“NOTES” in “The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate”
NOTES
Introduction
1. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 225–295; Christian Wiese, “Translating Wissenschaft: The Emergence and Self-Emancipation of American Jewish Scholarship, 1860–1920,” in American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience?, ed. Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Wiese, “The Philadelphia Conference 1869 and German Reform: A Historical Moment in a Transnational Story of Proximity and Alienation,” in Wiese and Wilhelm, American Jewry, 136–158; Wiese, “Auf Deutsch nach Amerika: Über den Transfer der Wissenschaft des Judentums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Sprache, Erkenntnis und Bedeutung—Deutsch in der jüdischen Wissenskultur, ed. Arndt Engelhardt and Susanne Zepp (Leipzig: Leipziger Uni-Verlag, 2015), 57–86.
2. Meyer, Response, 264–289.
3. Wiese, “Auf Deutsch nach Amerika,” 57–86.
4. Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach, eds., Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner, 2 vols. (Munich: De Gruyter, 2004–2009); Michael A. Meyer, ed., Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography—The German and Early American Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), or Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). See, for example, Alan Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2011).
5. Michael A. Meyer et al., eds., German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Renewal and Destruction, 1918–1945, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 391–402.
6. Ian Tyrell, “What Is Transnational History?,” https:/iantyrelol.wordpress.com/what-is-transnational-history; David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (1993): 1045–1077; Heinz Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). For American Jewish history specifically, see, for example, Ava F. Kahn and Adam Mendelsohn, eds., Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014).
7. Steven Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
8. See, for example, Timothy L. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review 83:1155–1185.
9. Schenderlein stressed this circumstance in her recent work, Anne Clara Schenderlein, Germany on Their Minds (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).
10. Leo Baeck, “Israel und das Deutsche Volk,” Merkur 10 (October 1952): 911; Michael A. Meyer, “Denken und Wirken Leo Baecks nach 1945,” in Leo Baeck 1873–1956: Aus dem Stamme von Rabbinen, ed. Georg Heuberger and Fritz Backhaus (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2001), 144.
11. Kaja Kaźmierska, Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors (Boston: Academic Studies, 2012).
12. Baeck, “Israel,” 911; Meyer, “Denken und Wirken,” 144.
13. The exchange took place mainly in West Germany and Berlin. Only West Germany acknowledged the existence of a unique Jewish victimhood in the Holocaust and addressed its responsibilities toward the Jewish people in World War II and the Shoah in the postwar era. East Germany never enforced restitution or indemnification for Jewish victims of Nazism until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Nevertheless, since the Jewish community of Berlin functioned as one united Jewish Gemeinde until 1961, for a while, there was some overlap, and a few rabbis, like Ernst Lorge, even visited East Berlin when returning to Germany. Since displaced persons had avoided East Germany for ideological reasons after 1945, few German-Jewish survivors remained. Moreover, Jewish life among the survivors suffered antisemitic Stalinist purges in the early 1950s, which triggered another wave of emigration, leaving Jewish life in East Germany very weak outside of Berlin. See Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
14. Baeck, “Israel,” 911; Meyer, “Denken und Wirken,” 144.
15. This is a uniquely neglected topic that deserves more attention. Some work has been done by Shlomo Shafir. Shlomo Shafir, Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). Shafir, however, mainly discusses this topic from the perspective of diplomatic history.
16. Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, https://www.abraham-geiger-kolleg.de/; Zacharias Frankel College, http://zacharias-frankel-college.de/; Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, https://rabbinerseminar.de/.
17. Cornelia Wilhelm, “Saved by the Seminary: German Refugee Rabbis’ Careers during and after the Holocaust: A Transnational Perspective,” in Academics in a Century of Displacement: The Global History and Politics of Protecting Endangered Scholars, ed. Leyla Dakhli, Pascale Laborier, and Frank Wolff (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2024), 73–99.
18. Michael A. Meyer, “A Centennial History,” in Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion at One Hundred Years, ed. Samuel Karpf (Cincinnati: HUC Press, 1976); Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob R. Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (New York: HUC Press, 1976), 359–375; with new findings about their returns to postwar Germany, see Wilhelm, “Saved by the Seminary”; see also Richard Damashek, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: The Life of Rabbi Herman E. Schaalman (Brooklyn: KTAV, 2013); Meyer, “The Refugee Rabbis: Trials and Transmissions,” LBIY 57 (2012): 87–103; and Marsha Rozenblit, “The Seminary during the Holocaust Years,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, vol. 2, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 274. See also Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 74, 49–58, 84–97.
19. For the practice of naturalization in Germany, particularly in Prussia, at the time, see Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2001), 328–368.
20. See James Turner and Paul Bernard, “The ‘German Model’ and the Graduate School: The University of Michigan and the Origin Myth of the American University,” History of Higher Education Annual 13 (1993): 69–98.
21. Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Sheehan, eds., The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).
22. Ulrike Jureit, Generationenforschung (Göttingen: V&R, 2006), 86–92.
23. An excellent example is Joachim Prinz’s introduction to Martin Luther King’s speech during the March on Washington, 28 August 1963. See also David Jünger, “Prinz and King,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 August 2013, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/die-gegenwart/vor-50-jahren-prinz-und-king-12546288.html.
24. Jureit, Generationenforschung, 86–92.
25. Ibid., 91.
26. This large database could not be made accessible to the public due to privacy laws and data protection: it just provides the analysis for this book. However, a smaller set of data that can be researched independently in an online database named MIRA is accessible through the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München at http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/. The database also provides updated information on the location of research papers and biographical literature and links its information to the online version of Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner, ed. Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach, parts 1 and 2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, Imprint of Walter de Gruyter, 2004–2009). For an electronic version, see http://www.steinheim-institut.de/wiki/index.php/Biographisches_Handbuch_der_Rabbiner_(BHR).
27. See C. Wilhelm, ed., “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States after 1933,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/.
28. Jureit, Generationengeschichte, 92–93, 114–123.
1. German Jewry under Nazism
1. Simone Lässig, “How German Jewry Turned Bourgeois: Religion, Culture, and Social Mobility in the Age of Emancipation,” Bulletin of the GHI 37 (2005): 59–73.
2. Michael A. Meyer et al., eds., German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Renewal and Destruction, 1918–1945, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 198.
3. For the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and High Schools of 25 April 1933, see Richard Fuchs, “The ‘Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums’ in the Period of Nazi Rule,” LBIY 12 (1967): 9.
4. The law was enacted on 15 April 1937, ibid., 9.
5. For the Decree of the Reich Secretary of Education, enacted on 8 December 1938, ibid., 9.
6. Germany’s Jewish communities were—unlike the American congregation—tied to the superstructure of the Gemeinde, a kehillah-like organization that coordinated and financed Jewish life locally. It also embraced the religious life of the local communities, usually with several synagogues of different religious backgrounds. Unlike in the United States, where the congregational structure of religious life secured complete freedom of conscience for one congregation, the Gemeinde blocked such individualism and enforced religious compromise instead to cooperate successfully. Only a few congregations quit the Gemeinde because they did not feel represented by their religious and social setup. Such congregations were the modern orthodox “Breuer Gemeinde” in Frankfurt, the Orthodox Adass Jisroel, and the radical Reform Congregation in Berlin.
7. Alfred Jospe, “A Profession in Transition: The German Rabbinate, 1910–1939,” LBIY 19 (1974): 55. See also Astrid Zajdband, German Rabbis in British Exile: From ‘Heimat’ into the Unknown (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 50ff. Zajdband argues that the changes started during the Nazi era.
8. This ordination was carried out by a single rabbi in accordance with the liberal wing of the Allgemeiner Rabbinerverband Deutschlands. The ordination was not granted by the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.
9. Liz Elsby, “I Shall Be What I Shall Be—The Story of Rabbiner Regina Jonas,” Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/rabbiner-regina-jonas.html.
10. Bernard Drachman, “Activities, Contacts, and Experiences in Breslau,” in Das Breslauer Seminar: Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (Fraenkelscher Stiftung) in Breslau 1854–1938, ed. Guido Kisch (Tübingen: Gedächtnisschrift, 1963), 319.
11. The term “Jewishness” is in quotation marks here because it refers to a racial construction of Jewishness by the Nazis and does not match the halachic definition of Jewishness.
12. Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 7, 29.
13. Ibid., 8; Fuchs refers here to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Central British Fund.
14. Max Nussbaum was still a Romanian citizen, and for that reason, he was not always affected by legal measures targeting German Jews. The same claim is made by the biographers of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Kaplan and Dresner claim that even Polish Jews had a better status than German Jews in Germany before the forced expulsion in October 1938. Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 220.
15. Ibid., 274.
16. Esriel Hildesheimer, “Die Studenten des Rabbinerseminars zu Berlin,” in Das Berliner Rabbinerseminar 1873–1938, ed. Chana Schütz and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2008), 44.
17. Kisch, Das Breslauer Seminar, 384–388.
18. For recent and innovative scholarship on the relationship between Germans and Jews in Eastern Europe, see Tobias Grill, “Preface,” in Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe: Shared and Comparative Histories (New Perspective on Modern Jewish History 8), ed. Tobias Grill (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), vii–xxii. See also the other contributions in this volume, which explore this relationship with great historical depth. See also Hillel Kieval, “The Lands Between: The Jews of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia to 1918,” in Where Cultures Meet: The Story of the Jews of Czechoslovakia, ed. Natalia Berger (Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutsoth/Ministry of Defence, 1990), 23–51.
19. See C. Wilhelm, ed., “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States, 1933–1990,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/.
20. Isi Jacob Eisner, “Reminiscences of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary,” LBIY 12 (1967): 37f.
21. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 22–35, 36–65; Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001).
22. Eisner, “Reminiscences,” 41ff.
23. Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 7.
24. As a young rabbi in the Berlin Jewish community, Cohn was dismissed from his post of religious teacher at the Berlin Jewish high school run by the Jewish community, for he was liberally expressing his Zionist thoughts on (national) Jewish identity. As a result, he was banned from the Jewish community, which did not want to be identified with Zionism and underscored that it vehemently rejected an outspokenly Zionist and political rabbi. Consequently, Cohn turned to a second career, started studying jurisprudence, and successfully developed his talents as a playwright and poet. In 1925, he returned to Berlin as a rabbi in a “private” synagogue outside the Berlin Jewish community. Deborah Horner, Emil Bernhard Cohn: Rabbi, Playwright and Poet (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2009), 23–42.
25. Irene Kaufmann, Die Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1872–1942) (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2006), 22.
26. Upper Silesia was annexed by Prussia from the Austrian Habsburgs in 1742 and became Polish territory following Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. The multiethnic region, with cities like Wrocław (Breslau) and Opole (Oppeln) featuring large Jewish communities, had already been massively affected by territorial disputes and changes after the Treaty of Versailles.
27. Lewis M. Barth and Ruth Nussbaum, eds., Max Nussbaum: From Berlin to Hollywood. A Midcentury Vision of Jewish Life (Malibu: Pangloss, 1994), 8.
28. Latin, French, and English.
29. Barth and Nussbaum, Max Nussbaum, 8ff.
30. Max Nussbaum, “Kantianismus und Marxismus in der Socialphilosophie Max Adlers” (PhD diss., University of Würzburg, 1931).
31. Michael A. Meyer, ed., Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography—The German and Early American Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), xiv.
32. Joachim Prinz, “Zum Begriff der religiösen Erfahrung: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Religion” (PhD diss., University of Giessen, 1927).
33. Meyer, Joachim Prinz, xv–xix, xxii.
34. Prinz, “Zum Begriff der religiösen Erfahrung”; Joachim Prinz, Der Freitagabend (Berlin: Brandus, 1935).
35. Many of them were popular histories: Joachim Prinz, Helden und Abenteuer (Berlin: P. Baumann, 1930); Prinz, Jüdische Geschichte (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1931); Prinz, Die Geschichten der Bibel (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1934).
36. Such as a chessboard game called Durch Wüstensand ins Heilige Land (Through Desert Sand to the Holy Land), in Emil Cohn, ed., Jüdischer Kinderkalender (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, Jg. 1 and 2, 1927, 1928): Leo Baeck Institute New York (LBI), r 162.
37. Ibid., xix-xxi.
38. Meyer, Joachim Prinz, xx.
39. Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1934).
40. Emil Cohn, Judentum, ein Aufruf an die Zeit (Munich: Georg Müller, 1923).
41. Ibid., 185ff, 201ff, 217ff.
42. Simon Schwab, Heimkehr ins Judentum (Frankfurt am Main: Hermon, 1934), 16–26.
43. Moses Auerbach, “Die Bildungsfrage in Der Thora-Treuen Judenheit Deutschlands,” in Vom Sinn des Judentums: Ein Sammelbuch zu Ehren Nathan Birnbaums, ed. Abraham Elijah Kaplan and Max Landau (Frankfurt am Main: Hermon, 1925), 225–232; Isaac Breuer, “Die Deutsche Orthodoxie im Jahre des Weltkrieges,” Jüdische Monatsschrift 2, no. 2 (1915): 60–64; Breuer, Ein Kampf Um Gott (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag von Sander and Friedberg, 1920); Breuer, “Rabbiner Hirsch als Wegweiser in die Jüdische Geschichte,” Nachlaß Z’wi: Eine Monatsschrift für Judentum in Lehre und Tat 5, no. 4 (February 1935): 69–84; Maximilian Landau, “Samson Raphael Hirsch und Unsere Zeit,” Nachlaß Z’wi: Eine Monatsschrift für Judentum in Lehre und Tat 7, no. 1 (October 1936): 27–35.
44. Hans Steidle, Jakob Stoll und die Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt: eine Spurensuche (Würzburg: Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, 2002), 57.
45. Ibid., 28–59.
46. For a good description of the changes and challenges Nazism introduced to the communities, see Meyer, Joachim Prinz, 98ff.
47. Ibid., 105.
48. Ibid., 100.
49. Among them were, for example, Max Gruenewald (Prinz’s brother-in-law), Manfred Swarsensky, Heinrich Lemle, Siegfried Ucko, Selig Sigmund Auerbach, Ulrich Steuer, Robert Raphael Geis, and Emil Schorsch. Walter Homolka and Heinz-Günther Schöttler, Rabbi—Pastor—Priest: Their Roles and Profiles through the Ages (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 341.
50. See Meyer, “Refugee Rabbis,” 90n13.
51. Nussbaum, “Kantianismus und Marxismus.”
52. Sermon “Das Fest der Erstlinge und das Fest des Buches” [The festival of the newcomers and the festival of the Book], Dr. Max Nussbaum, Berlin: Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio, at americanjewisharchives.org (AJA), MS-705, box 3, folder 2.
53. Sermon “Das Fest der Erstlinge.”
54. Sermon “First day of Rosh Hashanna,” Friedenstempel, 6 September 1937: AJA, MS-705, A, box 3, folder 3, p. 1; here he explains at length the deep-seated value of the Jewish tradition and its historical consciousness; the sermon carries the handwritten subtitle “Wohl Dir, dass Du ein Enkel bist,” pointing at the benefits of being part of a lineage of Jewish generations.
55. “Purim—Los, Lösung, Erlösung im Judentum,” presentation given on 17 March 1938 at the Jewish Cultural League: AJA, MS-705, A, box 3, folder 4, p. 10. Here Nussbaum claims: “Man muss eine neue jüdische Generation erziehen. Deswegen sind Vorträge über Purim, wenn sie nicht antiquiert anmuten sollen, wichtig. . . . Der Sinn der großen Kräfte-Konzentration, die wir in diesen Jahren betreiben, besteht darin, dass in jedem Schritt vorwärts zum Aufbau ein Stück Erlösung sichtbar werden muss.” [One has to educate a new generation of Jews. That is why lectures on Purim are important, if they are not to sound antiquated. . . . It is the higher meaning of our joining forces during these years that we move forward to building up visible salvation (for our congregants) . . .] Translated by the author.
56. “Glück! (Ursachen unseres Unglücks)” [. . .], sermon presented for Kol Nidre, 14 September 1938 in the Neue Synagoge Oranienburgerstr: AJA, MS-705, A, box 3, folder 3, p. 4.
57. “Welt ohne Frieden, Welt ohne Recht,” sermon, 1. Tag Rosh Hashanna 5699 (1938), Friedenstempel, 26 September 1938 [handmarked]: AJA, MS-705, A, box 3, folder 4.
58. Galut = Jewish exile.
59. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61–99.
60. “Judentum als Erlebnis einer großen Liebe,” Jüdische Rundschau, no. 18, 5 March 1937, 2: AJA, MS-705, A, box 3, folder 3.
61. “Vierzig Jahre Zionismus,” sermon given on 4 August 1937 in Friedenstempel, Berlin: AJA, MS-705, A, box 3, folder 3. The concluding sentence reads: “Jüdisches Volk, tritt Dein Erbe an!” (“Jewish people, embrace your heritage!”)
62. Under extreme pressure to complete his degree as a Jew at a university increasingly controlled by Nazis, Heschel prolonged his stay in Germany and published his dissertation in 1936 with the Polish Academy of Science and the financial support of the German-Jewish publisher Erich Reiss. See Kaplan and Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 180–233.
63. Rav is the Hebrew term for rabbi, typically used in a religiously traditional setting for an eminent rabbinical scholar.
64. Alexander Altmann, “The German Rabbi, 1910–1939,” LBIY 19 (1974): 19; Jospe, “Profession in Transition,” 51–61; Max Gruenewald, “The Modern Rabbi,” LBIY 2 (1957): 85–97.
65. Max Gruenewald, “The Beginning of the Reichsvertretung,” LBIY 1 (1956): 57–67.
66. This change of status of the Hochschule was ordered on 24 June 1933; see Kaufmann, Die Hochschule, 45. The Hochschule had already been degraded once before to a Lehranstalt from 1883 to 1918, ibid., 33. See also Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 4.
67. Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 13.
68. Ibid., 15–16.
69. “Memorandum betreffend einige Punkte der Ausbildung der Rabbiner in der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums,” by Professor Dr. Otto Toeplitz, undated (approximately 1937): AJA, MS-663, box 1/18.
70. “Memorandum betreffend einige.”
71. See Eisner, “Reminiscences,” 32–52. The history of the orthodox rabbinical seminary is not very informative concerning the Nazi years: Mordechai Eliav and Esriel Hildesheimer, Das Berliner Rabbinerseminar, 1873–1938: Seine Gründungsgeschichte, seine Studenten (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2008), Marc B. Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1966 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), 110–164, and Kisch, Das Breslauer Seminar.
72. Kisch, Das Breslauer Seminar, 159. Many students gave up their studies to seek vocational training, which they considered more useful for a potential immigration to Palestine. Only courses in modern Hebrew grew significantly at the seminary to facilitate immigration.
73. Kisch, Das Breslauer Seminar, 160; see also Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 20–21.
74. Leo Baeck to Ismar Elbogen, 25 April 1939: LBI, AR66, III, Elbogen.
75. Eisner, “Reminiscences,” 49, and Christhard Hoffmann, “Early, but Opposed—Supported, but Late: Two Berlin Seminaries Which Attempted to Move Abroad,” LBIY 36 (1991): 267–304.
76. Hoffmann, “Early, but Opposed,” 279–282. See also Robert Jütte, “Not Welcomed with Open Arms: German Rabbis in Eretz Israel, 1938–1948,” LBIY 57 (2012): 105–117.
77. Hoffmann, “Early, but Opposed,” 282.
78. Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob R. Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976), 362–363, and Hoffmann, “Early but Opposed,” 283–296.
79. Ruth Nattermann, Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung nach der Shoah: Die Gründungs- und Frühgeschichte des Leo Baeck Institute (Essen: Klartext, 2004), 31.
80. Ibid., 35, and Hoffmann, “Early but Opposed,” 283–295.
81. Kaufmann, Die Hochschule, 46–47; see also Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 26ff.
82. Wolfgang Hamburger, “Teacher in Berlin and Cincinnati,” LBIY 2 (1957): 30. See also Fuchs, “Hochschule,” 30. See also the autobiographies of Nathan Peter Levinson and Herbert Strauss for the last days of the Hochschule: Nathan Peter Levinson, Ein Ort ist, mit wem Du bist: Lebensstationen eines Rabbiners (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1996), 48ff, and Herbert Strauss, In the Eye of the Storm: Growing Up Jewish in Germany, 1918–1943 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 83ff. See also Hartmut Bomhoff, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich—Prägende Jahre: Eine Biographie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 28–32.
83. Michael A. Meyer, “A Centennial History,” in Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion at One Hundred Years, ed. Samuel Karpf (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976), 1–284, and Jeffrey Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary Press, 1997).
84. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 74, 49–58, 84–97, and Meyer et al., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 196–197.
2. Rescue and Flight
1. Samuel H. Goldenson to William Rosenau, 28 November 1932, Wm. Rosenau to Samuel H. Goldenson, 23 November 1932, and circular letter by Wm. Rosenau, 21 February 1933: AJA, MS-34, box 15, folder 13.
2. Circular letter by Wm. Rosenau, 21 February 1933: AJA, MS-34, box 15, folder 13.
3. Henry M. Rosenthal to Wm. Rosenau, 1 March 1933, Wm. Rosenau to Samuel Goldenson, 8 March 1933: AJA, MS-34, box 15, folder 13.
4. Minutes of the Admin. Council Meetings, 20 March and 30 March 1933, UOJCA: American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), I-66, box 3, folder7. The UOJCA also rejected the proposed Zionist World Jewish Congress.
5. Circular letter by Wm. Rosenau with results of the query to American Jewish organizations, 19 May 1933 and letter of CCAR to members, 5 June 1933: AJA, MS-34, box 15, folder 13.
6. On the ideological background of the movement for a World Jewish Congress and on Stephen Wise as a leading Reform rabbi and visionary, see Zohar Segev, The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust: Between Activism and Restraint (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 1–22. The WJC was founded in 1936. William Rosenau was a member of the anti-Zionist American Council of Judaism, and the correspondence of the two Reform rabbis highlights the different worlds they came from: Stephen Wise to Wm. Rosenau, 10 April 1933, Stephen Wise to Wm. Rosenau, 19 April 1933 and Wm. Rosenau to S. Wise, 15 April 1933, Wm. Rosenau to S. Wise, 21 April 1933: AJA, MS-34, box 15, folder 13.
7. Since the Nazis persecuted a variety of people as “Jews” who were neither halachically nor religiously Jewish but were subject to the exclusionary policies and their racial thinking, I use quotation marks here for the term “Jewish.”
8. Post Conference Executive Board Meeting, CCAR, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 26 June 1933: AJA, MS-34, box 15, folder 11.
9. Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob R. Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976), 359.
10. Marsha Rozenblit, “The Seminary during the Holocaust Years,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, vol. 2, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 274.
11. Cyrus Adler to Louis Finkelstein, 29 May 1933: JTS, Archives and Special Collections (JTS), Ratner Center (RC), Finkelstein Archive, Corr. 1920–1939.
12. Stephen Duggan and Betty Drury, The Rescue of Science and Learning: The Story of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 173–175.
13. Ibid., 7.
14. Ibid., 177, 180–181.
15. Ibid., 180ff. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 74, 49–58, 84–97.
16. The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences is an American encyclopedia project on social sciences that was meant to highlight the relevance of the study of human affairs. The project benefited enormously from the involvement of German refugee scientists at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1934).
17. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 80.
18. Cyrus Adler to Edwin Seligman, 3 May 1933: JTS, RC, Finkelstein Archive, Corr. 1920–1939, folder ECAGS, and circular letter of Edwin A. Seligman to Anonymous, 26 April 1933: JTS, RC, Finkelstein Archive, Corr. 1920–1939, folder ECAGS. The envisioned project urgently needed funding, and Johnson turned to Seligman to support his fundraising initiative: Alvin Johnson to E. A. Seligman, 24 April 1933: RC, Finkelstein Archive, Corr. 1920–1939, folder ECAGS, and Seligman to Adler, 29 April 1933: RC, Finkelstein Archive, Corr. 1920–1939, folder ECAGS.
19. Cyrus Adler to Stephen Duggan, 31 January 1934: JTS, RC, Finkelstein Archive, Corr. 1920–1939, folder ECAGS.
20. See also Cyrus Adler to Stephen Duggan, 31 January 1934: The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (NYPL), Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records (ECAFS), box 139, folder 35.
21. See Rozenblit, “Seminary,” 274. For a younger scholar, the salary was considered adequate, especially since the college also provided room and board to Sperber in the JTS dormitory for many years.
22. Ibid. The hiring of Leo Rosenzweig was rejected by Cyrus Adler for this reason.
23. Ibid., 275.
24. Isaac Landman and Israel Goldstein to Samuel Goldenson, 15 March 1934: AJA, MS-34, box 16, folder 2.
25. Everett R. Clinchy to Henry J. Cadbury, 9 May 1934, and Samuel Goldenson to Felix A. Levy, 10 May 1934: AJA, MS-1834, box 15, folder 18.
26. Cadbury was a lifelong Quaker who had been forced out of his teaching position at Haverford College in 1918 due to a letter he wrote criticizing the American war effort that appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger.
27. Pre-Conference Meeting of the Executive Board CCAR, Wernersville, PA, 13 June 1934: AJA, MS-34, box 16, folder 6.
28. The Rabbinical Council of America was the rabbinical organization of the Union of Orthodox Congregations of America.
29. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 362–363.
30. The effort was financially supported by HUC, the JTS, Dropsie College, and the JIR; the invitation was extended by HUC, where this project was organized; Jacob Rader Marcus offered to provide the affidavit.
31. Ismar Elbogen to JTS, 25 May 1937: JTS, RC, RG 3, B, box 1.
32. Julius Lewy to Cyrus Adler, 17 September 1937: JTS RC, RG 3, B, box 1.
33. HUC offered him a teaching position in Cincinnati, but he declined.
34. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 3623–3663. It took until early May 1938 for the four colleges to raise the funds for Elbogen’s fellowship: Julian Morgenstern, “To Whom It May Concern,” 2 May 1938: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A box 18/Julian Morgenstern. On Elbogen’s arrival, see Cyrus Adler to J. Morgenstern, 2 November 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, B, box 1.
35. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 363.
36. Ibid., 362. Nestor is a character from the Iliad and the eldest of the Greek leaders in the Trojan War. A great warrior as a young man, at advanced age he was noted for his wisdom and for sharing his knowledge.
37. For example, he helped Max Landau to make contact with Yeshiva University; see Christhard Hoffmann, “Early, but Opposed—Supported, but Late: Two Berlin Seminaries Which Attempted to Move Abroad,” LBIY 36 (1991): 282.
38. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 127. Here it is stated that at some point, the number of new German faculty members equaled the existing faculty positions.
39. JTS Press Release, 29 June 1934: JTS, RC, Finkelstein Archive (unprocessed), Corr. 1920–1939, ECAGS. The funds for the positions of Lewy and Sperber were retrieved from the Rockefeller Foundation.
40. At about the time that Wilensky’s permitted stay was to end, his wife, Mary, a medical doctor who had stayed in Lithuania, convinced Julian Morgenstern in a dramatic correspondence that her husband’s return to Lithuania would mean his death; eventually, HUC allowed him to stay, and his wife joined him. See the correspondence of Julian Morgenstern with Michael and Mary Wilensky in the Julian Morgenstern manuscript collection of the American Jewish Archives: AJA, MS-30, box 12, folder 25.
41. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 360.
42. Ibid., 361.
43. J. Morgenstern to A. Guttmann, 6 April 1939 (invitation letter), and Guttmann asking for the support of Chief Rabbi of Great Britain J. Hertz to get a temporary permit for Great Britain, as visa problems for the United States were developing: A. Guttmann to J. Hertz, 10 August 1939; Anderson Dana Hodgdon, American Consul in Germany to Secretary of State, 12 January 1940; Israel Schapiro to J. Morgenstern, 12 March 1940 on having turned to Senator Taft’s office for assistance on behalf of Alexander Guttmann and the other refugee scholars: AJA, MS-30, box 3, folder 2.
44. Julian Morgenstern to Franz Landsberger, 6 April 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 7, folder 5; Julian Morgenstern to Franz Landsberger (already residing in Oxford, England), 5 July 1939, in which Morgenstern mentions difficulties with the State Department, and J. Morgenstern to American Consul, London, 10 July 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 7, folder 5.
45. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 363.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 364.
48. Ibid., 365.
49. Ibid., 366.
50. Taft was the US House representative for Cincinnati, Ohio, the city in which HUC had its historical campus.
51. For Morgenstern’s correspondence on Sonne’s behalf, see his file in the Morgenstern papers: AJA, MS-30, box 10, folder 27.
52. A. Heschel to J. Morgenstern, 1 June 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 5, folder 23.
53. William H. Cordell, American Vice Consul, Warsaw to A. Heschel, 18 April 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 5, folder 23.
54. A. Heschel to J. Morgenstern, 28 July 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 5, folder 23.
55. J. Morgenstern to A. Heschel, 21 September 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 5, folder 23.
56. Ibid.
57. J. Morgenstern to the American Consul in Dublin, 25 September 1939: AJA, MS-30, box 5, folder 23.
58. A. Heschel to J. Morgenstern, 25 March 1940: AJA, MS-30, box 5, folder 23.
59. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 370; see also correspondence of Julian Morgenstern with E. Taeubler: AJA, MS-30, box 11, folder 7. For the reasons for Taeubler’s delayed departure, see Ruth Nattermann, Deutsch-jüdische Geschichtsschreibung nach der Shoah: Die Gründungs- und Frühgeschichte des Leo Baeck Institute (Koblenz: Klartext, 2004), 37–65. Nattermann claims that Taeubler was involved in making plans for the transfer of Jewish scholars to a Jewish Academy with bases in New York, Jerusalem, and Cambridge.
60. Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 372.
61. Rozenblit, “Seminary,” 274.
62. Ibid., 275; Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 360. It took until early May 1938 for the four colleges to raise the funds for Elbogen’s fellowship: Morgenstern, “To Whom It May Concern.” On Elbogen’s arrival, see Cyrus Adler to J. Morgenstern, 2 November 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, B, box 1.
63. Interview Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss for the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971: LBI, AR 25385, 21.
64. Robert Jütte, Die Emigration der deutschsprachigen “Wissenschaft des Judentums”: Die Auswanderung Jüdischer Historiker nach Palästina (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991). Interview Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss for the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971: LBI, AR 25385, 21–22.
65. Robert Jütte, “Not Welcomed with Open Arms: German Rabbis in Eretz Israel, 1938–1948,” LBIY 57 (2012). See also Oral History Interview Simon Schwab, July 1971: LBI, AR 25385, 4.
66. Heinrich Kronstein to Cyrus Adler, 13 December 1937: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG.
67. Cyrus Adler to H. Kronstein, 23 December 1937: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG.
68. Finkelstein to US Consul, Tel Aviv, 13 January 1939: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG.
69. Obviously, the JTS tried to obtain funding for Gruenewald’s family, but without success: L. Finkelstein to Frederick Borchardt, 25 October 1939: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG.
70. L. Finkelstein to City Clerk, NYC, 13 February 1940: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG, and M. Gruenewald to L. Finkelstein, 2 November 1939: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG.
71. Morgenstern, “To Whom It May Concern,” L. Finkelstein: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG.
72. Louis P. Spicer to Ernest Gruenewald, 2 July 1940: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG. See also Interview Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss for the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971: LBI, AR 25385, 22.
73. M. Gruenewald to L. Finkelstein, 9 March 1941 and Affidavit of Support for Dr. Max Gruenewald by L. Finkelstein, dated 1941: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG. Interview Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss for the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971: LBI, AR 25385, 25.
74. Gruenewald to Finkelstein, 30 November 1943; Finkelstein to Gruenewald, 19 June 1944, M. Gruenewald to Finkelstein, 5 January 1944: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 10, MG. Marian Meisner, A History of Milburn Township (Millburn, NY: Millburn Short Hills Historical Society, 2002), 19, https://millburnlibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/HistoryMillburnTownshipEbook.pdf.
75. B. Revel to S. Duggan, 26 November 1933: NYPL, ECADFS, box 19.
76. Cecilia Raskovsky-Davidson to E. R. Murrow, 26 June 1934: NYPL, ECADFS, box 19.
77. E. R. Murrow to B. Revel, 10 August 1934: NYPL, ECADFS, box 19. Yeshiva University is the superstructure for a college for general studies with some graduate schools, such as the rabbinical school.
78. Revel to Duggan, 26 November 1933 with attachments (short bios of suggested scholars): NYPL, ECADFS, box 19. See also Office Memo, Betty Drury to E. R. Murrow, 8 December 1933: NYPL, ECADFS, box 19.
79. Hartstein to Roger Howson, 6 June 1936, Hartstein to Gutkind, 15 March 1938, and Erich Gutkind to Hartstein, 3 April 1938: Special Collections, Gottesman Library, Yeshiva University (YU), Hartstein, box 14, Gutkind, Erich, 1936–39, 9/2-35.
80. List of Yeshiva College Faculty, Spring Term 1936: YU, Faculty, Hartstein, box 31, 1937–44, 17/3-68; Gutkind to Hartstein, 21 September 1936: YU, Hartstein, box 14, Gutkind, Erich, 1936–39, 9/2-35.
81. Reprint of Announcement in School and Society, 13 January 1934, and Ida Landau to E. R. Murrow, 1 March 1934: NYPL, ECAFS, box 19. See also “Dr. Keyser Invited Here,” New York Times, 24 December 1933: NYPL, ECAFS, box 19.
82. Landau to B. Revel, 14 May 1939: YU, Hartstein, 13/3/40, Foreign Faculty. See also Marc Shapiro, “Torah im Derekh Eretz in the Shadow of Hitler,” Torah u-Maddah Journal 14 (2006–2007): 87–88, and Hoffmann, “Early but Opposed,” 282.
83. Shapiro, “Torah,” 88. M. Landau to H. Friedenwald, 26 June 1939: YU, Hartstein, 13/3/40, Foreign Faculty.
84. Hoffmann, “Early but Opposed,” 282.
85. Ibid.
86. Mordechai Eliav and Esriel Hildesheimer, Das Berliner Rabbinerseminar, 1873–1938: Seine Gründungsgeschichte, Seine Studenten (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2008), 167.
87. David Kranzler and Dovid Landesman, Rav Breuer: His Life and Legacy (New York: Feldheim, 1998), 115–116.
88. Ephraim Zuroff, Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States: The Activities of the Vaad Ha-Hatzala Rescue Committee, 1939–1945 (Philadelphia: KTAV, 2000).
89. See also David Kranzler, Holocaust Hero: The Untold Story and Vignettes of Solomon Schonfeld (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2004).
90. Bildung refers to character formation by self-improvement, including the improvement of heart and mind, following the nineteenth-century German ideal of “Bildung.”
91. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 280.
92. Rubinstein, a dedicated Zionist (Mizrachi), was the chief rabbi of Vilnius. He attended the World Zionist Congress in Geneva in 1939 and returned to Vilnius at the outbreak of WWII to assist his community. When the city was back under Soviet control, he fled to the Soviet Union. He arrived in the United States in 1941 and started teaching at Yeshiva University in New York City.
93. Shatzkes did not accept this offer at the time, but he stayed in Poland, then fled to Vilnius after Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and Russia. After Vilnius fell back under Soviet control, Shatzkes managed to flee to Japan via the Soviet Union with the assistance of Chiune Sugihara. He arrived in the United States in 1941, where he was appointed as senior Rosh Yeshiva at RIETS. Once in the United States, he continued to support the flight of over five thousand refugees from Vilna, many of whom were rabbis, including those from the evacuated Yeshiva Mir.
94. “Faculty Promotions Honor Yeshiva College Scholars,” Yeshiva College Quarterly 4, no. 5 (December 1941): 1, 4. See also Scholarship Fund Dinner for Refugee Students at Yeshiva College, 2 April 1939, Hotel Astor: YU Press Releases, box 163.
95. Minutes of the Admin. Council Meetings, 15 May, 19 August, UOJCA: AJHS, I-66, box 3, folder 8; Minutes of the Admin. Council Meetings, 26 October 1941, UOJCA: AJHS, I-66, box 3, folder 13.
96. Among them were, for example, Henry Siegman, Eli Chaim Carlebach, Walter Würzburger, and Shlomo Carlebach.
97. He contributed to the founding of Mesivta Chaim Berlin, Telshe Cleveland, and Beis Medrash Gehova.
98. Apparently, there were problems in obtaining a state license for the schools because Joseph Breuer mentions troubles with the Education Association in a letter to Leo Jung, whom he asks for assistance in obtaining some subventions. Joseph Breuer to Leo Jung, 30 November 1939: Archives of Agudath Israel of America.
99. Mitteilungen—Organ der K’hall Adass Jeshurun und der K’hall Agudath Jeshorim 1 (September 1939): 1.
100. Jacob Breuer, “Die Beth-Jacob-Schule unserer Gemeinde,” Mitteilungen 2 (9 August 1940): 1–2.
101. Joseph Breuer, “Samson Raphael Hirsch Jeshiva,” Mitteilungen 6 (June/July 1944): 1. The yeshiva was to have the characteristics of an American public school; the model of a parochial school was rejected.
102. “Teachers Seminary for Girls,” Mitteilungen 24 (June/July 1963): 1.
103. Jacob Breuer, “Probleme der Jüdischen Schule in Amerika,” Mitteilungen 3 (January 1942): 2–3; Breuer, “American Yeshiva Problems,” Mitteilungen 17 (December 1955): 1–2.
104. Breuer, “Probleme,” 2–3; Breuer, “American Yeshiva,” 1–2.
105. B. Drury to B. Revel, 29 November 1940: YU, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars (ECADFS), 5/4/26. Since the records of the Emergency Committee did not show any further communication, this grant application may have been turned down. It may have been hard to prove that the mesivta was equal to other institutions, such as colleges and universities of higher learning in the United States.
106. Ruderman had emigrated two years earlier from Daŭhinava in Belarus and was in contact with American colleagues who had studied with him at the Yeshiva Knesses Yisroel at Slabodka.
107. Hans Steidle, Jakob Stoll und die Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt: Eine Spurensuche (Würzburg: Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, 2002), 57.
108. Namely, Siegfried Bendheim.
109. A. M. Warren to H. Neuberger, 6 June 1939: YU, Vaad Hatzalah Papers, box 3.
110. Ibid.
111. Steidle, Jakob Stoll, 59, and Herman N. Neuberger, Treasuring His Legacy: Perpetuating the Mission (Baltimore: Ner Israel Rabbinical College, 2006), 22.
112. Steidle, Jakob Stoll, 60, and Biographical Questionnaire Samson R. Weiss, Biographische Dokumentation der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 in Kooperation mit der Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration (Biographische Dokumentation): IfZ, MA 1500/63B.
113. “Rav Shimon Schwab, zt”l, Recollections of His Years in Baltimore on the Occasion of This 13th yahrzeit,” adapted by Yitzchok Levine, Hamodia Magazine 14 Adar 5768 (20 February 2008), http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/recolletions_r_schwab.pdf.
114. Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Sheehan, The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians (New York: Berghahn Books), 2016.
115. Wolli Kaelter and Gordon Cohn, From Danzig: An American Rabbi’s Journey (Malibu, CA: Pangloss, 1997); W. Gunther Plaut, Unfinished Business: An Autobiography (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981); and Plaut, More Unfinished Business (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); see also the unpublished interviews with Alfred Wolf by his son Dan Wolf made available to the author for research purposes; see also Michael A. Meyer, “A Centennial History,” in Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion at One Hundred Years, ed. Samuel Karpf (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976), 123–124; see Meyer, “Refugee Scholars Project,” 312, 359–75; Richard Damashek, “The Gang of Five: The Impact of Five German Rabbinic Students on Twentieth-Century Reform Judaism: From Berlin to Cincinnati,” CCAR Journal 63 (Fall 2016): 5–21; and Damashek, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: The Life of Rabbi Herman E. Schaalman (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2013).
116. Julian Morgenstern to Louis Finkelstein, 15 June 1938: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 18, J. Morgenstern.
117. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 44.
118. Plaut, Unfinished Business, 47.
119. Damashek, Brand, 52–53.
120. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 44–45.
121. See unpublished interview # 385 with Alfred Wolf by his son Dan Wolf made available to the author for research purposes.
122. Damashek, “Gang of Five,” 7.
123. The term was coined by Richard Damashek.
124. Herman Schaalman met his girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancée Lotte Strauss in 1938. She died tragically in Palestine shortly before their planned wedding. Damashek, Brand, 86–103; Plaut, Unfinished Business, 72–78.
125. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 15–16, 21–22, 58.
126. The secretary of the Emergency Committee.
127. Joseph Abrahams to Cecilia Razovsky, 27 November 1935: JTS, RG 1, A, box 19/19.
128. See AJA, MS-672, Ernst Lorge Collection.
129. Julian Morgenstern to Louis Finkelstein, 15 June 1938: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 18, J. Morgenstern.
130. Ibid.
131. See correspondence Joe Weber (AJA) with Cornelia Wilhelm, 4 and 9 May 2017: private correspondence Cornelia Wilhelm.
132. Julian Morgenstern to Louis Finkelstein, 15 June 1938: JTS, RC, JTSGF, A, box 18, J. Morgenstern.
133. Nathan Peter Levinson, Ein Ort ist, mit wem Du bist: Lebensstationen eines Rabbiners (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1996), 87.
134. Ibid., 66.
135. Ibid., 69.
136. Plaut, Unfinished Business, 85.
137. “Biographical Note,” Stephen Schwarzschild Papers, AR 25376, Leo Baeck Institute, New York, http://digifindingaids.cjh.org/?pID=475354.
138. Hartmut Bomhof, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich: Prägende Jahre, Eine Biographie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 32. See also Rabbinic Ordinations at HUC, 188: AJA.
139. The HMT Dunera was a British steamer that transported German and Austrian refugees to their internment as enemy aliens in Australia.
140. Moses Rischin, “The German Imperative and the Jewish Response,” in The Jewish Legacy and German Conscience, ed. Moses Rischin and Raphael Asher (Berkeley, CA: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1991), 3.
141. Faculty Minutes, 17 November 1937 and 19 January 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
142. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 35, 62.
143. Information on Lewkowitz taken from the Bericht des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars (Fraenkelscher Stiftung), Hochschule für Jüdische Theologie, für das Jahr 1937 (Breslau: Kuratorium der Fraenkelschen Stiftungen, 1938), 5.
144. The BA degree was only introduced in Germany in the context of the European Bologna process in 1998.
145. Faculty Minutes, 24 September 1937: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
146. Faculty Minutes, 24 September 1937 and 17 November 1937: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
147. Faculty Minutes, 17 November 1937: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
148. Faculty Minutes, 19 January 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
149. Ibid.
150. Alexander Marx was born in Elberfeld, Germany, in 1878, and trained at the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar and continued to have lasting relationships with German colleagues.
151. Faculty Minutes, 19 January 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38; see also Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 347n18.
152. Katrin Hopstock, “Bis zum Ende-Die letzen 50 Jahre der jüdischen Gemeinde,” Vierteljahresheft des Verkehrsvereins Speyer in Zusammenarbeit mit der Stadtverwaltung (Winter 1988), 10, https://www.speyer.de/de/bildung/kulturelles-erbe-stadtarchiv/benutzung/digitale-praesentationen/vierteljahreshefte-speyer/vierteljahrshefte-pdfs/1961-1991/247-1988-4.pdf?cid=zq4.
153. Faculty Minutes, 19 January 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
154. Ibid.
155. Faculty Minutes, 28 February 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
156. Ibid.
157. Faculty Minutes, 13 April 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38; see also Eva Goldschmidt Wyman, Escaping Hitler: A Jewish Haven in Chile (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 127.
158. Faculty Minutes, 31 May 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
159. Adler was a young rabbi, ordained at the Hochschule in Berlin in November, 1938. He officiated at the private synagogue in Schulstrasse in Berlin. He obviously waited until he had completed his doctorate to emigrate. See Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach, eds., Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner, part 2, vol. 1 (Munich: De Gruyter, 2009), 4.
160. He had joined the JTS in Breslau in 1936; see Bericht des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars, 5.
161. Susanne Heim, ed., Verfolgung und Ermordung der Juden, vol. 2: Deutsches Reich 1938-August 1939 (Munich: Oldenburg, 2009), 394.
162. Faculty Minutes, 26 October 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
163. Ibid.
164. Faculty Minutes, 26 October 1938: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
165. Curt Arndt to L. Finkelstein, 24 October 1938; Finkelstein to Arndt, 8 December 1938; Arndt to Finkelstein, 15 January 1940; Finkelstein to Arndt, 7 February 1940; Arndt to Burnstein, 29 November 1940; Finkelstein to Arndt, 20 January 1941; Burnstein to Finkelstein, 7 February 1941; Finkelstein to Burnstein, 7 May 1942: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 2/17.
166. Werner Lampel was the son of the cantor at the Leipzig liberal synagogue and managed to immigrate to England in March 1939, where he served in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps, then in the Royal Navy. He changed his name to Herbert Werner Langford at the end of the war, married a Christian woman, converted to Christianity, and became a minister of the Anglican Church. See “Rev. Herbert Walter Langford (1919–1992),” Winthorpe, http://www.winthorpe.org.uk/Rev.-Herbert-Walter-Langford-1919-1992.
167. Faculty Minutes, 23 November 1938: JTS RC, RG 3, A, Faculty Meetings, box 1, 1938–39.
168. Brocke and Carlebach, Biographisches Handbuch, 329. Here the first name of Kempner is referred to as “Herbert” and “Fritz,” and in the JTS faculty minutes, he is mentioned as “Kempner, Fritz W.” See Faculty Minutes, 18 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1937–38.
169. Faculty Minutes, 27 February 1940: JTS, RC, RG 3, Faculty Minutes, A, box 1, 1939–40.
170. C. Wilhelm, ed., “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States, 1933–1990,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/159.
171. Faculty Minutes, 15 May 1940: JTS, RC, RG 3, A, Faculty Meetings, box 1, 1939–40.
172. Vita Harry May, undated (presumably 1938): JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
173. HICEM: Jewish emigration organization formed in 1927 as a merger of three organizations: the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish Colonization Association, and Emigdirect. The organization provided an important international emigration network to European Jews before and throughout the Nazi era.
174. Noam Penkower, The Holocaust and Israel Reborn: From Catastrophe to Sovereignty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 268n66.
175. Harry May to JTS, 2 August 1938, Harry May to ZOA, 3 August 1938, and HICEM to JTS, 3 August 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17. Dora Magnus to C. Adler, 23 July 1938, and Elisha Friedman to C. Adler, 23 August 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
176. The NCC was founded in 1934 as an umbrella organization for about twenty Jewish and non-Jewish aid organizations for German refugees. The committee was the precursor of the National Refugee Service, established in 1939. See Lyman Cromwell White, 300,000 New Americans: The Epic of a Modern Immigrant Aid-Service (New York: Harper, 1957).
177. C. Adler to E. Friedman, 26 August 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
178. Joseph B. Abrahams to H. May, 14 September 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17. See Vivien Enoch, “A Holocaust Story Searching for Family Roots in a Photo on PBS,” My Jewish Detroit, http://myjewishdetroit.org/2015/03/in-search-of-family-roots/.
179. H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 29 October 1937: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
180. H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 29 October 1937, H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 3 November 1937, Memorandum by L. Finkelstein, 9 November 1937, L. Finkelstein to H. Galliner, 19 November 1937: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
181. H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 5 December 1937: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
182. H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 15 December 1937: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
183. L. Finkelstein to US Consul, Berlin, Germany, 29 December 1937: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
184. Telegram by I. Elbogen and E. Mittwoch to L. Finkelstein, 24 January 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
185. H. Vogelstein to J. Bloch, 7 January 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
186. Certificate “To Whom It May Concern” by Joseph Abrahams, 4 March 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8, Galliner.
187. L. Finkelstein to Mrs. Frieda Schiff Warburg, 2 May 1941: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
188. L. Finkelstein to C. Adler, 21 February 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
189. Memorandum by A. Marx, 28 February 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
190. Note of H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 6 April 1939 and response on same sheet: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
191. A. Marx to L. Finkelstein, 2 February 1940: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
192. L. Finkelstein to Mrs. Frieda Schiff Warburg, 2 May 1941: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
193. L. Finkelstein to H. Galliner, 11 March 1940, and L. Finkelstein to Mrs. Frieda Schiff Warburg, 2 May 1941: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
194. L. Finkelstein to Mrs. Frieda Schiff Warburg, 2 May 1941: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner. It is important to note that Finkelstein does not ask for support of Helmut Galliner; he just explains his case at length to Frieda Schiff Warburg. See also L. Finkelstein to H. Galliner, 16 May 1941: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
195. L. Finkelstein to H. Galliner, 19 September 1941: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
196. H. Galliner to L. Finkelstein, 1 September 1942: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 8/Galliner.
197. Hoffmann, “Early but Opposed,” 282.
198. Jeffrey Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 82–120.
199. Questionnaire Henry Siegman, Biographische Dokumentation: IfZ, MA 1500/55B.
200. The ILBA was an Orthodox institution founded by Rav Seligman Baer Bamberger in 1864, and it had a serious impact on the professionalization of Jewish teacher training in Germany.
201. Steidle, Jakob Stoll, 91. Steidle refers to the students Fritz Veit, Kurt Perlmutter, and Heinz Roberg. While the first two students managed to immigrate to the United States, Heinz Roberg stayed with his family and ultimately perished in the Shoah. See Max Ottensoser and Alex Roberg, ILBA: Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt Würzburg, 1864–1938 (Detroit: Harlo, 1982), 240–253. See also Oral History Interview with Ib Nathan Bamberger, 7 July 2013: UHMM, RG-50.677.0006, Accession Number: 2011.177.6, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn90194. See also “‘א גרופּע דייטשע ישיבה בחורים אין דער באלטימאָרער ישיבת ‚נר ישראל.” Jewish American, Family Magazine and Gazette 37, no. 36 (7 July 1939): 1–3.
3. Flight and Rescue
1. Oral history interview Simon Schwab, July 1971, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385, 4.
2. Leo Jung was born in 1890 in Moravia and grew up in a German-speaking environment. His father, Dr. Meir Tzvi Jung, followed the philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch and had held a pulpit in Mannheim. Leo was educated in Talmudic and secular studies at Cambridge University, the University of London, the yeshiva of Galanta and Eperies, and the Rabbinerseminar in Berlin, where he was ordained by Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann of Berlin. He also received semicha from Rabbi Mordechai Zevi Schwartz and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. In 1920 he arrived in the United States and first officiated in Cleveland; in 1922 he was offered the rabbinate of the Jewish Center Synagogue in New York City, which he accepted.
3. “Rav Shimon Schwab, zt”l, Recollections of His Years in Baltimore on the Occasion of This 13th Yahrzeit,” adapted by Yitzchok Levine, Hamodia Magazine 14 Adar 5768 (20 February 2008), 13–14, http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/recolletions_r_schwab.pdf.
4. Michael A. Meyer, ed., Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography—The German and Early American Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 162.
5. Ibid., 141, 163.
6. Max Koppel earned a doctorate from the University of Breslau in 1931 and was ordained in 1933.
7. Max Koppel’s paternal grandfather settled in Albany, Georgia, before the First World War, Oral History Interview with Emmie Vida: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-50.184.0001, Accession no.: 1995.A.0658.1.
8. Oral History Interview Max Koppel, Research Foundation of Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385, Max Koppel, 2.
9. Deborah Horner, Emil Bernhard Cohn: Rabbi, Playwright and Poet (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2009), 47–57. See also Interview with Emil Bernhard Cohn, 1 June 1971, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385, 5. Cohn’s wife and daughter joined him in Holland in 1937 and followed him to New York, with a short stay in Southampton to meet their son and brother Emil Bernhard, who had gone to a boarding school in Brighton directly from Berlin in 1937. After a short reunion in Southampton on the way to the United States, they joined Rabbi Emil Moses Cohn in New York City. Stephen Wise also assisted Cohn’s family in obtaining a visa and communicated directly with Cordell Hull about their visas.
10. Martha Appel Memoirs, dated 1940/1941: LBI Berlin, ME1168; published in Monika Richarz, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918–1945, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1982), 231–243.
11. Ibid.
12. Wolf Gruner, “Die Radikalisierung der NS-Verfolgung und die Berliner Jüdinnen und Juden,” in Ausgewiesen! Berlin, 28.10.1938: Die Geschichte der “Polenaktion,” ed. Alina Bothe and Gertrud Pickhan (Berlin: Metropol, 2018), 117.
13. Ibid., 118–121.
14. See also Alan Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2011), 13–14.
15. Gesetz über die Neugestaltung deutscher Städte of 4 October 1937, in Reichsgesetzesblatt I, 1054–1055, https://www.stadtgrenze.de/s/p3r/gnds/gnds.htm.
16. Festpredigt zum 50jährigen Jubiläum der Synagoge in München, gehalten in der Synagoge zu München am 5. Sept. 1937, Erew Rosch-Haschonoh 5698 (Munich: Vorstand der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde, 1937).
17. “Die erste Synagoge, die den Nazis zum Opfer fiel,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), 8 June 2018, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/juedische-geschichte-wie-muenchen-vor-80-jahren-seine-synagoge-verlor-1.4004815-2.
18. Ibid.
19. Document no. 336 in Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel, Die Juden in den geheimen Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004).
20. Jens Ostrowski and Oliver Volmerich, “‘Reisst ab den Judentempel’—Dortmunds NSDAP-Chef vor Gericht,” Ruhr Nachrichten, 28 October 2018, https://www.ruhrnachrichten.de/dortmund/dortmunds-nsdap-chef-vor-gericht-als-friedrich-hesseldieck-die-synagoge-verschwinden-liess-plus-1341012.html.
21. Hannelore Künzl, Islamische Stilelemente im Synagogenbau des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984), 99ff.
22. Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2001), 356–368.
23. Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 274, and Erwin Zimet, “1933: The Beginning of the End of German Jewry,” Jewish Museum Berlin, https://www.jmberlin.de/1933/en/05_18_student-identification-card-issued-to-erwin-zimet-by-the-friedrich-wilhelm-university-of-berlin.php; for Moses Sister, see Emil Fackenheim, An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 53–54.
24. Cyrus Adler to Dr. Greenberg, 29 July 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17.
25. Abraham Klein to Cyrus Adler, 17 August 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17, and a second letter in German from A. Klein and Joseph Horovitz to Cyrus Adler, 17 August 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17.
26. That was the case with Fritz Plotke, who left his Schneidemühl pulpit for Berlin in October 1938 before Kristallnacht, and with Max Gruenewald, who left his position in Mannheim for Berlin in April 1938. Karl Richter of Mannheim went into hiding after Kristallnacht. See C. Wilhelm, ed., “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States, 1933–1990,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/4.
27. Leo Trepp, Die Oldenburger Judenschaft (Oldenburg: Heinz Holzberg, 1973), 308–366. See also Meyer, Joachim Prinz, 98–186, and Marvin Zolot, Mensch: Biography and Writings of Manfred Eric Swarsensky (Madison, WI: Edgewood College Press, 2009), 18–31.
28. Cyrus Adler to Dr. Greenberg, 29 July 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17. Adler called his colleagues to action and reminded them to lose as little time as possible, even during the Jewish High Holidays, C. Adler to H. Parzen, 1 September 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17.
29. Cyrus Adler to William Rosenwald, 2 November 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17; Adler explains here that since August, the number of people willing to leave Germany for the United States was rapidly growing.
30. See Lyman Cromwell White, 300,000 New Americans: The Epic of a Modern Immigrant Aid-Service (New York: Harper, 1957), 34–50.
31. After the Nazis revoked Hoffmann’s German citizenship in 1934, he still had his original Hungarian citizenship. This may have saved his life in 1937 when he was arrested by the Gestapo. The Hungarian government intervened on his behalf. Although Hoffmann was freed from prison, the German government demonstrated its desire to banish this well-known Zionist and leader of the Mizrachi organization by marking him as an “enemy of the state” in 1937, which amounted to expulsion from Germany.
32. For more information on Cecilia Razovsky, see White, 300,000 New Americans, 37–38.
33. “Problem of Refugee Jewish Religious Functionaries,” Meeting, 13 October 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17.
34. Resume Special Committee Meeting to Consider Problems of Refugee Jewish Religious Functionaries, 24 October 1938: JTSRC, RG1, A, box 19/17.
35. Parzen was born in Ozorkow, a Polish town in Prussian Poland, the area occupied by Prussia from 1793 to 1919. He came to the United States in 1906, earned a BA from the University of Michigan, and received his graduate education at the JTS in New York. He thus fulfilled the committee’s requirements for the future chairman since he also spoke English, German, and Yiddish.
36. Resume Special Committee Meeting to Consider Problems of Refugee Jewish Religious Functionaries, 24 Oct. 1938: JTSRC, RG1, A, Box 19/17.
37. Cyrus Adler to S. C. Kohs, 10 November 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17, and Cyrus Adler to Rabbi Schwab, 28 March 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
38. Steinweis, Kristallnacht, 9−16, 103−122. See also Nancy Rupprecht and Wendy Koenig, eds., Holocaust Persecution: Responses and Consequences (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 12. The main synagogue in Mannheim and its Jewish cemetery were blasted away during that night, Forchheim experienced the same brutality, and the synagogue in Braunschweig was destroyed after the pogrom; Institut für Zeitgeschichte München, NSG-Datenbank “Die Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen durch deutsche Justizbehörden nach 1945,” https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-archiv/benutzung-und-service/nsg-datenbank/.
39. On the situation of the communities, see Interview with Jacob Breuer, 12 June 1972, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385, 14.
40. Contract between Congregation Agudass Achim, Zurich, and Dr. Erich Löwenthal, Berlin, 16 November 1938: Private collection, Dr. Abraham Lowenthal.
41. Letter Dr. Abraham Lowenthal to Cornelia Wilhelm, 5 August 2015: Private archives of the author.
42. The Fires on the Rhine, An Eyewitness Account of the Burning of the Synagogues of Cologne, 10 November 1938, by Alfred Kober: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
43. Manfred Swarsensky to Liebenau family, 16 December 1939: AJA, SC-15217.
44. An Autobiographical Sketch, by Leo Trepp: AJA, SC-12426.
45. Eric Lidji, The Seventeenth Generation: The Lifework of Rabbi Walter Jacob (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Press, 2018), 34–43.
46. Booklet listing the passengers who sailed on the SS Manhattan on 13 June 1939, including Senta, Gabriele, and Susanne Kronheim: LBI, Hans Kronheim Collection, AR 3156, box 3.
47. Questionnaire Hans Harris Hirschberg, Biographische Dokumentation: IFZ, MA 1500/90.
48. Interview with Ismar Schorsch by Cornelia Wilhelm, 13 November 2013: Private archives of the author and LBI (unprocessed).
49. David Kranzler and Dovid Landesmann, Rav Breuer: His Life and Legacy (New York: Feldheim, 1998), 106–111; see also Interview with Jacob Breuer, 12 June 1972, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385, 14–15.
50. Kranzler and Landesman, Rav Breuer, 110–111.
51. Fackenheim, Epitaph for German Judaism, 62–75.
52. Questionnaire Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, Naphtali Hartwig Carlebach: IfZ MA 1500/76B.
53. Norbert Weinberg, Courage of the Spirit (Pensacola, FL: Indigo, 2014).
54. Excerpts from an unpublished autobiography contributed to the Berlin Festschrift of the Jubilee Volume on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reestablished postwar Jewish community in Berlin: AJA, MS-705, Series A, box 1/9.
55. Interview with Eli Faber by Cornelia Wilhelm, 17 April 2019, part 1: Private archives of the author and LBI (unprocessed).
56. Leo Baeck to Ismar Elbogen, 25 April 1939: LBI, AR66, III, Elbogen. Max Dienemann returned to his congregation after he was released from a concentration camp; Manfred Swarsensky had promised Leo Baeck that he would stay in Berlin to help those Jews still living in the city after he was discharged from Sachsenhausen in March 1939; however, the Gestapo pressured him to leave as promised; see Manfred Swarsensky Oral History Transcript, p. 180: Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust, https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/HolocaustSurvivors/Swarsensky.asp.
57. Alexander Burnstein to Cyrus Adler, 13 December 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
58. Ibid.
59. Circular letter by Alexander Burnstein, 21 December 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17.
60. Henry Pels, Secretary of Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Fund, to A. Burnstein, 22 December 1938: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/17. That letter was circulated to approximately six hundred rabbis; see Report of Meeting of Executive Board, Committee on Refugee Jewish Ministers, 16 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
61. Report of Meeting of Executive Board, Committee on Refugee Jewish Ministers, 16 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
62. White, 300,000 New Americans, 35–36. For the growing list of Jewish and non-Jewish members of the NCC, see p. 39. Almost all of the larger American Jewish organizations joined the effort, including the American Friends Service Committee and the American Committee for Christian-German Refugees.
63. While Burnstein talks about “rabbis,” this number might refer instead to “Jewish religious functionaries,” including cantors, mohels, shohetim, religious teachers, and so on. Report of Meeting of Executive Board, Committee on Refugee Jewish Ministers, 16 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
64. A. Burnstein to C. Adler, 20 February 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
65. Report of Meeting of Executive Board, Committee on Refugee Jewish Ministers, 16 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
66. Cyrus Adler to A. Burnstein, 19 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18, and A. Burnstein to C. Adler, 22 January 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
67. Burnstein to [first name unreadable] Cohen, 20 February 1939 (found in Adler’s correspondence): JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18; see also Burnstein to Adler, 1 May 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
68. Report “The United Synagogue as a Functioning System, 1937”: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 27/6; see also “Extension Activities, From July to September 1940”: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 27/6.
69. Cyrus Adler to A. Burnstein, 22 February 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18, and Cyrus Adler to Mr. A. Shual, 2 May 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
70. A. Burnstein to C. Adler, 17 March 1939: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
71. Edward S. Maney to Eugene Horovitz, 19 February 1940: JTS, RC, RG 1, A, box 19/18.
72. Supplement to Report to Board of Directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 5 June 1940: JTS, RC, RG 2, box 2/3.
73. White, 300,000 New Americans, 34–59.
4. The Refugees’ First Years in the United States
1. W. Gunther Plaut, Unfinished Business: An Autobiography (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981), 59.
2. Ibid., 51–54.
3. Wolli Kaelter and Gordon Cohn, From Danzig: An American Rabbi’s Journey (Malibu, CA: Pangloss, 1997), 52.
4. Interview with Ismar Schorsch by Cornelia Wilhelm, 15 November 2013 at LBI, New York: Private archives of Cornelia Wilhelm and LBI New York (unprocessed).
5. Plaut, Unfinished Business, 54.
6. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 48.
7. Plaut, Unfinished Business, 76.
8. Ibid., 66–67.
9. Ibid., 143.
10. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 48.
11. Plaut traveled with Herman Schaalman: Plaut, Unfinished Business, 77.
12. Ibid., 76–78.
13. Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 7, 47.
14. On anti-German feeling at the New York versus Cincinnati campuses, see Interview of Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971 (Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration): LBI, AR 25385, 25.
15. C. Wilhelm, ed., “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States, 1933–1990,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/.
16. Steven Schwarzschild, “Two Modern Jewish Philosophies of History: Nachman Krochmal and Hermann Cohen” (DHL diss., HUC, 1955); Walter Jacob, “The Contemporary Jew in the German Novel and Short History, 1800–1914” (DHL diss., HUC, 1961); W. Gunther Plaut, “Contributions to the History of German Jewry in the Eighteenth Century, from Hebrew and Missionary Sources” (rabbinic thesis, HUC, 1939); Wolfgang Hamburger, “Abraham Geiger as Reformer and Theologian: First Phase, as Presented in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift fuer Juedische Theologie” (rabbinic thesis, HUC Cincinnati, 1952); Robert Lehman, “Herzl’s Zionist Ideology” (rabbinic thesis, HUC Cincinnati, 1954); Ismar Schorsch, “Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., Columbia University Press, 1972); Walter Würzburger, “Brentano’s Theory of a Priori Judgments” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1951); Joshua Haberman, “The Validation of Revelation” (DHL diss., HUC Cincinnati, 1966).
17. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/57. He considered going back to London early in the 1950s; see Joseph Asher to Herman Saenger, 16 January 1950: Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (BANC), Mss. 2010/783, box 1.
18. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 14.
19. Ibid., 29.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Ibid., 20.
22. Ibid., 39.
23. Kaelter and Cohn, From Danzig, 56.
24. Guido Kisch, ed., Das Breslauer Seminar: Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (Fraenkelscher Stiftung) in Breslau 1854–1938 (Tübingen: Gedächtnisschrift, 1963), 125, 138–141.
25. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 49.
26. Ibid., 36–37.
27. Ibid., 36.
28. See Abraham J. Heschel, Das prophetische Bewusstsein (Kraków: Verlag der Polnische Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1935) (PhD diss., Berlin, 1935) and Samuel Atlas, “Man and the Ethical Idea of God,” CCAR Journal 15 (1968): 40–53.
29. Alexander Guttmann to Julian Morgenstern, 1 October 1942: AJA, MS-663, box 6/32.
30. Ibid.
31. Mirzinker? [unreadable] to Alexander Guttmann, 22 October 1942: AJA, MS-663, box 6/32.
32. See Franz Landsberger to Julian Morgenstern, 10 January 1943: AJA, MS-30, box 7/5.
33. Eugen Taeubler to Julian Morgenstern, 31 March 1947, and Memorandum for the Board of Governors of HUC, c/o President Dr. Morgenstern, 31 March 1947: AJA, MS-30, box 11/7.
34. Prussian landed aristocracy, which is considered to have been the backbone of Germany’s political conservatism and antidemocratic spirit as well as Prussian militarism.
35. Eugen Taeubler to Julian Morgenstern, 31 March 1947.
36. Ranke, the director of the Egyptian Institute at the University of Heidelberg, was a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, as was Taeubler. He lost this membership and his academic credentials in 1937, among other things, because his wife was considered a “half-Jew.”
37. Hajo Holborn was a history professor at the University of Heidelberg who lost his position in 1933 because he was married to a Jewish woman. From 1936 to 1942, he taught at Tufts University; during the Second World War, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he taught at Yale University.
38. An advanced Privatdozent, without tenure track.
39. Privatdozent is the status of an untenured faculty member who has completed a second book, which is the qualification for full professorship.
40. Eugen Taeubler to Julian Morgenstern, 31 March 1947, and Memorandum for the Board of Governors of HUC, c/o President Dr. Morgenstern, 31 March 1947: AJA, MS-30, Box 11/7.
41. Ibid.
42. Eugen Taeubler to Julian Morgenstern, 2 May 1947: AJA, MS-30, box 30/7.
43. Julius Lewy to Julian Morgenstern, 22 April 1947: AJA, MS-30, box 11/7.
44. Eugen Taeubler to Julian Morgenstern, 2 May 1947: AJA, MS-30, box 30/7.
45. Eugen Taeubler to Jacob R. Marcus, 8 October 1950: AJA, MS-210, box 11/4, courtesy of Gary Zola, director of the American Jewish Archives.
46. “Problem of Refugee Jewish Religious Functionaries,” Meeting, 13 October 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, box 19/17.
47. Interview of Jean Lessing with Max Gruenewald, 16 March 1971, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385, 8.
48. Max Gruenewald to Louis Finkelstein, 12 June 1944: JTS, RC, RG 1, box 34/19.
49. Interview of Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration): LBI, AR 25385, 28.
50. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/143.
51. David Kranzler and Dovid Landesman, Rav Breuer: His Life and Legacy (New York: Feldheim, 1998), 110.
52. Jeffrey Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). While Gurock hints that refugees were among faculty and students, he does not elaborate on this.
53. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/91.
54. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77–84.
55. Steven Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
56. Certainly the Aufbau was also read in this community, but unlike the Jewish Way, it represented a much larger, cosmopolitan group of refugees, few of whom were clustering in an ethnic neighborhood.
57. See the advertisement for “Rosens Bake Shop” in Washington Heights: Yeshiva University Archives, 2001.001 Congregation Beth Hillel and Beth Israel, box 1.
58. Kranzler and Landesman, Rav Breuer, 151–176.
59. Oral History Interview with Trudie Rosenthal, June 1976: USHMM, Oral History Collection, RG 50. 174. 0001, Accession Number: 1995.A.0872, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512258, and Martin M. Weitz, ed., Interview with Mrs. Karl (Trudie) Rosenthal: Concentration Camp Survivor, Given in 1976 (Greenville, NC: Pambrit, 1993).
60. Ibid.
61. Oral History Interview, Cecile Meiers and Syma Mendelsohn, 1973: University of Illinois at Springfield, Norris L Brookens Library, Archives/Special Collections, The Jewish Experience Project, 34–40.
62. N. N. to Samuel Cohen, 2 October 1938 [difficult to read]: USHMM, Hans Enoch Kronheim Papers, box 3. Agreement between Congregation Gates of Hope and Hans Enoch Kronheim, no date [date of tenure in contract 1 January 1952 to 31 December 1953]: USHMM, Hans Enoch Kronheim Papers, box 3.
63. Michael A. Meyer, Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography—The German and Early American Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 205–223.
64. “Problem of Refugee Jewish Religious Functionaries,” Meeting, 13 October 1938: JTS, RC, RG1, A, Box 19/17.
65. Interview of Cornelia Wilhelm with Ismar Schorsch, 15 November 2013, at LBI, New York: Private archives of Cornelia Wilhelm and LBI New York (unprocessed).
66. Interview with Eli Faber by Cornelia Wilhelm, 19 April 2019, part 1: Private archives of author and LBI New York (unprocessed).
67. Joseph Asher to Herman Saenger, 15 January 1952: BANC, Mss. 2010/783, box 1.
68. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/58.
69. See the database German Refugee Rabbis in the US after 1933 for their short bios; Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/57.
70. Interview with Michael Munk by Jack Wertheimer and Michael Schwarzschild, part 1 (19) and part 2 (9, 20), 11 July 1972 (Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration): LBI, AR 25385.
71. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/133.
72. Benny Kraut, German-Jewish Orthodoxy in an Immigrant Synagogue: Cincinnati’s New Hope Congregation and the Ambiguities of Ethnic Religion (New York: Markus Wiener, 1988), 55ff.
73. An excellent and comprehensive analysis of the development of German nationality and citizenship can be found in Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2001).
74. Expatriation of politically or “racially” unwanted individuals was facilitated by 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) of 14 July 1933. See Klaus Pfeiffer and Joachim Rott, eds., Die erste Ausbürgerungsliste vom 25. August 1933 (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2016). See also the post-1945 restoration of citizenship for those affected by this legislation: “Restoration of German Citizenship,” Consular Services, German Missions in the United States, https://www.germany.info/us-en/service/03-Citizenship/restoration-of-german-citizenship/925120.
75. Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen, 373.
76. Ibid., 379–383.
77. Ibid., 383–393.
78. “11. Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetzt vom 25,” November 1941, http://www.ns-quellen.at/gesetz_anzeigen_detail.php?gesetz_id=4410&action=B_Read.
79. Miriam Rürup and Doerte Bischoff, eds., Ausgeschlossen: Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatenlosigkeit und Exil (Exilforschung; 36) (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2018), 9–20.
80. Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach, eds., Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner, part 2, vol. 2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2009), 287.
81. Meyer, Joachim Prinz, 140–141, 160–161.
82. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the League of Nations introduced this travel document for refugees. This was not a “passport” in the legal sense and was issued by the nation that received a refugee. It allowed the refugee to continue to travel legally and to return to the country that issued the document within its one-year validity, if necessary.
83. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/62.
84. Cornelia Wilhelm, Bewegung oder Verein? Nationalsozialistische Volkstumspolitik in den USA (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 266.
85. Interview of Jack Wertheimer and Herbert Strauss with Max Gruenewald, 14 and 21 June 1971 (Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration): LBI, AR 25385, 25.
86. Wilhelm, Bewegung, 265–277.
87. Interview of Jack Wertheimer with Simon Schwab, July 1971 (Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration): LBI, AR 25385, 15–16, and 145 F.2d 672 (1944) SCHWAB et al. v. COLEMAN, US District Judge, No. 5293. Circuit Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, 10 November 1944, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/145/672/1476121/.
88. Second War Powers Act, 56 Stat. 176, Senate Bill 2208, 27 March 1942.
89. Interview with Ismar Schorsch by Cornelia Wilhelm, 15 November 2013 at LBI, New York: Private archives of Cornelia Wilhelm and LBI New York (unprocessed). On the process of “taking out first papers” and the pride of becoming an American citizen, see Interview with Eli Faber by Cornelia Wilhelm, 19 April 2019, parts 1 and 2: Private archives of author and LBI New York (unprocessed).
5. Careers Lost and Found
1. Kaufmann Kohler was born in 1843 in Fürth and died in 1926 in Cincinnati. He came from a traditional Jewish background and education before studying at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Erlangen, where he earned a PhD and became a follower of Samuel Holdheim. In 1869, he immigrated to the United States where he officiated first at Temple Beth-El in Detroit; then, after 1871, at Sinai Temple in Chicago; followed by Congregation Beth-El in New York. In 1870, he married Johanna Einhorn, the daughter of Rabbi David Einhorn, and in 1903, he was appointed president of HUC in Cincinnati. He was the founder of a systematic theology of historical Judaism and had a significant influence on the development of the American Reform movement, including on the Pittsburgh Platform. See Jakob Petuchowski, “Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim: Their Differences in Germany and Repercussions in America,” LBIY 22 (1977): 139–159.
2. In 1943, Elbogen was probably not fully aware of the extent of the Holocaust; in his publication, he refers to Nazi persecution as the driving force behind the developments.
3. Ismar Elbogen, “American Jewish Scholarship: A Survey. In Honor of the Centenary of Kaufmann Kohler,” American Jewish Yearbook 45 (1943/44): 47.
4. Ibid., 64–65.
5. Astrid Zajdband, German Rabbis in British Exile: From “Heimat” into the Unknown (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 263–264.
6. Leonard Baker, Hirt der Verfolgten (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 431.
7. Ibid., 432.
8. Ibid., 438.
9. Julian Morgenstern served as vice president of the WUPJ at the time. Lily Montagu was the woman leader of the movement for liberal Judaism in England and cofounder of the WUPJ founded in London in 1926. She also served as president of the WUPJ from 1955 to 1959. See the entries of the individuals in Cornelia Wilhelm, ed., “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States, 1933–1990,” http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de. For the first in a series of publications, see Atina Grossman, “Rabbi Steven Schwarzschild’s Reports from Berlin, 1948–1950,” LBIY 60 (2015): 237–242.
10. Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 95–96.
11. Nathan Peter Levinson, Ein Ort ist, mit wem Du bist: Lebensstationen eines Rabbiners (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1996), 120.
12. Ibid., 121–123. Translated from the German by the author.
13. Ibid., 104.
14. Markus Krah, American Jewry and the Re-Invention of the East European Jewish Past, New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History 9, ed. Cornelia Wilhelm (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 3–7.
15. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
16. See also Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
17. Gilad Hirschberger, “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 1–14.
18. Eva Jospe and Raphael Jospe, eds., To Leave Your Mark: Selections from the Writings of Alfred Jospe (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 2000).
19. The first five students sent to HUC by the Hochschule in 1935.
20. “Der letzte Rabbiner: Die Geschichte des Leo Trepp,” dir. Christian Walther, RBB Fernsehen, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, DVD, Germany: 2010 (courtesy of Christian Walther) and “Nahum N. Glatzer and the German-Jewish Tradition,” dir. Judith Wechsler, USA: 2011.
21. Leo Trepp, leotrepp.org/en/.
22. See, for example, Jan Taubitz, Holocaust Oral History und das lange Ende der Zeitzeugenschaft (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), Christopher Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei, eds., Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). See also Kaja Kaźmierska, Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors (Boston: Academic Studies, 2012).
23. Baker, Hirt, 444.
24. The following honorary degrees were bestowed (by institution and, if known, year): Yeshiva University: Jacob Hoffmann (1951); JTS: Ezekiel Landau (1977), Bert Woythaler, Erwin Zimet (1975), Norbert Weinberg, Max Gruenewald; HUC: Ulrick Steuer, Leo Lichtenberg (1965), W. Gunther Plaut (1964), Hugo Hahn (1963), Alfred Jospe (1972), Leo Trepp, Walter Jacob (1975), Max Nussbaum (1959), Steven Schwarzschild (1973), Nahum Glatzer, Gustav Buchdahl (1996), Alfred Wolf (1966), Iwan Grün (1962), Wolfgang Hamburger, Guido Kisch (1963), Frank Rosenthal (1964), Herman Vogelstein (1940). See Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis.”
25. Address at Funeral Services of Rabbi Ulrick Steuer, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 21 October 1973 by Rabbi Karl Richter: AJA, SC-12008.
26. “Leader Looks to the Future,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 14 October 2002, B 3.
27. Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 209–239.
28. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 289–293.
29. For example, Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 20 and Michael A. Meyer, Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography—The German and Early American Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 187–256.
30. Werner Rosenstock, “The Jewish Youth Movement,” LBIY 19 (1974): 98–99.
31. Chanoch Rinott, “Major Trends in Jewish Youth Movements in Germany,” LBIY 19 (1974): 80–83.
32. Walter Laqueur, Geboren in Deutschland (Berlin: Propyläen, 2000). For a recent evaluation, see Yotam Hotam, ed., Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendliche im “Zeitalter der Jugend” (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2009).
33. Rinott, “Major Trends,” 86.
34. “Our History,” OSRUI, https://osrui.org/about/history/.
35. Judah Cohen, “Singing Out for Judaism: A History of Song Leaders and Song Leading at Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute,” in A Place of Our Own: The Rise of Reform Jewish Camping, ed. Michael M. Lorge and Gary P. Zola (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 173–208.
36. Michael Lorge and Gary Zola, “The Beginning of Union Institute in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, 1952–1970: Creation and Coalescence of the First UAHC Camp,” in A Place of Our Own: The Rise of Reform Jewish Camping, ed. Michael M. Lorge and Gary P. Zola (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 52–71.
37. Lorge and Zola, “The Beginning,” 57, 64.
38. Wolli Kaelter and Gordon Cohn, From Danzig: An American Rabbi’s Journey (Malibu, CA: Pangloss, 1997), 116–138.
39. Ibid., 132.
40. See Questionnaire of Leo Adler, Biographische Dokumentation der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 in Kooperation mit der Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, Microfilm Series A and B: IfZ, MA 1500.
41. Interview Jack Wertheimer and Steven Schwarzschild with Michael Munk, 11 July 1972, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385. While there were boys participating from the Breuer community in Washington Heights, the camp attracted a variety of American Jewish participants. For today’s Camp Munk, see https://www.munkmemories.com/.
42. Questionnaire of Samson Raphael Weiss, Biographische Dokumentation der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 in Kooperation mit der Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, Microfilm Series A and B: IFZ, MA 1500. Alfonso Narvaez, “79-Year-Old Leader of Orthodox Jewry,” New York Times, 8 February 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/08/obituaries/rabbi-s-r-weiss-79-year-old-leader-of-orthodox-jewry.html.
43. Also Ralph Kingsley launched a day school in Boca Raton, Florida, as did Gunther Hirschberg in the 1970s in New York. See Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” ed. C. Wilhelm, http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/107.
44. Cornelia Wilhelm, The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters: Pioneers of a New Jewish Identity, 1843–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 260.
45. Wilhelm, “German Refugee Rabbis,” ed. C. Wilhelm, http://mira.geschichte.lmu.de/171,201and125.
46. Alfred Jospe to Harry Kaplan, 8 August 1944: AJA, BB Hillel Foundation, SC-1184.
47. Jospe and Jospe, To Leave your Mark, passim.
48. Ibid., 9.
49. Ibid., xxi.
50. Lewis M. Barth and Ruth Nussbaum, eds., Max Nussbaum: From Berlin to Hollywood. A Midcentury Vision of Jewish Life (Malibu: Pangloss, 1994), 82–90.
51. Ibid., 92–98.
52. Ibid., 101.
53. Meyer, Joachim Prinz, 224–225.
54. Joseph Asher to Herman Sanger, 22 September 1950: BANC, Mss. 2010/783, box 1.
55. Joseph Asher to Albert Vorspan, 27 May 1963: BANC, Mss. 2010/783, box 1. See also Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 212–216.
56. Speech given by Joachim Prinz during the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, “Civil Rights,” Joachim Prinz, http://www.joachimprinz.com/civilrights.htm.
57. This is an addendum by the author, as Jünger speaks only about “Judaism,” but the author thinks it is essential to highlight Prinz’s strong commitment to defining a modern Jewish identity for Jews that was not purely assimilationist but that gave them a way to be part of modern society as Jews. He had great hopes that American society would provide a platform for this, but he became increasingly concerned that American Jewry could live up to that promise.
58. David Jünger, “In the Presence of the Past: Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Holocaust Memory, and the Fight for Jewish Survival in Postwar America,” in Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades, ed. Eliyana Adler and Sheila Jelen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 306–313. David Jünger uses the term “Judaism” throughout his arguments, but he does not differentiate between a modern historical Judaism that Prinz most probably had in mind and traditional forms of Judaism, such as the Israeli state religion.
59. Ibid.
60. Krah, American Jewry, 103–109.
61. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: JPS of America, 1951); see also Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1955).
62. Susannah Heschel, “Theological Affinities in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” in Black Zion, ed. Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 168–186. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Das prophetische Bewusstsein (Kraków: Verlag der Polnische Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1935; PhD diss., Berlin, 1935); his dissertation was published in English only in 1962: Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
63. Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 164, 208–243.
64. Susannah Heschel, “God Talk, Friendship and Activism: The Theological Affinity and the Relationship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” The Jewish Federations of America, https://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=13296&print=1.
65. Wilfried Mausbach, “Auschwitz and Vietnam: West German Protests against America’s War during the 1960s,” in Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975, ed. Philipp Gassert (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 279–298; Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1945–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Brian Van De Mark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
66. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); see also Allan Arkush, “The Contribution of Alexander Altmann to the Study of Moses Mendelssohn,” LBIY 34 (1989): 415–420. Stephen Whitfield, “Brandeis University at the Beginning: Judaic Studies,” European Judaism 45 (2012): 117–119.
67. Eugene Sheppard, “‘I Am a Memory Come Alive’: Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of German Jewish Thought in America,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 (2004): 123–148, and Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Knowledge as Service: An Appreciation of Nahum N. Glatzer,” Jewish Studies 31 (1991): 25–46.
68. Steven Schwarzschild, “Two Modern Jewish Philosophies of History: Nachman Krochmal and Hermann Cohen,” (DHL diss., HUC, 1955). See also Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1961); Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1967); and Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955).
69. Steven Schwarzschild, “Franz Rosenzweig’s Anecdotes about Hermann Cohen,” in Gegenwart im Rückblick: Festgabe für die Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 25 Jahre nach dem Neubeginn, ed. Herbert A. Strauss and Kurt R. Grossman (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1970), 209–218; Schwarzschild, “Germanism and Judaism—Hermann Cohen’s Normative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933, ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1979), 129–172. See also Schwarzschild, The Tragedy of Optimism: The Writings of Herman Cohen, ed. George Y. Kohler (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018).
70. Alan Brill, “A Tiny, but Articulate Minority,” Tradition 41 (2008): 13–15.
71. Daily News Bulletin, Jewish Telegraphic Agency XXX, 28 February 1963, 4 and CV of Leon Feldman, Sam Hartstein Papers, YU Archives.
72. W. Gunther Plaut, The Torah: The Five Books of Moses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963); Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary (New York: CCAR, 2005). See also Plaut, Exodus: Commentary (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1983), and Plaut, Deuteronomy: Commentary (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1983).
73. Walter Jacob, Contemporary American Responsa (New York: CCAR, 1998); Jacob, Questions and Reform Jewish Answers: New American Reform Responsa (New York: CCAR, 1992), and Eric Lidji, The Seventeenth Generation: The Lifework of Rabbi Walter Jacob (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom, 2018), 143–175.
74. Jacques Steinberg, “Rabbi Alexander Schindler, Reform Leader and Major Jewish Voice, Dies at 75,” New York Times, 16 November 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/16/nyregion/rabbi-alexander-schindler-reform-leader-and-major-jewish-voice-dies-at-75.html.
75. In 2021, the so-called Morgan Lewis Report commissioned by HUC to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct of HUC faculty also charged Alfred Gottschalk with misbehavior toward female students. See Morgan Lewis, “Report of Investigation into Allegations of Misconduct at the HUC-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati 2021,” https://huc.edu/wp-content/uploads/HUC-REPORT-OF-INVESTIGATION-11.04.21.pdf.
76. Douglas Martin, “Alfred Gottschalk, Reform Rabbi, Dies at 79,” New York Times, 15 September 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/us/16gottschalk.html; Elaine Woo, “Alfred Gottschalk Dies at 79; a Leader of Reform Judaism,” Los Angeles Times, 13 September 2009, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-alfred-gottschalk13-2009sep13-story.html; “Dr. Alfred Gottschalk, z”l, Former President and Chancellor Emeritus of HUC-JIR,” Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 14 September 2009, http://huc.edu/news/article/2009/dr-alfred-gottschalk-zl-former-president-and-chancellor-emeritus-huc-jir.
77. “Ismar Schorsch,” Jewish Theological Seminary, http://www.jtsa.edu/ismar-schorsch.
78. See also Ismar Schorsch, “The Leo Baeck Institute: Continuity amid Desolation,” LBIY 25 (1980): ix–xii.
79. Max Gruenewald, “The Beginning of the ‘Reichsvertretung,’” LBIY 1 (1956): 57–67; Nahum N. Glatzer, “The Frankfurt Lehrhaus,” LBIY 1 (1956): 105–122; Alexander Altmann, “Jewish Theology in 20th Century Germany,” LBIY 1 (1956): 193–216; Wolfgang Hamburger, “Teacher in Berlin and Cincinnati,” LBIY 2 (1957): 27–34; Kurt Wilhelm, “The Jewish Community in the Post-Emancipation Period,” LBIY 2 (1957): 47–75; Max Gruenewald, “The Modern Rabbi,” LBIY 2 (1957): 85–97; Adolf Kober, “150 Years of Religious Instruction,” LBIY 2 (1957): 98–118; Fritz Bamberger, “Julius Guttmann: Philosopher of Judaism,” LBIY 5 (1960): 3–34; Nahum N. Glatzer, “Leopold Zunz and the Revolution of 1948: With Four Letters by Leopold Zunz,” LBIY 5 (1960): 122–139; Leo Adler, “Israelitische Religionsgemeinschaft of Wurttemberg: Development and Changes,” LBIY 5 (1960): 251–261; Alexander Carlebach, “A German Rabbi Goes East,” LBIY 6 (1961): 60–121.
80. Alexander Altmann, “The German Rabbi, 1910–1939,” LBIY 19 (1974): 31–49; Alfred Jospe, “A Profession in Transition: The German Rabbinate, 1910–1939,” LBIY 19 (1974): 51–61; Max Gruenewald, “The Jewish Teacher in Germany,” LBIY 19 (1974): 71–76; Ismar Schorsch, “German Anti-Semitism in the Light of Post-War Historiography,” LBIY 19 (1974): 257–271; Emil Schorsch, “The Rural Jew: Observations on the Paper of Werner J. Cahnman,” LBIY 19 (1974): 131–135. Fritz Bamberger, who joined the faculty of HUC in New York in 1962 also contributed to this volume: Fritz Bamberger, “The Arden House Conference: ‘Exploring a Typology of German Jewry,’” LBIY 19 (1974): 3–10.
81. Ursula Büttner and Martin Geschrat, Die verlassenen Kinder der Kirche: Der Umgang mit Christen jüdischer Herkunft im “Dritten Reich” (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1998).
82. Joseph Foschepoth, Im Schatten der Vergangenheit: Die Anfänge der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1993), 11; Benny Kraut, “Towards the Establishment of the National Conference of Christians and Jews: The Tenuous Road to Religious Goodwill in the 1920s,” American Jewish History 77 (1988): 388–412.
83. One of the major initiatives on the tension between modernity and religion was the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, introduced by the JTS; see Cara Rock-Singer, “A Prophetic Guide for a Perplexed World: Louis Finkelstein and the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion,” Religion & American Culture 29 (2019): 179–215.
84. Joachim Prinz, “The Right to Be Different,” in Best Jewish Sermons of 5714, ed. Rabbi Saul I. Teplitz, 125–133 (New York: Jonathan David, 1954).
85. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 239.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., 263.
88. Ibid., 239–276.
89. Myrna Oliver, “Alfred Wolf, 88; Noted Rabbi Started Jewish Youth Camps,” Los Angeles Times, 2 August 2004, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-aug-02-me-wolf2-story.html.
90. Richard Damashek, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: The Life of Rabbi Herman E. Schaalman (Brooklyn: KTAV, 2013), 344.
91. Manya Brachear Pashman, “Rabbi Herman Schaalman, an Interfaith Pioneer, Dies at 100,” Chicago Tribune, 1 February 2017, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/ct-herman-schaalman-obit-met-20170201-story.html.
92. Marvin Zolot, Mensch: Biography and Writings of Manfred Eric Swarsensky (Madison, WI: Edgewood College Press, 2009), 99–107.
93. Jakob J. Petuchowski, Mein Judesein: Wege und Erfahrungen eines deutschen Rabbiners (Freiburg: Herder, 1992). See also Jakob Petuchowski, ed., When Jews and Christians Meet (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988); Hans Küng and Walter Kasper, eds., Jews and Christians (New York: Seabury, 1975); Jakob J. Petuchowski, Ferner lehrten unsere Meister . . .: rabbinische Geschichten (Freiburg: Herder, 1983); Jakob J. Petuchowski, Das Buch vom Volk des Buches: Jüdische Gedanken zur Buch- und Lesekultur (Freiburg: Herder, 1982); Peter Eicher, Jakob Petuchowski, and Walter Strolz, eds., Offenbarung im christlichen und jüdischen Glaubensverständnis (Freiburg: Herder, 1982); Jakob Petuchowski and Clemens Thoma, eds., Lexikon der christlich-jüdischen Begegnung (Freiburg: Herder 1997). See also Michael A. Meyer, “Jakob J. Petuchowski (1925–1991),” Proceedings of the American Academy of Religion 58 (1992): 27–31.
94. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1994). See also Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).
95. Kaja Kaźmierska, Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors (Boston: Academic Studies, 2012), 14, 33–52.
96. For details on the difficult relationship between the two communities in postwar Germany, see Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeffrey Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
6. Refugee Returns
1. Eric H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: Norton, 1980).
2. Kaja Kaźmierska, Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors (Boston: Academic Studies, 2012), 37–52.
3. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, eds., Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
4. See, for example, Erica Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
5. Andreas Brämer, “‘. . . die Rückkehr eines Rabbiners nach Deutschland ist keine Selbstverständlichkeit’: Zur Remigration jüdischer Geistlicher nach Westdeutschland (1945–1965),” in “Auch in Deutschland waren wir nicht wirklich zu Hause”: Jüdische Remigration nach 1945, ed. Irmela von der Lühe, Axel Schildt, and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 169–189; Andrea Sinn, “The Return of Robert Raphael Geis to Germany: One of the Last Witnesses of German Jewry?,” European Judaism 45 (2012): 123–138.
6. Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17–52. See also Oral History Interview with Ernst Lorge, 27 April 1984: USHMM, Accession Number: 1989.346.43, RG-50.031.0043, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn507473, and Interview with Hermann Dicker, 29 November 1974: Hebrew University, Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Oral History Division, Nr. 119, 18 A and B, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_snbQzYLmc&list=PLZEGL2eD5gA1tO02gEP-Al-yMaM_Xd1VF&index=36; see also W. Gunther Plaut, Unfinished Business: An Autobiography (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981), 141–146.
7. Geller, Jews, 29–31, 34, 37, 46, 48–49, 50–51.
8. Ibid.
9. The report on the circumstances and special needs of Jewish DPs in Germany was commissioned by Harry Truman and prepared by Earl G. Harrison in the summer of 1945.
10. Ibid., 23–28. See also: Harrison Report, http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/displaced-persons/politic6.htm.
11. Wolfgang Hamburger, Abraham Geiger as reformer and theologian, first phase, as presented in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift fuer Juedische Theologie, Rabbinic thesis: HUC Cincinnati, 1952. See also Hartmut Bomhoff, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich: Prägende Jahre, Eine Biographie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 32. Hamburger served as rabbi in Lincoln, Nebraska; Duluth, Minnesota; Longview and Houston, Texas; and St. Joseph, Missouri.
12. Neue Deutsche Biographie, Leopold Neuhaus, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz71416.html.
13. Most likely an undertaking similar to the UNRRA DP-university in Munich; see Anna Holian, “Displacement and the Post-War Reconstruction of Education: Displaced Persons at the UNRRA University of Munich, 1945–1948,” Contemporary European History 17 (2008): 167–195.
14. Weinberg, Courage, 212–213. See also Constantin Goschler, “The Attitude towards Jews in Bavaria after the Second World War,” LBIY 36 (1991): 443–458.
15. Norbert Weinberg, Courage of the Spirit (Pensacola, FL: Indigo, 2014).
16. Edith Raim, Nazi Crimes against Jews in German Post-War Justice (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 64; and courtesy of Edith Raim, who pointed at further records on these cases in the National Archives: Office of Military Government, Bremen (OMGBR) 6/62-2/33 re. Bremen and Office of Military Government in Bavaria (OMGBY) 17/183-3/12 re. Würzburg.
17. “NSG Datenbank,” Institut für Zeitgeschichte, https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-archiv/benutzung-und-service/nsg-datenbank/.
18. Elie Munk to Anthony Rothschild, 12 November 1944; Joint Secretary of A. Rothschild to Elie Munk, 14 November 1944; B. Mindel to A. Rothschild, 18 December 1944; Joint Secretary to H. A. Goodman, 13 December 1944; P. Steinberg to A. Rothschild, 3 December 1944; E. Munk to M. Stephany, 21 December 1944; B. Mindel to M. Stephany, 3 January 1945; Joint Secretary to E. Munk, 18 January 1945, in The Jewish People from the Holocaust to Nationhood: 1933–1960, 74 microfilm reels (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publication, 1989), Reel 1, file 3.
19. Secretary CBF to H. Galinsky and J. Meyer, 11 October 1951, in Jewish People from the Holocaust to Nationhood, Reel 62, file 283.
20. Interview Jack Wertheimer and Michael Schwarzschild with Michael Munk, 11 July 1972, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration: LBI, AR 25385.
21. Lily Montagu was the woman leader of the movement for liberal Judaism in England and cofounder of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) founded in London in 1926. She also served as president of the WUPJ from 1955 to 1959.
22. Joseph Asher to Editor of Commentary Magazine, 17 November 1947: BANC, Mss. 2010/783.
23. Steven Schwarzschild, “Report on Berlin on World Union for Progressive Judaism Conference in London, July 14–19, 1949,” LBIY 60 (2015): 249–256, and Maimon Schwarzschild, “A Note from Steven Schwarzschild and the Letters from Berlin,” LBIY 60 (2015): 243–247.
24. Schwarzschild, “Report on Berlin,” 249–256; Report on Meeting of the Governing Body of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, 14 July 1949, London: AJA, MS-34, box 18.
25. Geller, Jews, 202–208, 219–272; “The Luxembourg Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, 10 September 1952,” Treaties, United Nations, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20162/volume-162-I-2137-English.pdf.
26. Report on Meeting of the Governing Body of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, 26 February 1950, London: AJA, MS-34, box 18.
27. Lily Montagu to Mr. Stephany, 11 July 1950, in The Jewish People from the Holocaust to Nationhood, Reel 21, file 114.
28. Nathan Peter Levinson, Ein Ort ist, mit wem Du bist: Lebensstationen eines Rabbiners (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1996), 104–136.
29. Ibid., 188–194. It is quite possible that Levinson tried to downplay how much the family enjoyed living in Germany because of the negative perception internationally.
30. Ibid., 194–216.
31. Michael Wolffsohn, Eternal Guilt? Forty Years of German-Jewish-Israeli Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1–67, 108–113, 138–150, 191–204.
32. See Anne Clara Schenderlein, Germany on Their Minds (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020), 143.
33. German Consulate General, Atlanta to Foreign Office, Bonn, 9 April 1956: Politisches Archiv (PA), Auswärtiges Amt (AA), B92, no. 128; Dr. König, Foreign Office, Bonn to German Consulate General, Atlanta, 8 May 1956: PA, AA, B92, no. 128.
34. German Consulate General, Cleveland to German Foreign Office, Bonn, 22 October 1958 and German Consulate General, Cleveland to German Foreign Office, 31 December 1958: PA, AA, B 92, no. 128.
35. Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Nürnberg to Cultural Department of the Federal Government, 16 December 1960 and German Foreign Office, Berlin, to German Foreign Office, Bonn, 1 March 1961: PA, AA, B92, no. 152; Embassy of the German Embassy in Luxembourg to German Foreign Office, Bonn, 24 September 1958: PA, AA, B92, no. 128. See also Lina Nikou, Besuche in der alten Heimat: Einladungsprogramme für ehemals Verfolgte des Nationalsozialismus in München (Frankfurt: Neofelis, 2020) and Nikou, Zwischen Imagepflege und moralischer Verpflichtung und Erinnerungen: Das Besucherprogramm für jüdische ehemalige Hamburger Bürgerinnen und Bürger (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2011). See also Schenderlein, Germany on Their Minds, 81–211.
36. Joachim Prinz, Special Debate “Germans and Jews,” WJC 5th Plenary Assembly, Brussels 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 4/7. See also Tobias Winstel, “‘Healed Biographies?’ Jewish Remigration and Indemnification for National Socialist Injustice,” LBIY 49 (2004): 137–152.
37. Telegram of the German Embassy to German Foreign Office, Bonn, 19 June 1959: PA, AA, B 92, no. 128.
38. A. L. Easterman to Joachim Prinz, WJC, 17 November 1959: AJA, MS-673, box 4/5. “Heuss Finds Anti-Semitism in West Germany Minor,” Int. Herald Tribune, 24 July 1959: AJA, MS-673, box 1. “German Jew Scores A U.S. Jewish Group,” New York Times, 11 November 1959: AJA, MS-673, nearprint-bio.
39. Joachim Prinz to Joachim Fest, 23 January 1963: AJA, MS-673, box 3/2.
40. Werner Steltzer to Joachim Prinz, 27 July 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 4/7. In his answer, Prinz expressed his hopes for a political change in Germany with the rise of the Social Democratic Party, which might ultimately bring change to society and politics. Joachim Prinz to Werner Steltzer, 30 August 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 4/7.
41. Memorandum from Will Maslow, AJC, to Joachim Prinz, AJC, 4 February 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 1/3.
42. Stephan Schaller to Joachim Prinz, 6 February 1968: AJA, MS-673, box 1/7; Joachim Prinz to Nachum Goldman, 4 May 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 1/5; A. L. Sachar to Joachim Prinz, 11 April 1968: AJA, MS-673, box 4/1; Joachim Prinz to Kurt Eberhardt, 27 January 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 1/3. C. Tesch to J. Prinz, 4 January 1967: AJA, MS-673, box 1/6.
43. Abraham Sachar to Joachim Prinz, 24 February 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 4/1; and Joachim Prinz, “Germans and Jews—Is There a Bridge?,” manuscript: AJA, MS-673, box 7/5.
44. Herbert A. Strauss and Kurt R. Grossmann, eds., Gegenwart im Rückblick: Festgabe für die Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 25 Jahre nach dem Neubeginn (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1970).
45. Schenderlein, Germany on Their Minds, 145–153. Max Nussbaum, “Ist Versöhnung Möglich?,” Aufbau, 9 October 1959. Voice of America, German Sermonette, 11 October 1959, and Church of the AIR, KNX, 11 October 1959, “Is Atonement with Germany Possible?”: AJA, MS-705, box 5/6.
46. Joseph Asher, “A Rabbi Asks: Isn’t It Time We Forgave the Germans?,” Look magazine, 20 April 1965.
47. Simcha Kling, “A New Look at Germany . . .,” The Messenger Congregation Adath Jeshurun, Louisville, KY, April 1967.
48. Niemeier, EKD (Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands), to J. Asher, 6 October 1971, and J. Asher to Niemeier, EKD, 14 February 1969: BANC, Mss. Coll. 2010/783, box 1. “Olive Branch or Grave—Which One?” Daily News, 2 November 1965; “He’ll Reintroduce Germans to Jews: Greensboro Rabbi Will Teach at Berlin University,” Charlotte Observer, 16 October 1966; Kling, “A New Look at Germany.” Ekkehard Klausa to the participants of a conference discussing the memorial site Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, 30 October 1987: BANC, Mss. Coll. 2010/783, box 4.
49. World Union for Progressive Judaism, Berlin Week, Program, 4–11 April 1965: courtesy of Gaby Müller-Oehlrichs (chief librarian), Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, library.
50. See Levinson, Ein Ort, 231–232; among the young people who went to London were Uri Themal, Adi Asabi, and Daniela Tau.
51. Ibid.
52. Joachim Prinz to Balfour Brickner (UAHC Commission on Interfaith Activities), 16 March 1966: AJA, MS-673, box 1/3.
53. Levinson, Ein Ort, 199.
54. Ibid., 221–222. N. P. Levinson to Max Nussbaum, 21 June 1971; Max Nussbaum to N. P. Levinson, 13 September 1971, with the manuscript “Mein Leben in Amerika” by Max Nussbaum: AJA, MS-705, box 8/2.
55. Levinson, Ein Ort, 245–252.
56. Paul Martin, “Planting New Jewish Roots,” Newsweek, 7 April 1980, 52. Alexander Guttmann to Leon Feldman, 18 February 1980: AJA, MS-663, box 4/15; and Alexander Guttmann to Robert S. Schine, 9 May 1980: AJA, MS-663, box 4/15.
57. Alexander Guttman to Leon Feldman, 28 September 1979: AJA, MS-663, box 4/15. See also the contract between the HJS and Alexander Guttmann, 27 August 1980: AJA, MS-663, box 4/15; Michael Hierholzer, “Verschüttetes Wissen bergen und wiederbeleben,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 July 1981, 23: AJA, MS-663, box 4/15; Memorandum, HUC, from Adrienne Polster to A. Guttmann, 28 September 1981 and A. Guttmann to Harold Epstein, HUC-JIR, 4 October 1981: AJA, MS-663, box 4/15.
58. Jeffrey Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 40–59.
59. Levinson, Ein Ort, 252.
60. Eric Lidji, The Seventeenth Generation: The Lifework of Rabbi Walter Jacob (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom, 2018), 195.
61. Ibid., 177.
62. Ibid., 182–184.
63. Ibid., 185–204.
64. Walter Jacob to Fae R. Asher, 28 February 2000: BANC, Mss. Coll. 2010/783, box 4.
65. Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, https://rabbinerseminar.de.
66. Zacharias Frankel College, http://zacharias-frankel-college.de.
67. “Zentralrat der Juden empört über neuen Träger von Rabbinerschule,” Der Spiegel, 13 January 2023, https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/abraham-geiger-kolleg-in-potsdam-streit-ueber-liberale-rabbinerschule-in-potsdam-hoert-nicht-auf-a-eea89ec6-4e38-477c-a783-19607569ef9e.
68. Walter Jacob, “Keepers of the Flame,” Reform Judaism 35, no. 4 (2007): 61–63.
Conclusion
1. See, for example, Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (London: Penguin, 2004).
2. See David Jünger and Anna Ulrich, “German-Jewish Agency in Times of Crisis, 1914–1938,” LBIY 66 (2021): 3–5 and a collection of articles addressing this question in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook.
3. A number of works discuss refugee returns to Germany, but few explore this topic within the framework of the life cycle. Kaja Kaźmierska’s stimulating work on Poland and Holocaust survivors takes this approach; see Kaja Kaźmierska, Biography and Memory: The Generational Experience of the Shoah Survivors (Boston: Academic Studies, 2012).
4. Yotam Hotam, ed., Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendliche im “Zeitalter der Jugend” (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2009).
5. David Jünger, “In the Presence of the Past: Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Holocaust Memory, and the Fight for Jewish Survival in Postwar America,” in Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades, ed. Eliyana Adler and Sheila Jelen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 306–313.
6. See Stephanie Zloch, Lars Müller, and Simone Lässig, Wissen in Bewegung: Migration und Globale Verflechtungen in der Zeitgeschichte seit 1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 1–35.
7. The Rabbi Dr. Joseph Breuer Foundation, https://www.rabbibreuerfoundation.org/; see also Zev Eleff, “Between Bennett and Amsterdam Avenues: The Complex American Legacy of Samson Raphael Hirsch, 1939–2013,” Tradition 46 (2013): 8–27.
8. In fact, the history of this last generation is missing from the existing literature on the American Reform Movement, which has so far only focused on the knowledge transfer from Germany to America in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth century, and the return of the movement to central Europe after the reunification of Germany.
9. This is made clear in Prinz’s speech during the March on Washington; see Joachim Prinz, “Civil Rights,” http://www.joachimprinz.com/civilrights.htm.
10. See Eric Lidji, The Seventeenth Generation: The Lifework of Rabbi Walter Jacob (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom, 2018).
11. Walter Jacob, “Keepers of the Flame,” Reform Judaism 35, no. 4 (2007): 61–63.
12. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 274–355.
13. Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 365–390.
14. Markus Krah, American Jewry and the Re-Invention of the East European Jewish Past, New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History 9, ed. Cornelia Wilhelm (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 241–258.
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