forward in action as well as in words, among the young, on whom all depends.”⁴³

Berlin played a special role in this process, thanks to its large and mostly liberal Jewish community, its Allied status, and the presence of many former rabbis who had survived the Nazi regime. Almost all of the former Berlin rabbis visited the city to support the Jewish community in Berlin and to honor their own histories. Therefore, in 1970, during the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reinstitution of Berlin’s Jewish community, the refugees were invited to publish their memories in the memorial volume Gegenwart im Rückblick (The present in retrospect). Most did indeed contribute, telling their story as the last witnesses to a period of destruction and renewal.⁴⁴

Besides Prinz, many other refugee rabbis participated in these exchanges and gave West Germany helpful feedback on its progress and shortcomings in becoming a democratic nation. As early as 1953, Max Nussbaum went to Berlin on a trip organized by the United Jewish Appeal. He revisited Berlin in 1958 and 1965, this last time at the invitation of the Federal Republic’s government after West Germany had established diplomatic relations with Israel, which he considered to be promising for the future. All of his visits were covered in the press and Jewish publications, where he explained his impressions and thoughts on Germany. In October 1959, Nussbaum wrote an article titled “Ist Versöhnung möglich?” [Is reconciliation possible?] and published a sermon on the occasion of Yom Kippur in the refugee paper Aufbau.

He called on West Germany to follow Berlin’s progressivism and launch an open and honest dialogue between Germans and Jews. He presented the issue on the Los Angeles radio station KNX and the Voice of America on RIAS Berlin and explained the situation in West Germany to the American Jewish Congress during its biennial convention in 1960, saying that American Jews should think twice about rejecting the idea of Jews living in Germany because this attitude would only support Hitler’s goals. Nussbaum argued that Jews today had the right to live in Germany, and their treatment there would have to be seen as a criterion of the sincerity of that effort.⁴⁵

An example of how intensely some of the rabbis were moved and then inspired by their travels is Rabbi Joseph Asher’s trip to Wiesbaden, where he was born and educated. In 1964, he returned to his former Gymnasium, a German academic high school in Wiesbaden, where he had been humiliated and mistreated by classmates over twenty years ago. He spent eight weeks there, met former classmates, joined classes, tried to understand how the Holocaust was being taught, and talked with students, teachers, and former classmates.

The school had prepared for Asher’s visit—which had been negotiated by the German ambassador in Washington and the Foreign Office—and tried to demonstrate that German students were indeed studying the Holocaust. However, Asher discovered through several conversations that the school had just started to deal with the Shoah when his trip was announced.

He encountered many stereotypes about Jews among the students, most of whom had never met a Jew. In several relaxed but frank discussions with Ernst, the classmate who had tormented Asher the most as a child, Asher learned that only nine of his forty-eight classmates had survived the war—most of them had died on the Eastern Front. The conversations with Ernst and the students emphasized that the Germans needed help in dealing with their past; they needed to learn about Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish experience; and they needed a way to understand a different perspective and move forward in the process of confronting their past. The younger generation in particular needed these experiences to avoid making the same mistakes their parents had made.

The trip benefited Asher as well, as he tried to understand the anatomy of prejudice, faced some of his own misguided convictions as a Jew, and ultimately learned how important the individual encounter with the Germans had been to move forward. Asher discussed the trip with Rabbi Balfour Brickner, head of the interfaith committee of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), then published his thoughts in the April 1965 edition of Look magazine under the bold title “A Rabbi Asks: Isn’t It Time We Forgave the Germans?” The article concluded with these thoughts: “The spiritual victory I feel that I have won lies in the reducing of bitterness and converting it into the stuff of which civilized human relations are made. ‘God desires not the death of the wicked, but that he return from his evil ways and live.’ That is the Jewish concept of God. Since Man is created in His image, it behooves him to desire likewise. As wickedness springs from small and individual acts, thus does compassion begin in an individual’s heart.”⁴⁶

Joseph Asher with his son Raphael Asher at Raphael’s ordination from HUC in Cincinnati in 1977: AJA, pc0170.001.

In the following months, Asher shared his thoughts and plans in several publications and public talks, discussing his strong feelings and informative experiences in American Jewish circles. He argued in favor of taking a “New Look at Germany,”⁴⁷ a bold and controversial stance that got a lot of attention in the United States. For Asher, it was the beginning of a special type of engagement with the Germans. In conjunction with the Evangelical Lutheran Church, he tried to launch an exchange between rabbinical students from HUC and German Christian theology students to support more understanding and knowledge about Jews and enhance personal relations. Many visits to West Germany, specifically to Berlin, followed. Asher was among the driving forces for establishing the memorial House of the Wannsee Conference (Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz), an educational memorial site in Berlin founded in 1992 to commemorate the destruction of European Jewry, which had been decided in this place.⁴⁸

Returning Rabbis, B’nai B’rith, A Center for the Study of Antisemitism and a New Hochschule in Heidelberg

Reinforcing the right of Jews to live in Germany, the WUPJ made a bold decision to invite its youth to West Berlin on 4–11 April 1965 for the first WUPJ Youth Section conference in the city, the former center of liberal Judaism in Europe. The Berlin Jewish community had requested that this first youth meeting take place in their city, and the committee accepted the suggestion to underscore that Jewish life in Berlin was a fact that had been ignored and even condemned for far too long. Their decision acknowledged that “a new generation of Jew and Gentile is growing up in Germany and both need the education and contact of such a conference to help them understand their situation and create a new future.”⁴⁹

The youth delegates came primarily from England, the Netherlands, and, not surprisingly, from Mannheim, Germany, where Nathan Peter Levinson had established a progressive Jewish community. They also came from the United States and included Nathan Peter Levinson, Kuno Lehrmann (the rabbi of Berlin), and Ignatz Maybaum. They were received by the Jewish community of Berlin, the B’nai B’rith lodge, the Progressive Jewish Youth Group, and the Berlin Senate. At the conference, unexpectedly open discussions centered around the reasons why Jews returned to Germany and if it was legitimate to live in Germany as a Jew.

One of the most important outcomes of the meeting was the consensus that the identity of this neglected and controversial community might change if its members had their own rabbis, rabbis who were educated and familiar with the particular circumstances and concerns of their congregants, rather than “imported rabbis” from abroad, who typically stayed for only a short time and never became more than a “sympathetic outsider.” This conclusion motivated four German conference participants to begin studying for the rabbinate at the Leo Baeck College in London,⁵⁰ the only European school with a distinctly liberal German-Jewish climate that existed after the Shoah.⁵¹

The German-born rabbis who officiated in Germany at the time were prominent as rabbis and scholars, but their placement by and connection with American, British, or Swiss Jewish organizations was seriously criticized by the German Central Council of Jews. The organization for the German-Jewish community felt that they were being “colonized” in a way by spiritual leaders from other Jewries.⁵² The degree to which religious jealousies and rivalries between Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism may have played a role in these concerns is hinted at in Nathan P. Levinson’s recollection of his efforts to become a member of the German Rabbinical Conference under the leadership of the Orthodox rabbi Isaak Emil Lichtigfeld of Frankfurt.

Lichtigfeld not only had trouble accepting the rabbinic authority of Levinson as a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR, the American Reform movement’s rabbinical organization); he also prevented Levinson from joining the rabbis’ festive parade into the Worms synagogue on the occasion of its rededication in December 1961, seating him instead with the Christian theologians and professors of secular universities, not with the rabbinate. Levinson was only accepted as a member of the Rabbinical Conference after he officially protested against such treatment to Werner Nachmann, the president of the Jewish Council of Baden.⁵³

Later in the 1960s, the Levinson family relocated to Heidelberg, an old, vibrant, culturally rich, and in its own way very “American” university town that had been shaped by the continued postwar presence of the US Army. The Levinsons all appreciated the qualities of this city, and Helga especially approved of its proximity to the university where she lectured. This atmosphere also seemed to have spurred Nathan Peter Levinson’s rabbinate and work. Acknowledged as the chief rabbi of Baden and part of the city’s public life, Levinson rose to become the Jewish chairman of the Coordinating Council for Jewish-Christian Cooperation and the editor of the journal Emuna (faith), which became a pioneering platform for interfaith dialogue in Germany featuring many refugee rabbis as contributors. Emuna also gave them a forum to share their life stories and experiences, which further motivated them to dedicate their time and energies to Christian-Jewish dialogue. In the fall of 1971, an entire issue of Emuna was dedicated to the rabbis and their new careers abroad. Among others, Rabbi Levinson published a contribution by Max Nussbaum.

While Levinson had long refrained from participating in interfaith dialogue after his first disastrous experiences in Berlin, where Protestant Christians had made little effort to acknowledge Jews, the situation was different in Heidelberg. Fifteen years later and in an inclusive civic culture, Levinson finally saw this dialogue with his Christian counterparts as an essential tool to prevent future acts of genocide and religious stereotyping.⁵⁴

More importantly, Heidelberg offered Levinson the intellectual climate and infrastructure to launch a visionary project fully in line with the long-term goals of the WUPJ and the sensibilities of many of the refugee rabbis. This project would acknowledge that there was a permanent Jewish community in Germany and its members would be supported and protected by rabbis, cantors, and teachers from Germany. Unlike the “imported” rabbis, these scholars would be familiar with the local circumstances, habits, and sensitivities of their communities.

A rabbinical seminary, or Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (HJS, Higher Institute for Jewish Studies)—a central institution of higher education for training Jewish teachers, rabbis, and cantors in Germany—was sponsored by the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the West German government. In Heidelberg, a town with a strong academic culture, the oldest German university, and Christian faculties of theology, Levinson found an environment where this idea resonated and could be realized.

It only took a year from the time the first official suggestion of the project was made, and the plan was ultimately accepted by both the key West German educational body (the Kultusministerkonferenz [Conference of German Ministers of Education]) and the Central Council. The dedication of the HJS in Heidelberg took place in 1979. Its founding for the first time reintroduced a Jewish institution of higher learning to Germany after the closing of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin in 1941.

Jakob Petuchowski was asked to be the founding director, but he declined. The second candidate was Herbert Strauss, a former student of the Hochschule in Berlin who had relocated to New York City. He taught history at the City University of New York and directed the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration. This organization’s vast collection of research materials is preserved in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and constitutes a valuable resource for research on German-Jewish flight and relocation in the United States. Strauss turned down the job to take care of his aging mother in New York.

The third candidate, whom Levinson approached, was Leon Aryeh Feldman, an Orthodox professor of Judaic studies at Rutgers University who had attended the Adass Jisroel School in Berlin with Levinson and was willing to relocate to Germany. Soon after he signed his contracts, Feldman settled in Heidelberg and moved energetically forward on a project that was for him a matter of the heart: the founding of the HJS as a separate institute of higher learning that maintained a loose relationship with the University of Heidelberg.

By the time the HJS opened its doors to its first students in 1979, it had recruited a number of scholars who rotated as professors rather than holding a permanent chair, which added to the variety of Jewish perspectives taught there. Levinson’s recollections stress a competitive relationship between the project and the Leo Baeck College in London, whose president then was Albert Friedlander.Friedlander, who had also been trained in Cincinnati, belittled the project and claimed that there were not enough students or faculty to teach Wissenschaft des Judentums again in Germany.⁵⁵

Indeed, the HJS attracted more Christians interested in Jewish studies than Jews from Germany. The reason that so few Jewish students wanted to prepare for a role in the synagogue was the small size of the community, which never exceeded thirty thousand Jews. However, the founding of the HJS proved that the German government wanted and supported the school and thus an ongoing presence of Jews in Germany.⁵⁶

When Leon Aryeh Feldman compiled a schedule of courses for the first semester starting in the fall of 1979, he approached colleagues he considered capable of teaching at the Hochschule to a German-speaking audience, ideally in German. Among them were refugee scholars and rabbis, including Alexander Guttmann, who taught in Heidelberg in the fall of 1980 and in the spring of 1981 and 1982.

Guttmann had been saved as a young scholar by HUC in Cincinnati and had been teaching as the college’s Talmudist since 1940. Guttmann and the other well-compensated professors who taught for a year in the appealing city of Heidelberg felt great pride accompanied by memories of how their previous careers in Germany had ended. In Heidelberg, they were invited, reinstituted, and welcomed by a newly founded institution funded by the West German government to teach Wissenschaft des Judentums for the first time in Germany since their expulsion and the forced closing of the seminaries in Berlin and Breslau.

Under these circumstances, the scholars’ return created hope for the future of modern Jewish studies in a country that had so radically abandoned that academic asset and its people. This country was celebrating the return of those once persecuted. Inspired by the reopening of a new Hochschule for Jewish studies in Germany early on, Guttmann enthusiastically offered his services for the first ordination of a new generation of rabbis in Germany, which never took place there. The West German and American press published articles stating that the endeavor would retrieve and rejuvenate knowledge that had long been buried—a euphemism for the persecution and expulsion these scholars had experienced but used to play up the special occasion.

Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and the school’s press were eager to hear from Alexander Guttmann about his experience teaching in this special and sensitive environment. They sent Guttmann a list of questions about why he went back, if he had been back previously, how many students studied at the Hochschule and how many of them were Jewish, who else was on the faculty and why he accepted the particular position. In his report, among other details, Guttmann stressed that he came to contribute to the revival of Judaism in Europe.⁵⁷

Germany’s Reunification: A Changing Jewish Community as a Working Ground for American Rabbinical Seminaries

Unfortunately, the Hochschule in Heidelberg did not fulfill German Jewry’s hopes of becoming an institute of higher learning of Wissenschaft des Judentums; however, there was a great interest in the scholarly study of Judaism in Germany due to the Holocaust. The main reason so few Jewish students joined the rabbinate was that, among the small Jewish community in Germany, the young people did not necessarily envision a future in West Germany, or they spent several years abroad in larger Jewish communities to establish themselves and find a Jewish spouse.

The situation changed radically and unexpectedly in 1989 with the collapse of the Cold War order, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the German reunification in October 1990. During the year before German reunification, a new East German government, under the lens of a global public, tried to make amends for ignoring Jewish victimhood during the Second World War and the Holocaust in that state and for never considering or discussing restitution to survivors of the Holocaust. Instead, during this short phase of renewal, the East German government passed legislation that invited Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union to immigrate to East Germany under special conditions.

After reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany maintained this commitment to Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union, many of whom also sought refuge in Israel and the United States. The country considered this migration, which brought approximately two hundred thousand Jews to a united Germany between 1990 and 2010, as an opportunity to stabilize Jewish life in Germany. The Jewishness of these immigrants was debated among Germany’s largely Orthodox communities because the newcomers did not always meet halachic expectations and few of them had hardly any religious Jewish identity.

Nevertheless, about one hundred thousand of these immigrants joined Jewish religious communities in Germany, which caused these communities to quadruple in membership. Since the refugees were evenly distributed throughout Germany, new Jewish communities emerged even in small towns. Consequently, more than ever before, Jewish life in Germany was challenged by the overwhelming number of community members who needed instruction in Judaism, enhanced social services, and spiritual leadership. The integration of this diverse majority of Jews from the former Soviet Union also created other issues. For example, since these people had not been raised in traditional Orthodoxy, many of them preferred a liberal affiliation.

This bothered the large German Orthodox Gemeinde, where religious pluralism had hardly existed after 1945. They witnessed independent liberal communities emerging outside the Gemeinde, attracting a mix of former Russian Jews and Jews who came to Germany as a result of the globalization. They saw this development as a threat to their survival and domination of the Gemeinde. The Gemeinde had to adapt not only to the growing number of members but also to the task of integrating and educating them and making possible a future with religious pluralism in Germany. The independent communities outside the Gemeinde, most of which were connected to the American Reform movement or the Leo Baeck College in London, were demanding permanent and unified Jewish spiritual leadership from Germany to claim their rights as part of an integrated community. Rabbis, cantors, and teachers educated in Germany were urgently needed, for without them, “integration” into the Gemeinde and long-term peace among the Jewish factions would never be possible.⁵⁸

In this climate, fifty years after the Shoah, the WUPJ sensed a unique opportunity to reinitiate a new and more organized presence of modern Judaism in Germany. How such a historical change could be realized was unclear at the beginning. In 1994, Nathan Peter Levinson proposed closing the Hochschule in Heidelberg and moving it to Berlin, where German reunification had made available the property of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in the former Artilleriestrasse (today Tucholskystrasse). In Levinson’s opinion, this move would reclaim that space for Jewish Wissenschaft. However, he and his second wife, Pnina Navè Levinson, were planning their retirement in Mallorca, Spain.⁵⁹

In November 1995, the WUPJ invited one of the youngest refugee rabbis of the second generation, Rabbi Walter Jacob of Congregation Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh, to a seminar with lay leaders in Vienna, where the situation and potential of the rising number of small liberal congregations in Germany and their neglect outside the state-funded Gemeinde were passionately discussed among German-speaking grassroots sympathizers. Jacob, who had risen to a prominent leadership position in the American Reform movement, took up the issue. He promised to send short-term visiting rabbis, but he emphasized that in the long term, they needed “Torah,” or the instruction of the law, synonymous with rabbinical training in Germany.⁶⁰

Rabbi Jacob had left Germany as an eight-year-old when his father, the rabbi of Augsburg, fled Germany and relocated first to England and then to the United States. He did not return to Germany until the mid-1970s, even though a cultural bond with Germany continued to exist. He never lost his proficiency in German and married a German-born woman, Irene Lowenthal, who had come to the United States as a refugee. They passed on the German language to their children, who studied it. Returning to the country of his birth, however, seemed impossible for a long time, and Jacob asserted that a revival of Judaism in Germany would have been bluntly rejected by his father.⁶¹

However, in his rabbinate and personal encounters with Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel, Jacob claimed that he started to understand that confronting the past allowed a person to make individual choices about how to deal with tragedy. A person could be eternally caught in tragedy, or he could understand that tragedy offered lessons for the future. Jacob started to take the latter path. From the mid-1970s on, he and his wife visited Augsburg and his father’s former synagogue several times. Eric Lidji, Jacob’s biographer, explained that the visits to Germany deeply engaged Jacob both personally and as a rabbi and convinced him that Jews should not turn exclusively to the Holocaust as the single leading motif of their Jewishness. Instead, he believed, they should remember that flight and emigration of ancient Jews had enabled their forefathers to leave their anger and bitterness behind in Egypt and gave them the freedom to start over with new empathy and energy. Only such an attitude would allow them to embark on new paths and build something new, something good.⁶²

During his travels, Jacob learned about the realities of communities, met young Germans, got involved with German officials on behalf of the communities and in organizing joint commemorations, and increasingly became a mediator in the complex mélange of Jews and Germans, history and memory, Jewish survival and a potential Jewish future in Germany.

As a rabbi, he interpreted what he saw as being not unlike the Jews’ forty years of wandering through the wilderness and the enormous difficulties they encountered before finding the Promised Land. He drew parallels to the biblical example: the Holocaust had left an entire generation of Jews in Germany in a spiritual desert, forced to leave the realization of their goals to the next generation. In the mid-1990s, at the height of his career in the Reform movement and the end of his CCAR presidency and WUPJ vice presidency, Jacob felt that American Jewry had failed to provide the support it should have given long ago and took the matter into his own hands.

Jacob encouraged young and retired rabbis to officiate at the small liberal congregations that were beginning to emerge in German-speaking Europe. He became chief rabbi of Munich’s Beth Shalom Congregation after his retirement in 1996. Part of his decision to volunteer and support this development of liberal Judaism was an unusually rich friendship with Walter Homolka, a young Bavarian convert to Judaism who had trained for the rabbinate at Leo Baeck College in London. Homolka was gay and unwilling to hide that fact, and at the time, neither HUC nor Leo Baeck College ordained openly gay rabbis. This might have stood in the way of Homolka’s career path and desire to serve a congregation, but Jacob resolved the conflict. He conducted a private ordination ceremony at Beth Shalom in Munich, which gave Homolka his Smicha and permitted him to continue his career. Fully aware of the symbolism, Jacob included the academic robes of his parents from Drury College in Missouri in the ceremony: he wore his mother’s robe, and Walter Homolka donned his father’s robe.

The ordination was accompanied by the Swiss, Austrian, and German lay participants of the Vienna seminar in 1995, who, as a result of the festive gathering, formed a unit of the newly founded Union of Progressive Jews in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This paved the way for the WUPJ to take root organizationally in central Europe after the Holocaust and develop a network to send rabbis to orphaned congregations.⁶³

With an organizational framework and the membership of the WUPJ in place and approximately forty liberal (proto-) congregations with no trained rabbis, Rabbis Jacob and Homolka turned to the UAHC for assistance in raising the practical standards among this largely lay-led group. As a result, an ad hoc four-week training program was established in 1998 for laypeople in the United States, where they were acquainted with liturgical music, social activities, and leadership skills.

At the same time, Rabbi Walter Homolka explored the options for instituting a program for modern rabbinical training within the large and tuition-free German state university system, which already offered a number of Jewish studies centers. Ultimately, the decision was made to establish a rabbinical seminary in partnership with the University of Potsdam, where the Moses Mendelssohn Center had been founded after German unification. Not only did this new seminary constitute the largest Jewish studies center of the country; it also stressed the historical impact that Moses Mendelssohn, the Haskala, and German Jewry had had on the region and provided a pillar to support this project within the University of Potsdam, right next to Berlin, its historical center.

Alfred Gottschalk ordaining the first German-trained liberal rabbis at the first ordination ceremony of the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, Potsdam, with Walter Homolka and Walter Jacob in the upper right: Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, © Margrit Schmidt.

Substantial financial backing for the project was raised by the newly founded American Friends of the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, whose members, many of them former refugees, included Chancellor Alfred Gottschalk (HUC), Alexander Schindler (former president of the UAHC) W. Gunther Plaut (head of the responsa committee), historian Michael A. Meyer (HUC), Joshua Haberman, Lore Metzger (wife of Kurt Metzger), Ruth Nussbaum (wife of Max Nussbaum), Elizabeth Petuchowski (wife of Jakob Petuchowski), Karl Richter, Herman Schaalman, and Alfred Wolf.⁶⁴

Abraham Geiger, the nineteenth-century father of liberal, historical Judaism, became a role model and standard-bearer of the training program. This new institution satisfied Geiger’s demand to have Jewish theology for the first time stand on equal footing with Christian theological faculties at German state universities. Incorporated in 1999, opened in 2000, and graduating its first class of German-educated liberal rabbis in 2006, it heralded a new beginning in post-Holocaust Jewish history in Germany and paved the way for the other two American Jewish movements, the Conservative movement and the Orthodox movement in Judaism, to follow suit.

In 2009, the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar reestablished a rabbinical school in Berlin with the assistance of the Lauder Foundation and the remaining members of the dispersed Orthodox community. The school was led by Heinrich Chanoch Ehrentreu, son of Jonah Ernst Ehrentreu, as rector and supported by Prof. Meir Hildesheimer, great-grandson of the founder of the original seminary who taught Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University outside of Tel Aviv. The Orthodox seminary established academic cooperation with secular universities such as Berlin’s Humboldt University (law faculty) and the University of Applied Science in Erfurt (social work/social sciences).⁶⁵

In 2013, the Conservative movement in American Judaism established the Zacharias Frankel College⁶⁶ in Potsdam, which, together with the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, has been educating and graduating new generations of a modern European Jewish rabbinate in the University of Potsdam’s recently founded Jewish School of Theology since then. Rabbi Walter Homolka was not only professor and managing director of the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg and the Zacharias Frankel College, guiding the intellectual and organizational growth of the Jewish School of Theology in a unique and energetic fashion; he also became the prototype and role model for a new generation of modern rabbis from Germany until the Geiger-Kolleg was recently confronted with severe accusations of abuse of power that are challenging the seminary’s future.⁶⁷

For those who supported the reestablishment of these rabbinical schools, the ordination of the first modern, German-trained rabbis in 2006 at the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg was one of the last steps in finding closure and meaning in their personal lives and professional careers. The return of these former refugee rabbis to Germany not only benefited them in their personal quest for resolution; they also seized the opportunity to pass on a tradition that they thought had been completely lost. They embraced the chance to demonstrate to the world that, after their flight and renewal, they had never lost agency. They were able to—at least symbolically—undo a process that had started with Nazism.⁶⁸