TWO

Rescue and Flight

Scholars and Students—And a Visa That Saved Lives

The Emerging Crisis

Long before the Nazis seized power in January 1933, it was apparent to American Jewry and its religious movements that nationalism and antisemitism had been on the rise globally and that many Jewish communities, particularly those in central and eastern Europe, were at the brink of a crisis. Jewish solidarity and action were needed. Thus, during its November session in 1932, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) appointed William Rosenau, a German-born, American-educated rabbi in Baltimore, to chair a newly appointed Special Committee on World Jewry to explore if and to what degree Jewish organizations and representations should and could take action.¹ The committee sought to present a resolution to national Jewish organizations globally in order to prepare a platform for this plan. The ideas from these diverse organizations were to be presented and discussed at the next meeting of the CCAR in June 1933 in Chicago.²

The CCAR was not alone in its concerns about the state of Jewish communities abroad. In early March 1933, the conservative Rabbinical Assembly answered Rosenau’s letter and pointed out that a similar project, a Committee to Study the Organization of Jewish Public Opinion in America, had just been launched by the Rabbinical Assembly, and cooperation was being considered.³ The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Orthodox counterpart to the Reform and Conservative organizations, advocated political action on the part of the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee.⁴

These exchanges formed two competing approaches to action: on the one hand, a World Jewish Conference composed of national Jewish organizations worldwide and led by the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and B’nai B’rith in the United States; on the other hand, a Zionist World Congress. Zionist groups argued that the Zionist World Congress scheduled for 1934 in Geneva would provide a sufficient global representation of Jews.⁵ Personal correspondence between Stephen Wise—a leading Reform rabbi who supported Zionism, a political rabbinate, and the idea of a World Jewish Congress (WJC) as the democratic representation of Jews globally—and William Rosenau—the outspoken anti-Zionist who supported a venture led by the assimilationists—showed the degree to which American Jews were conflicted, even within the American Reform movement, over how to best assist their European brethren.⁶

At the June 1933 Milwaukee meeting of the CCAR, the conference project was postponed due to difficulties coordinating the plan. Nevertheless, the meeting minutes show that the CCAR was already quite aware of the persecution of “Jewish” scholars in Germany and decided to provide $1,000 for rabbis and scholars in need.⁷ The funds were to be made available by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an organization that had gathered experience and developed networks to provide aid to European Jewry since the beginning of the First World War, when many Jewish communities in eastern Europe were suffering from the war’s effects and aftermath.⁸ This aid, however, was intended to help individuals still in Germany and excluded the first refugees who were starting to arrive at America’s shores.

Aware that the new Nazi legislation and the anti-Jewish Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service were driving Jewish professors and scholars out of the country and that liberal and leftist intellectuals were also being chased out of Germany, Jewish seminaries worked on behalf of numerous scholars they intended to bring to the United States. Most refugees were not yet seeking to rebuild their lives in the United States but were instead exploring professional opportunities for exile in Europe. Some experts in the field of Jewish studies turned to American rabbinical seminaries because these scholarly institutions were centers of narrow fields of study and highly specialized knowledge. In the absence of modern Jewish Studies Departments at American universities, it seemed logical to rely on Jewish seminaries that embraced Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Jewish Knowledge at Stake

American seminaries were aware that a unique collection of expert knowledge in the field of modern Jewish studies was at stake. The dispersion of the European scholarly community and particularly the leading experts in Jewish studies, several of whom were also ordained rabbis, could potentially shift the center of Jewish learning from Europe to wherever these scholars could find employment. As early as 1933, Cyrus Adler, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and Dropsie College in Philadelphia, and Julian Morgenstern, president of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, sensed that the emerging humanitarian crisis was a unique opportunity to recruit scholars who might otherwise not consider continuing their work in the United States.⁹ From the onset of the crisis, both leaders helped refugee scholars find employment¹⁰ and provided guidance to individuals exploring the American job market in their field by directing job seekers from Europe to a volunteer clearinghouse established at 270 Madison Avenue and headed by philanthropist Fred Stein.¹¹

This clearinghouse was the nucleus of the executive committee of the Emergency Committee in Aid of German Scholars (ECAGS), which was in its formative phase in May and June 1933.¹² The initiative was launched by Stephen Duggan, director of the Institute of International Education, which had assisted students and scholars fleeing from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia decades earlier.¹³ The institute worked with the Rockefeller Foundation and philanthropists Abraham Flexner and Fred Stein to launch a concerted effort by the American community of higher learning to aid German refugee scholars. This refugee aid committee was composed of legal scholar Abraham Flexner, securities analyst and philanthropist Fred Stein, and Felix Warburg, who supported the project with his philanthropist wife, Frieda Schiff.

The project quickly grew into a communication center for open positions and expertise sought among refugees from Europe. The newly founded ECAGS facilitated communication between American colleges and universities and the refugees in the hiring process. It brought together a vast number of American professional organizations, universities, and educational societies to assist in the rescue and recruitment of these scholars.¹⁴

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the project offered limited three-year contracts for refugees and made these appointments affordable for American universities by arranging compensation far below the salaries of comparable American experts in these fields and by having European refugee scholars hired for short periods to avoid long-term obligations for tenure track positions. The temporary arrangements gave the refugees what they needed to quickly obtain the so-called nonquota visas as professors or fellows. These visas were issued outside the regulations for immigrant visas in the US national quota system. Thus these institutions provided an attractive alternative for refugees to enter the United States relatively quickly. Refugees avoided a lengthy and difficult admittance process, and their immigration status could gradually be adjusted after they entered the United States.¹⁵

Besides the ECAGS, which worked directly with American universities, a so-called University in Exile was conceptualized by Alvin Johnson, director of the New School of Social Research. He had been in discussions with numerous German social scientists affected by the Nazi legislation through his participation in an ongoing scholarly project, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,¹⁶ and was acutely aware of the events in Germany. Johnson suggested organizing and funding the University in Exile to transfer the leading scholars of the modern German social and political sciences to the United States by issuing nonquota visas and providing temporary positions for them.¹⁷

Edwin Seligman, an economist at Columbia University who had been coeditor of the Encyclopedia with Johnson, discussed with Cyrus Adler the possibility of including scholars of Jewish studies in the plan to set up the University in Exile project. Enthusiastic about the idea of aiding German Jewry, Adler promised to approach the Guggenheim Foundation about changing its program from supporting American students’ travel abroad to offering research fellowships to German scholars to pursue their studies in Germany or elsewhere, including America.¹⁸

In January 1934, Cyrus Adler approached Stephen Duggan for help recruiting new faculty for the JTS and Dropsie College. Potential candidates were Alexander Sperber, a lecturer of biblical Greek and Aramaic at the University of Bonn; Leo Rosenzweig, a philosopher who had found refuge in Palestine; Jacob Klatzkin, a Zionist publicist and editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica who had been recommended to Adler by Albert Einstein; and Julius Lewy, an Assyriologist at the University of Giessen, whose availability he praised as the “chance of a century [in] getting a man of his type.”¹⁹ Aware of the economic value of some fields versus others, Adler made a case for Jewish studies at large and pointed out that the idea of a University in Exile focused on social scientists and economists but not on those who were the first victims of Nazi racial cleansing and who had the hardest time finding new employment, such as scholars in Jewish philosophy and Semitic languages. Adler urged Duggan to give them appropriate attention in the emergency rescue effort because they had been largely overlooked.²⁰

The Rescue of Scholars in Modern Jewish Studies

By the fall of 1934, Adler had hired Alexander Sperber and Julius Lewy with the support of the ECAGS. Adler received $3,000 from the newly formed executive committee of the ECAGS and followed the recommendation of Prof. William Foxwell of Johns Hopkins University, who mentioned the two men as being unique experts in their fields. An additional $1,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed Adler to invite Lewy, who held a visiting professorship at Johns Hopkins University for the fall of 1934, to teach at the JTS in the spring semester of that year. Alexander Sperber’s visiting position at the JTS started in the academic year 1934/35, but Sperber stayed at the seminary until he was offered a permanent position on the JTS faculty in 1938 at a salary of $2,500 a year.²¹

Other scholars were not as lucky. Saving Aramaic scholar Eugen Mittwoch was not a priority to the seminary, and although Adler tried to assist his German colleague anyway, he was not successful.

A decisive criterion in the decision to invest in the rescue of German scholars was their ability to teach and communicate with students in English and share their thoughts in the classroom. This task was difficult for most of them, not only because of language challenges but also because they were not used to the style of teaching and academic culture in the United States. The older scholars in particular were challenged, and there was no time for them to successfully master the difficulties. The ECAGS and leadership of the Jewish seminaries were aware of this, and it was frequently a reason for declining to hire a scholar in need.²²

Another major criterion for the selection of candidates at the seminaries was whether their specific skills corresponded to a particular college’s curriculum development. Even brilliant scholars were rejected on this basis but were helped to continue their work and eventually find employment elsewhere. Such was the case of Guido Kisch, a legal scholar and expert on medieval Jewish law who had difficulty finding a position at an American law school due to the vast differences between the legal systems of the United States and Germany. He could not be hired to the JTS faculty because he had not been trained in rabbinical studies or any other area that would contribute to the seminary’s curriculum. However, he was assisted in obtaining a two-year research fellowship from the American Academy of Jewish Research in 1934, with funds granted by the ECAGS but largely raised by the JTS.²³

In the meantime, rabbinical organizations joined the Special Committee Representing the CCAR and the Rabbinical Association of the JTS of America, which approached American rabbis and congregations for solidarity and financial aid to ease the plight of rabbis, teachers, and the religious communities in Germany.²⁴

The CCAR also contacted other religious groups through Rev. Everett Clinchy, founder of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, including the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), to discuss with them their experience as suppressed minorities and learn strategies to successfully fend off religious persecution.²⁵ In response, Henry J. Cadbury,²⁶ Hollis Chair of the Harvard Divinity School, accepted an invitation to attend the CCAR meeting on 13 June 1934 and address the convention with a talk on the Quaker experience and strategies to deal with religious persecution. After all, Cadbury had experienced discrimination because of his religion during the First World War when he publicly criticized America’s entry into the war and then lost his teaching position at Haverford College, just outside of Philadelphia.²⁷ This episode illustrates that, at the time, Nazi persecution was completely misunderstood as a form of religious discrimination rather than racial persecution of the Jews in Germany. Its severity was also thoroughly underestimated.

At the same CCAR convention, it was resolved to contact the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America and coordinate activities on behalf of German Jewry with this group and Conservative rabbis.²⁸ In the meantime, as the issue of refugee aid became more pressing, a new plan for a Jewish University in Exile developed among Jewish institutions of higher learning. In 1938, HUC put forth a plan to support a “Jewish College in Exile” by hosting about twenty-five scholars in its dormitory and library for up to three years. The refugees could use the library and continue their work with the college faculty. Julian Morgenstern, president of HUC, displayed great ambition with his plan, which transformed the college into a global center of modern Jewish learning and provided a new home for modern Jewish Wissenschaft in America while its corresponding European centers were being destroyed by the Nazis.²⁹

Ismar Elbogen, former rector of the Hochschule in Berlin, arrived in the United States early in November 1938 after the dramatic effort of four seminaries³⁰ to raise the funds for a research position for him, compensated with $4,000 annually, which allowed him to obtain a nonquota visa. Since Elbogen did not hold a university position in Germany but “only” the position of Rektor, or administrative head, of the Hochschule (which had been degraded to a Lehranstalt under Nazism), his rescue could not be financed by the ECAGS. Its aid was restricted to assisting professors at accredited universities only.

Raising the funds for a scholar as eminent as Ismar Elbogen was a financial challenge for the four seminaries—HUC, the JTS, Dropsie College, and the Jewish Institute of Religion (JIR)—and their rabbinical organizations and congregational unions. The JTS had already tried to rescue Elbogen by awarding him an honorary degree and inviting him to take part in the celebratory bestowal in New York City in the spring of 1937. But Elbogen declined the invitation and thus missed the opportunity designed to facilitate his emigration.³¹ Elbogen, no doubt, had a close relationship with the conservative modern seminary in the United States, for the school’s more conservative theological outlook was perhaps even closer to what German liberal Judaism represented. Elbogen also had a warm relationship with the leadership of the JTS, Alexander Marx, Louis Finkelstein, and Cyrus Adler, representing the JTS and Dropsie College. All three men worked tirelessly with HUC to make Elbogen’s emigration possible when he finally felt the need to leave Berlin at the end of 1937.³²

Elbogen was by then sixty-five, and both his age and experiences during his last months in Germany had left their mark on him. Therefore, the seminaries offered him the fellowship ($4,000 annually) with no obligations to teach or conduct research.³³ On his arrival at the end of October 1938, Elbogen chose to reside in New York City until his death in 1943. He was an influential presence at the JTS, which became an important institution for him, conveniently located as it was next to the libraries of Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary.³⁴

Once in the United States, Elbogen became a central figure in the execution of the plan to save world-class scholars in modern Jewish studies from Nazism and to commit them to positions at HUC. In the weeks after Elbogen’s arrival, one of his primary tasks was to prepare for Julian Morgenstern a list of candidates to be considered for temporary employment or a fellowship by HUC.³⁵ Since Elbogen had been somewhat “the nestor” of the Hochschule in Berlin for thirty years,³⁶ he was very familiar with German scholars, students, and rabbis in both the Liberal and Conservative factions of German Jewry. Thanks to this background, he played a vital role in the exchange of information and testimonies on scholars, students, and rabbis who sought help leaving Germany. Even amid his own difficult flight, he tirelessly helped students and faculty get admitted to one of the US seminaries and set up to continue their work.³⁷

When Elbogen arrived in Cincinnati, four German refugees were already affiliated with HUC, making it the institution with more scholars than any other Jewish seminary in the United States.³⁸ Among them was Julius Lewy, professor of Semitic languages and Oriental history from the University of Giessen. Lewy accepted a position at HUC as a visiting professor and was then offered a permanent appointment in 1936, but this was only after an odyssey of visiting professorships at the Sorbonne and at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1933, the JTS in the spring of 1934 with the support of an ECAGS grant, and again at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1935.³⁹

Michael Wilensky, a cataloger from Lithuania, arrived at HUC in Cincinnati in 1937 with an invitation for one year, but he stayed until his retirement.⁴⁰ Legal scholar Guido Kisch spent time as a visiting scholar at the JIR in New York under the guidance of Stephen Wise in 1937.⁴¹

Last but not least, musicologist Eric Werner joined the faculty of HUC in Cincinnati as a visiting scholar based on a nonquota visa, but he ended up staying permanently.⁴²

Among the scholars suggested by Ismar Elbogen were Talmudist Alexander Guttmann,⁴³ art historian Franz Landsberger,⁴⁴ theologian and philosopher Albert Lewkowitz, historian and cartographer Isaiah Sonne, historian Eugen Taeubler, philosopher of religion Max Wiener, director of the Oriental Department of the Prussian State Library Walter Gottschalk, philosopher of religion Abraham Heschel, and expert for Semitic languages Franz Rosenthal. HUC added to its faculty Jewish studies scholar Arthur Spanier.⁴⁵

The two youngest and least established invitees, Heschel and Rosenthal (both recent graduates), were offered positions as research fellows with a stipend of $500 per year including room and board at HUC; the others were given positions as research professors with salaries of $1,800 for two years and the option to extend their tenure if their services were needed.⁴⁶

The Rabbinical Seminaries and the Hurdles of the American Immigration Administration

While the rescue of Elbogen revealed some of the problems present in the framework of immigration administration, more difficulties emerged around HUC’s efforts to rescue the abovementioned nine scholars. The State Department refused to consider the refugees’ former employers, all highly accredited German institutions of Jewish higher learning, as “universities.” The Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the largest seminary, was particularly disadvantaged by the fact that the Nazis had degraded the Hochschule (university) to a Lehranstalt. To receive a nonquota visa, scholars had to be from an institution of higher learning classified at the level of university. In addition, American bureaucrats were less than creative in interpreting the academic standing of others who had been employed by one of the many institutions of higher learning that existed independent of the German university system but that were quite typical for the German scholarly community, such as academies of sciences, museums, state libraries, and independent research institutes.

Morgenstern’s correspondence with the invitees, their relatives, and the immigration authorities describes the problems they faced: Arthur Spanier, who taught at the Hochschule (Lehranstalt) and was a Hebraica librarian at the Prussian State Library, was arrested and sent to a concentration camp after Kristallnacht, where he was told that he would be set free only if he could prove that his immediate emigration was organized. As a result, he urged Morgenstern to offer him an appointment. With the support of Elbogen, Jonah Wise, and Elbogen’s sister, who resided in New York, the funding for Spanier’s salary of $2,000 could be offered. However, the attempt to extend an invitation was denied by the US State Department because Spanier had not taught at an accredited German university but had “only” been employed at the Prussian State Library and the Lehranstalt; the department even based its argument for rejection on the recent degradation of the Hochschule.⁴⁷

This interpretation also limited the chances of several other scholars selected for a position and involved Morgenstern in endless negotiations with the State Department, which refused the admittance of research fellows and at times even demanded that the appointments on a nonquota visa would have to be for a tenured position rather than a temporary appointment.

American authorities questioned the eligibility of the University in Exile in applying for nonquota visas. After all, they argued, the institution only represented a research institution without a student body, so the existing legislation was therefore not applicable.⁴⁸ Just a few weeks later, the State Department suggested that HUC should only be allowed to invite professors on a nonquota visa if they were appointed “as regular members of its faculty,” provided they qualified for these positions according to the law.⁴⁹ Such arbitrariness in the handling of immigration cases, all of which represented urgent pleas for assistance, undermined not only the arrival of those who had been invited but also the survival of the project as a whole. It was not until Julian Morgenstern had held countless meetings with the head of the Visa Division of the State Department, Ava Warren, in Washington, DC; received the assistance of the office of Congressman Taft of Ohio;⁵⁰ and had a conversation arranged by Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith on 20 September that the legal framework in which nonquota visas could be issued was explained in detail. Still, the initiative was not successful in all cases.

Arthur Spanier was denied a visa based on the fact that he did not hold a teaching position but was instead a scholar employed at the Prussian State Library.

Albert Lewkowitz, a philosopher, taught at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau and could have expected to be given a nonquota visa following due process. But he did not have the time required to deal with the bureaucratic hurdles. He and Spanier relocated to the Netherlands, where his documents were destroyed in a German air raid. New documents were requested from the German authorities, but he did not receive them before the US consulates in Germany were evacuated in the summer of 1941.

As a librarian, Walter Gottschalk shared a fate similar to that of Spanier. His application was rejected because he was not employed by an institution of higher learning as defined by the State Department.

Max Wiener, who was both an eminent scholar in the philosophy of religion and an ordained rabbi, did not want to depend on a nonquota visa as a scholar because he believed he would be more successful in obtaining a visa if he applied as an assistant rabbi of a congregation in Syracuse, New York. After entering the country on a nonquota visa as a rabbi, he decided that he did not want to serve there in that capacity and thus did not fulfill the requirements for his admission for this type of visa. Instead, he headed to HUC in Cincinnati to pursue his research and was redirected to a congregation in Fairmont, West Virginia. He soon abandoned this place as well, only to end up as an assistant rabbi of Congregation Habonim in New York City in an insignificant position far below his qualifications, though it allowed him to also work as the editor of the scholarly journal The Reconstructionist.

Art historian Franz Landsberger had been imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during Kristallnacht and turned to Morgenstern with an urgent plea to help him leave the country. He received a temporary invitation to the University of Oxford from his colleague Gilbert Murray, which allowed him to leave Germany. From England, he departed for the United States and arrived at the end of August 1939 on a nonquota visa from HUC just days before the outbreak of the Second World War. Landsberger stayed in Cincinnati with a permanent position until his death in 1964.

Isaiah Sonne, a medieval scholar, had already obtained a nonquota visa for Palestine when HUC’s invitation reached him. The proposal to hire him had faced some serious opposition from faculty at HUC, which undermined the college’s plan to extend an offer earlier. As compensation, the college intended to provide him with research funding for Palestine, but in the end, he managed to secure a position teaching in Cincinnati.⁵¹

Abraham Heschel’s emigration also illustrated a variety of problems caused by the State Department, progressing persecution, and the outbreak of the Second World War. In June 1938, while he was still living in Frankfurt am Main, Heschel registered with the American consulate in Stuttgart for a regular quota visa for immigration.⁵² He did not hear from the consulate until ten months later, in April 1939, but he had been expelled to Poland in October 1938 and was residing in Warsaw. He was informed that his case “could not be examined earlier than in 9 months.”⁵³ He learned from Morgenstern that problems related to his lack of teaching experience at an accredited university in Germany, where Jewish scholars had been banned from teaching at state universities since April 1933, were complicating his application to immigrate to the United States. Heschel managed to leave Poland in mid-July 1939, just weeks before the German invasion of Poland, and found temporary shelter in England.⁵⁴ It took until 21 September 1939 before Morgenstern, after many trips to Washington, could finally extend an invitation to him as an “instructor in Bible for an indeterminate period,”⁵⁵ which allowed Heschel to obtain a visa from the US consulate in London.

Once the Second World War began, the American consulate in London stopped issuing visas for the United States. Morgenstern advised Heschel to travel to Dublin to receive the necessary visa there.⁵⁶ Without hesitation, Morgenstern wrote to the American consulate in Dublin to inform the visa department that all paperwork for Franz Rosenthal, who was by then residing in London like Heschel, had been completed.⁵⁷ Finally, Heschel learned that the Visa Department of the American consulate in London had resumed its work. He received his nonquota visa on 31 January 1940 from this office. He left almost immediately and arrived in New York City on 21 March 1940.⁵⁸

The emigration of Eugen Taeubler, a Jewish classicist and historian of ancient Rome, and his wife, Selma Stern-Taeubler, one of the first German women to become a historian, proved similarly complicated. The State Department’s visa division and the Consulate General in Berlin caused problems concerning the issuance of nonquota visas, but in addition, irrespective of the persecution of Jews in Germany, the couple found it extremely hard to leave Berlin, where they were at home emotionally and intellectually, and to relocate to the United States. Cutting old bonds, both professional and private, and giving up central Europe where they had been part of an academic culture they knew they would lose, posed a challenge for them. However, in May 1941, they arrived in the United States and settled in Cincinnati, where Eugen Taeubler taught until 1953. Stern-Taeubler, who had earned her doctorate at the University of Munich in 1913 and continued to work on a second book to advance her career, found a position as archivist, for which she was greatly overqualified, in the newly established American Jewish Archives.⁵⁹

The last professor to arrive in Cincinnati was Samuel Atlas, an expert on the Talmud and Jewish philosophy. He found a temporary teaching position in England where Morgenstern’s invitation had reached him in May 1941. At the time, US immigration authorities were increasingly worried about the loyalties of refugees entering the United States, and considerations about the nation’s security prolonged the processing of immigration cases. Once again, it was Morgenstern’s tireless work that enabled Atlas to join the faculty of HUC in early 1942, shortly after the United States entered the war. In Atlas’s case, Morgenstern brought his frustration with Ava Warren to the attention of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who intervened and personally monitored the processing of Atlas’s visa until it was issued by Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells.⁶⁰

German Refugee Scholars at HUC in Cincinnati: (from left) Samuel Atlas, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Michael Wilensky, Eugen Täubler, Julius Lewy, Julian Morgenstern, Alexander Guttmann, Isaiah Sonne (hidden in image), Eric Werner, Franz Landsberger, and Franz Rosenthal: AJA, hucpc240cin.02.

While HUC was rescuing scholars, an act that transformed the college for years to come, its conservative cousin, the JTS in New York City, felt that German colleagues would not fit in with its curriculum and hired only a few of them. The only cases exempted from this criterion were those of Julius Lewy, who taught there during the spring semester of 1935, and Alexander Sperber, who arrived as a visiting scholar during the academic year 1934/35.⁶¹ Nevertheless, JTS president Cyrus Adler helped Guido Kisch obtain funding from the ECAGS and American Jewish organizations including the JDC, the American Jewish Committee, and B’nai B’rith for a fellowship at the American Academy of Jewish Research.⁶²

Aside from Lewy, Kisch, and Elbogen, Max Gruenewald, a former rabbi in Mannheim, developed a close relationship with the JTS and resided there for several years in the dormitory, living on a fellowship provided by the college. This was not an unusual setup; for shorter periods, the seminary hosted rabbis and students who had no other way of supporting themselves, but the complex case of Max Gruenewald demonstrates that Jewish seminaries dedicated enormous energy to rescue, visa, and fundraising efforts for their colleagues abroad and were personally quite involved in their fates. This is vividly underscored by the involvement of provost Louis Finkelstein in Gruenewald’s case. Finkelstein was a close friend and colleague of Gruenewald’s father-in-law, Dr. Saul Horovitz of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau. Together, they edited the Sifre, a halachic commentary on the fifth Book of Moses.

Gruenewald visited the United States from late 1936 to early 1937 on behalf of the Reich Representation, for which he worked after April 1936. He claimed that the goal of the trip was to secure affidavits for especially endangered German Jews.⁶³ After his return to Germany, Gruenewald experienced serious harassment by the Gestapo, which had spied on his activities in the United States. He decided to leave Germany with his wife, a medical doctor, and his son in August 1938. The family arrived in Palestine in August 1938, but Gruenewald could find neither a position as a liberal rabbi nor an opportunity to continue his scholarly work.

Many of Gruenewald’s colleagues experienced the difficulties that modern rabbis encountered in Palestine when they explored it as a potential destination for emigration.⁶⁴ None of them, not even ardent Zionists, found liberal or modern Orthodox congregations, and all of them struggled with Hebrew, missed the intellectual climate of central Europe, and felt they could not make a living on the salaries paid in the Yishuv to immigrant rabbis.⁶⁵

Legal scholar Heinrich Kronstein, who had befriended Gruenewald and permanently relocated to the United States in 1936, highlighted Gruenewald’s dilemma and lack of prospects to Cyrus Adler in December 1937.⁶⁶ He asked if there was any way to assist him and his family, but the JTS could only offer them residence in a men’s dormitory, a rather unsuitable place to house a family.⁶⁷ With no alternatives, Gruenewald accepted the offer of a fellowship at the JTS, which was to bring him to New York City for one year starting in the spring of 1939.

On 13 January 1939, Louis Finkelstein asked the American Consul in Tel Aviv what was necessary to issue a visitors’ visa to Gruenewald as a guest of the seminary dormitory with room and board.⁶⁸ By May 1939, just months before the outbreak of the war, Gruenewald started his fellowship in New York City, leaving his wife and child in Palestine in anticipation that the separation would only be temporary.⁶⁹ While the refugee rabbi embarked on his research, the seminary tried to involve him in some religious functions, in working with the refugees, or in a congregation to acquaint him with American Jewish religious life and develop his English.⁷⁰ After one year, Gruenewald wanted to return to Palestine for a time while Finkelstein tried to extend his visitor’s visa in February 1940. The plan was to have Gruenewald renew his visa during his stay in Palestine, but the ship Gruenewald had sailed on was recalled to the United States just after it arrived in Lisbon due to Italy’s entry into the war. This left Gruenewald without the proper paperwork on a ship that returned to the United States in June 1940. He was placed under arrest on Ellis Island for three weeks and was denied entry into the country.

Gruenewald received another research fellowship for the academic year 1940-41 at the JTS,⁷¹ but before he could accept it, Louis Finkelstein was forced to explain the situation to the US immigration authorities and tried to initiate Gruenewald’s admission process. Early in July, Gruenewald’s brother Ernst, a resident of Long Island, contacted the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America asking for their advice and support in his brother’s case. Max Gruenewald’s readmission was granted for only sixty days after he applied for a visa waiver at the State Department on the condition that his brother pay a departure bond of $500.⁷² Gruenewald managed to extend that period and moved back into the JTS dormitory.

In March 1941, he traveled to Cuba to apply for an immigration visa to the United States from there, a process used by many of the refugees to change their visa status from temporary to permanent as immigrants to the United States. Louis Finkelstein personally provided an affidavit of support for Gruenewald.⁷³

After the United States entered the war, new regulations forced Gruenewald to file his application once again in July 1941. Under the Alien Registration Act (Smith Act), the German refugee rabbi was forced to confirm his political loyalty and submit newly issued affidavits for the application of his immigrant visa under the quota. At the same time, the JTS tried to support Gruenewald with continuing fellowships, but the school was financially challenged by the support it gave to a growing number of German refugees. Only the aid of the American Academy of Jewish Research and some private donations secured Gruenewald’s room and board at the JTS during the war.

Frustration with his situation and the desire to reunite with his family drove Gruenewald to finally accept a position in Milburn, New Jersey, as substitute rabbi when Melvin Kieffer, the congregation’s rabbi, left to serve as a chaplain in the US Army. By 1946, he would become the full-time rabbi of this congregation and be able to reunite with his family.⁷⁴

Bernard Revel—president of Yeshiva University, its college for general studies (Yeshiva College), and its Orthodox rabbinical school, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS)—also reached out to the Emergency Committee in November 1933 requesting its cooperation. Specifically, he wanted suggestions for German refugee scholars to add to Yeshiva University’s faculty and financial support to fund these appointments.⁷⁵

His primary interest lay in securing support for philosopher Leo Rosenzweig, whom he considered suitable to teach at RIETS.⁷⁶ Revel hired Rosenzweig, who was residing temporarily in Palestine. His case was discussed by the Emergency Committee in 1934 but was ultimately turned down due to a lack of funding. The university was encouraged to reapply for support from the Emergency Committee on Rosenzweig’s behalf at a later time. This effort was obviously successful because Rosenzweig was negotiating in the fall of 1936 to teach a class on “Problems of Jewish Philosophy” at Yeshiva College, a class he apparently did teach in the spring semester of 1937.⁷⁷

Yeshiva College received a long list of scholars recommended by the Emergency Committee to add to the liberal arts college faculty and who were already in New York City. Among them were Klara Deppe, Dr. Marie Munk, Dr. Anna Berger, Dr. Felix Salomon, Dr. Erich Gutkind, Dr. Leo Cahn, Dr. Erwin Hirschfeld, Klaus Liepmann, Dr. Heinz Steinhaus, and Dr. Leo Rosenzweig.⁷⁸

Yeshiva University Archives reveal that Erich Gutkind, an unusual and somewhat esoteric scholar of several disciplines, was appointed, but there is no proof in the college’s administrative correspondence that any of the other scholars were hired by Yeshiva University. Perhaps it was the special endorsement from Rabbi De Sola Pool of the Sephardic congregation Shearith Israel in New York City that pointed to Gutkind’s unique spiritual usefulness for American Orthodoxy and thus made him a strong candidate for the college. Or, it might have been his active engagement and communication with the college’s registrar, Jacob Hartstein, and his willingness to serve as a speaker for Yeshiva University Speaker’s Bureau. In this way, he could demonstrate his teaching skills, mastery of English, and multidisciplinary value, making him a successful candidate not only for hire but also as someone to be referred to Columbia University’s library for additional employment.⁷⁹ Yeshiva University likely employed Gutkind for two years, perhaps with a grant from the Emergency Committee. His name is on the faculty list of Yeshiva College for the 1936 spring term, and he discussed with registrar Jacob Hartstein the two courses he wanted to offer in the spring and fall semesters of 1937, namely, a two-semester seminar on the contemporary problems of philosophy and a two-semester seminar on Kant and Hegel.⁸⁰

Outside of RIETS, Yeshiva University hired several German refugee scholars, including legal scholar and judge Bruno Birnbaum, who was offered a permanent position as chair of political economy in 1934, and Rudolf Kayser, who was appointed as chair of German language and literature. As the son-in-law of Albert Einstein, who had a close relationship with Yeshiva University, Kayser also received the support of the eminent physicist for this appointment.⁸¹

Revel was also interested in employing a young Orthodox professor of the Berlin Rabbinerseminar, Dr. Max Landau, an expert on modern and medieval history who had been recommended by both Ismar Elbogen and Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, the rector of the Berlin Rabbinerseminar.⁸² Landau had sought employment at Yeshiva University in May 1939 just after the institution was shut down by the Nazis. He relocated to Warsaw and was on the run from Nazi persecution. His correspondence ended suddenly with a letter dated 26 June 1939 and addressed to philanthropist Harry Friedenwald in Baltimore, who was obviously willing to sponsor Landau’s emigration with an affidavit or loan. Unfortunately, a tragic road accident took Landau’s life.⁸³

Considering the unique relationship of German Orthodoxy to modern secular thought, it may also have been difficult to integrate a large number of scholars into the Rabbinical Department of the college. Yeshiva University was approached by the Rabbinerseminar after Kristallnacht in 1938 for admission of students and temporary work permits for its faculty, but it is unclear how much of a response, if any, that urgent plea received. No evidence exists of a reaction, and the lack of archival resources hinders any attempt to definitively answer this question.⁸⁴ At the time, Yeshiva University was still struggling with a lack of finances as a result of the Depression, so it might also have been difficult to launch a large-scale rescue in the brief window of time that was available then.

Esriel Erich Hildesheimer approached Alexander Marx of the JTS several times about a position in the library of that institution, but he never reached New York City.⁸⁵

Surprisingly, the only rabbinical scholar from Germany for whom Yeshiva University issued visa application papers for a teaching position was Rav Joseph Breuer of the Frankfurt Kehillah. A former student of his, Jacob Salomon, had already settled in New York City and had contacted Bernard Revel on Breuer’s behalf after the Breuer family had fled to Antwerp and were exploring their options for further emigration. Joseph Breuer and his family finally did receive a nonquota visa through Yeshiva University, although it is unclear why he taught at the Yeshiva Torah Vodaas instead. David Kranzler and Dovid Landesman explain that Breuer received “affidavits” from Yeshiva University and entered the United States on a nonquota visa for rabbis, a fact confirmed by the Breuer family.⁸⁶ Kranzler and Landesmann also explain that Breuer was ready to start teaching at Yeshiva University but feared that there might be some sort of internal opposition to his joining the faculty. Revel had asked him to take some time first to settle with his family before making that decision. Revel then died unexpectedly, which ultimately led Breuer to abandon the idea of teaching at Yeshiva University. Instead, he started teaching at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, whose director, R. Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, showed great interest in hiring him to fulfill the obligations that came with Breuer’s nonquota visa.⁸⁷

For American Orthodoxy, the exodus of German Jewry was only the beginning of a crisis and rescue effort that did not end in central Europe. Unlike the Reform and Conservative movements in Judaism, Orthodoxy’s centers of study and rabbinical learning were still mostly in Lithuania and Poland and not seriously threatened before the beginning of the Second World War. But once the war began, the Nazis rapidly and brutally gained control of eastern Europe, destroying centers of Orthodox Jewish learning there. However, a small minority of the students and religious leaders of these schools were able to flee and reestablish themselves elsewhere. Nazism and the Holocaust forced a process of Jewish knowledge transfer to take place. The fates of these people and the history of the postwar reconstruction should be examined in a complementary analysis of the migration of European Jewry in the context of the Shoah because a larger view of the two European traditions may provide insight into the rescue and knowledge transfer involved in this migration that exceeds the scope of this work.

The rescue and employment of “German” scholars and rabbis was only a prelude to a second phase of scholarly rescue from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. This involved the Orthodox movement in one of the most notable international rescue efforts of the war, known as the Vaad Hatzalah.⁸⁸ In this initiative, any differences between “rabbis” and “scholars” paled because in traditional Judaism, the rabbi is still a traditional scholar and, in this respect, has little in common with the new modern German rabbinate. That is why this rescue effort is not covered in this book, even though it represents a missing piece in the larger picture of research on the rescue of European rabbis, their scholarly institutions, and the transfer of knowledge during and after the Second World War.⁸⁹

At the time, modern German Orthodoxy clearly did not belong to the Orthodox mainstream in the United States. It stood out due to its small size, ethnic background, cultural identity, commitment to Bildung, and strict encounter with modernity.⁹⁰ Even though a number of the leading intellectuals in the American Orthodox movement had studied at the Rabbinerseminar in Berlin and had close links to Germany (such as Alexander Marx of the JTS, Leo Jung, and Joseph Soloveitchik), the ethnic background of the refugees and their cultural involvement in modern Western society complicated acceptance of the German Orthodox rabbinical leadership outside German refugee congregations in the United States despite the efforts of Yeshiva University to expand its services as an Orthodox scholarly institution.⁹¹

At Yeshiva College, the continuing commitment to east European Jewish scholarship became apparent when the Yeshiva College Quarterly announced in December 1941 the appointment of Polish scholars to its faculty, including the chief rabbi of Vilna, Yitshack Rubinstein,⁹² and the head of the Yeshiva at Grodna, Rabbi Moses Shatzkes.⁹³ Both men had been trapped by the German invasion of Poland and were able to leave Vilnius only once that city fell back under Soviet control.

After a venturesome flight via the Soviet Union and Japan, Rubinstein and Shatzkes eventually made it to the United States in 1941, where they both started teaching at Yeshiva University. Such activity may have benefited from the new financial independence Yeshiva College gained from a fund provided by the motion picture industry in 1939, which allowed the college to invest in fellowships for students.⁹⁴ The numerical relationship became increasingly striking between the modern German rabbinate and the east European rabbinical refugees, of whom many were stranded in Canada on their flight from Nazism.

This helps us understand the role German scholars and rabbis played in American Jewish Orthodoxy. By late 1941, 451 east European rabbis and scholars were stranded in Canada, where they tried to establish a “Yeshiva in Exile,” a project that involved almost double the number of German refugee rabbis in the United States and that needed the support of Orthodox Jewry far beyond that of American Jewry alone. It found perhaps its largest supporter in the British Chief Rabbinate, a topic that has so far been largely neglected in the existing research.⁹⁵

Besides Yeshiva University, smaller American yeshivot were also affected by the influx of German Orthodox rabbis and scholars, including the Yeshiva Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn. This school not only educated and graduated a number of refugee students⁹⁶ after 1945; it also had a strong relationship with the Orthodox refugee community. One person very active in this regard was Rabbi Joseph Breuer. As the former head of the Frankfurt Kehillah, he set up Kahal Adass Jeshurun as a modern Orthodox kehillah in Washington Heights and taught for two years after his arrival at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. The school’s head was Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlovitz, who was familiar with and supportive of the Hirschian philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz. He was genuinely dedicated to broadening Orthodox Jewish education⁹⁷ and introduced new models for institutions of Orthodox Jewish education, such as Aish Dosh, Torah U’mesorah, and Beis Medrash Elyon. This may have been what brought him together with Joseph Breuer, who was at the time energetically exploring the situation of American Jewish schooling and American public schools to set up the Yeshiva Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in the United States. By the fall of 1939, the periodical Mitteilungen of Kahal Adass Jeshurun announced that the former Frankfurt Yeshiva had started the process of reinstituting itself “in Anlehnung an die Brooklyner Jeschiwa ‘Thora Wedaas.’” This meant that Breuer had carved out a curriculum for the children of his community within the Brooklyn-based Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. They would be provided an education within an established and licensed educational framework, which Breuer continued to supervise as long as the community did not have an accredited yeshiva.⁹⁸

This refugee community’s dedication to education is apparent in that one of Breuer’s first initiatives after immigrating to the United States was to set up a so-called Schulverein (school association) for the congregation members in September 1939. The association prepared and financed the reestablishment of the former education system, in which rabbis Dr. Philipp Biberfeld, Goldschmidt, Dr. Rothschild, Dr. Ullmann, and Joseph Breuer were employed as teachers, in a religious school called Nachlas Zwi.⁹⁹ The setup of the Nachlas Zwi in 1939, the Beth Jacob Schule for girls in 1940,¹⁰⁰ the opening of the Yeshiva Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in 1944,¹⁰¹ and the Reka Breuer Teacher’s Seminary for girls in 1963¹⁰² were essential for the survival of this ethnic religious group, which did not want to merge with American Orthodoxy or adopt its schooling system.¹⁰³

Kahal Adass Jeshurun’s educational system not only provided jobs for teachers and rabbis in the community; it also became the backbone of their cultural and religious independence because it allowed them to educate the next generation according to their ideals of Torah im Derech Eretz, which explicitly expressed their openness for an encounter with the secular world. This reflected the widespread opinion that the existing Jewish parochial schools were unsatisfactory. However, the fact that the Yeshiva Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was designed and set up as a public school providing a broad range of secular subjects besides religious training was just as indicative of this as the community’s commitment to the education of girls.

In his 1940 exchange with Leo Jung, Joseph Breuer explained his vision of a “Work Yeshiva,” a yeshiva that would be dedicated to the vocational training of crafts not included in the American trade school system while also providing religious education for its youth. How intensely the community studied the American school system is apparent in its publications. In the Mitteilungen of Kahal Adass Jeshurun, Jacob Breuer, son of Rabbi Joseph Breuer, analyzed in detail the American school system and American Orthodoxy’s yeshivot to defend, define, and distinguish Kahal Adass Jeshurun’s own path in Jewish education and to explore how to best set up its own educational system in this new environment.¹⁰⁴

Since modern German Orthodoxy did not correspond ideologically or ethnically to the American Orthodox movement or its congregations due to its commitment to secular education and the education of girls, there are no analyses of the role of German Orthodox scholars and rabbis in the literature. Yet an analysis like this should consider their impact on the Orthodox education system in the United States. While many of the German Orthodox rabbis struggled to continue their careers as leaders of American congregations, the refugees had a major impact on the development of a modern Orthodox education system, the establishment of schools for girls, and the design and creation of explicitly modern, innovative approaches to American Jewish Orthodoxy, which were in great demand at the time.

Beyond Yeshiva University, smaller colleges and yeshivot also benefited from the social capital the refugees could invest in American Orthodoxy, and they played a hence-unknown role in the rescue of German (and likewise east European) Jewry. The records of the ECAGS clearly show how many of the new, small institutions of Jewish learning were interested in the “brain drain” from Germany. They all approached the ECAGS for support. One of these institutions was the Brooklyn-based Mesifta Talmudical Seminary, whose exact status in the larger American education system was explored by Betty Drury to properly answer its grant application.¹⁰⁵ Finally, the Baltimore-based Ner Israel Rabbinical College, founded in 1933 by Rav Yaakov Y. Ruderman, hired German Orthodox leaders, although it is not known whether this was facilitated by a grant from the ECAGS.¹⁰⁶

The first refugee rabbi appointed on a nonquota visa at Ner Israel Rabbinical College was Samson Raphael Weiss, who arrived in the United States in late 1938. Just before his emigration, he earned a PhD from the University of Dorpat in Estonia. Besides his graduation from a secular university, he had also acquired traditional Jewish knowledge in Lithuania and attended the notable Yeshiva Mir, where he received his Smicha, a traditional ordination, in 1934. During his secular studies in Germany, he made a name for himself as a leader in the Zionist Orthodox Jewish youth movement “Ezra,” where his charismatic leadership and dynamic style were much appreciated. He was appointed professor and then dean of the Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt (ILBA; Israelite Teacher Training Seminary) in Würzburg in 1934.

At the ILBA, Weiss found a region and institution where he could develop his innovative style of leadership and dedication to a new style of teaching. His teaching and administrative style held a unique fascination for the students during the Nazi period and dissolved the formal barriers between professor and student, which were typical for German institutions of higher learning at the time. It was his experience at the Yeshiva Mir that defined his personal and warm style of leadership and instruction and motivated many students to follow their role model and explore the world of traditional yeshivot in Mir.¹⁰⁷

Among those he inspired was young Herman Naftali Neuberger, who was not formally enrolled at the ILBA but attended some of Weiss’s classes in Würzburg to prepare for the Yeshiva Mir in 1935.

Neuberger immigrated to the United States in March 1938 when the opportunity arose for him through a cousin in Baltimore.¹⁰⁸ Subsequently, he was introduced to the newly founded Ner Israel Rabbinical College in that city, which hired him as a leading administrator. Neuberger was quickly promoted to the top levels of the college’s administration and was referred to as its “executive secretary” in the summer of 1939.¹⁰⁹ Neuberger advanced as a masterful administrator and architect of the college’s infrastructure and growth and was also ordained by the college in 1943.

Personally affected by the refugee crisis, Neuberger understood that the ECAGS was providing funds that could be used to rescue many of his peers from Würzburg and elsewhere in Germany. Like the other leading administrators of American rabbinical seminaries, the young man discussed with the State Department the conditions under which his institution could hire German scholars or invite students to Baltimore. He struggled with the State Department’s lack of recognition for the newly founded and, at the time, still relatively unknown Ner Israel Rabbinical College as an accredited institution of higher learning.¹¹⁰

Ultimately, Neuberger rescued several people, including his former teacher Samson Raphael Weiss and twenty-three students from the ILBA in Würzburg (their immigration is discussed later in this chapter).¹¹¹ To save Weiss, Neuberger applied for two nonquota visas for Weiss and his wife, Leni Carlebach, a student whom Weiss married while he was teaching at ILBA. Weiss arrived at Ner Israel Rabbinical College at the end of 1938 and taught there until 1940. The two-year period of his employment and the fact that he had a nonquota visa suggest that he was hired with help from the ECAGS, which facilitated the distribution of nonquota visas for clergy.

Weiss had been teaching not at a university in Germany but at a teachers’ seminary and therefore, strictly speaking, would not have qualified for this visa. However, in 1936, he was promoted to the position referred to as Studienprofessor. Although this was actually a mere promotion to a teacher in the seminary and not to a full professor at a university, the word “professor” in his documents enhanced his chances to immigrate with a nonquota visa. This situation was quite different from the difficulties experienced by some of the liberal professors of the Lehranstalt and other high-ranking academic institutions, but it demonstrates that the State Department was struggling to understand the German education system and its research and scholarly institutions.¹¹²

Unlike Weiss, who left Ner Israel after his initial two-year contract on the nonquota visa, Herman Naftali Neuberger continued his lifelong career as executive director and later vice president of Ner Israel Rabbinical College and married Ruth Kramer, the sister of Rabbi Ruderman’s wife. During his tenure at the college, Simon Schwab, who found a pulpit at Baltimore’s Shearith Israel congregation, joined the faculty of Ner Israel Rabbinical College as a professor of the Talmud and taught at the Baltimore Beis Yaakov School for Girls. According to Schwab’s account, the support of his congregation and particularly the Strauss family in Baltimore secured a large number of affidavits for Jewish refugees who emigrated from Germany to Baltimore.¹¹³

The Rescue of Rabbinical Students from Central Europe

Besides the rabbinate and (ordained) scholars associated with the four seminaries, the students of these institutions were an essential part of a transatlantic migration. They can be classified into two general groups. The first are those who were enrolled first at German seminaries and then sought to continue their studies in the United States because they felt their prospects were less than promising in Germany, their families had immigrated, or their immigration was organized by the seminaries. The second group is made up of children who emigrated with their parents or family and trained for the rabbinate at the American Jewish seminaries after they came to the United States. For the new immigrants, yeshivot and seminaries that supported students during their studies may have provided a welcome opportunity for their sons to gain access to graduate education and a career in the Jewish world.

Although these people were raised and educated in the United States, their lives were dramatically shaped by their refugee past and by a German-Jewish identity that was still very much alive in their family environment. Recent publications explore the generational belonging of this second generation of refugees, their relationship with the first generation, and the impact of their refugee experience on their work and careers.¹¹⁴ Such scholarship focuses on “historians” and their memories and identities as a group. It is not surprising that this group also includes individuals associated with the history of modern Judaism, the rabbinate, and the Jewish seminaries in the United States because the academic study of history plays an essential role in the interpretation of modern Judaism. This cohort of the last generation of the German rabbinate will be explored in more detail in the following chapters, along with refugee rabbis from Germany.

The most prominent and best-documented transfer of rabbinical students to the United States is the case of the five men who were sent from the Hochschule in Berlin to HUC in Cincinnati in the summer of 1935. The prominence of this case may be related in part to the outstanding careers these students embarked on later in their lives and the way they shaped the American Reform movement in the postwar era. But it may also be rooted in the accessibility of documentation in the American Jewish Archives at HUC in Cincinnati. Conscious of what they owed to the lucky choices they made in 1935 and the opportunities provided by their alma mater, the Hochschule in Berlin, and HUC, these students left records documenting their lives and specifically their rescue that are available in the American Jewish Archives. Therefore, their stories have been well researched.¹¹⁵

Wolli Kaelter, Alfred Wolf, Leo Lichtenberg, Herman Schaalman, and W. Gunther Plaut were selected at the Hochschule for five fellowships to complete their studies in Cincinnati. HUC gave them this opportunity to cover their tuition at the University of Cincinnati, just as the Hochschule had once offered fellowships to students from Cincinnati in the 1920s. The American institution decided to return the favor during the Nazi regime when the Hochschule was experiencing extraordinary pressures; it was a gesture that spoke to the close personal and intellectual relationship these two seminaries had developed since their founding in the 1870s.¹¹⁶

While the fellowship agreement stipulated that the students eventually return to Germany after they completed their degrees and rabbinical ordination, the HUC board of governors farsightedly left open the option for them to stay in the United States if conditions did not permit a return. Two of the five students, Kaelter and Plaut, were selected by Ismar Elbogen¹¹⁷ and Leo Baeck,¹¹⁸ who left three other fellowships open for applications from the student body. The opportunity garnered little interest among students of the Hochschule at the time, even though Elbogen continued to actively urge students to apply.

One of the students Elbogen appealed to was Herman Schaalman, who had no interest initially and little or no understanding of the opportunity a fellowship at HUC offered him. Only after Elbogen had contacted Herman’s father in Munich and emphatically stated that Herman should seize this chance did the student submit an application.¹¹⁹

Wolli Kaelter’s selection was not met with enthusiasm either. His mother, the widow of Rabbi Robert Raphael Kaelter in Danzig, was hesitant but consented when Wolli suggested making a commitment for only one year.¹²⁰

The case was different for Alfred Wolf, who was actively looking for an opportunity to leave Germany and had discussed this option with his parents just when the fellowship announcement was made.¹²¹

Little is known about Leo Lichtenberg, who also joined the group, or Heinz Schneemann, who withdrew his application at the last minute when he, Schaalman, Wolf, and Lichtenberg were forced to decide who would fill the three open positions for students.¹²² The passing of the Nuremberg Laws only a few months later illustrates how lucky this group of men were to have been a “brand plucked from the fire,” as it is described in the literature.¹²³

Their stay in Cincinnati was highly successful, even though they found it hard to adjust to American Jewish standards and forms. Although they stood out as German refugees, they successfully pursued their studies.

By 1939, W. Gunther Plaut, the most advanced among the students, was already ordained. Kaelter and Lichtenberg followed, with ordination in 1940, as did Schaalman and Wolf in 1941.

In the summers of 1936 and 1937, Schaalman, Kaelter, Wolf, and Plaut were able to return to Germany. They consulted with their families about their futures because their temporary residence in the United States allowed them to save their families through immigration at a time when immigration to the United States based on a strict national quota system was almost impossible. Plaut was able to bring over his seven-year-younger brother, Walter, to study at Franklin and Marshall College starting in 1937.

Wolli Kaelter, Alfred Wolf, and Herman Schaalman also visited their parents and friends, even at the risk of not being allowed to return to the United States from their summer vacations in Germany.¹²⁴

Wolli Kaelter applied for American citizenship during a visit to Germany in the summer of 1936. While he was in Danzig, press reports on German politics alerted his fellow HUC student and friend Lou Silberman, whose family had originally come from Wreschen, Germany. Silverman’s family provided the necessary affidavit for citizenship for Kaelter, who could then sponsor his mother and brother Hans.¹²⁵

In 1938, W. Gunther Plaut and Herman Schaalman traveled from Cincinnati to Havana, Cuba, where arrangements for their necessary “change of status” had been made. Like other students and exchange visitors who came to the United States on a temporary visa, they knew that this document would not permit them to take out “first papers”; that is, to apply for citizenship and sponsor family members to follow them. Accordingly, they sought to change their visa status to that of legal permanent residency, which would allow them to file first papers for American citizenship so they could stay permanently and then initiate the process of sponsoring their family members as immigrants to the United States. For that purpose, they had to leave the United States. Since going back to Germany in 1938 was too dangerous and the US consulates were flooded with Jews applying for immigration visas, they decided to travel to Cuba via Miami to apply for permanent resident status.

The “band of five” were not the only students to arrive in Cincinnati from Germany. In 1936, Ernst Lorge, a student at an early stage of his studies at the Hochschule in Berlin, was awarded a fellowship by the United Jewish Youth Movement to continue his education in the United States. Lorge had been exploring several venues for coming to the United States and had been in touch with the National Committee in Aid of Jewish Ministers to see whether he could be enrolled at the JTS in 1935.

Cecilia Razovsky’s correspondence with the JTS on his behalf¹²⁶ highlighted the problem posed by his lack of an American bachelor of arts, the degree required to enter the JTS, and expressed concern about his proficiency in English; therefore, his application was rejected.¹²⁷ Lorge was nineteen at the time. Although he only had the German degree of Abitur, he was able to eventually enroll at the University of Cincinnati and HUC, where he quickly earned a bachelor of arts degree before moving on to graduate studies and finally graduating in 1942 with a Master of Hebrew Letters. HUC continued his initial fellowship from the World Student Service with a fellowship from the college, and he was ordained shortly after he graduated in 1942. Lorge also managed to help his parents join him in the United States.¹²⁸

HUC extended special guidance and empathy to these young men and their family members, some of whom were well known to the college faculty because the fathers were also rabbis and no strangers to the college leadership. For example, Lorge’s father, Moritz, was a graduate of the Hochschule and had been a district rabbi of Sobernheim near Bad Kreuznach, a fact mentioned in a communication from Julian Morgenstern on the colleges’ responsibilities toward refugee students.¹²⁹

In the spring of 1938, shortly after the annexation of Austria with its dramatic impact on the Jewish community of Vienna, Samuel Krauss, professor at the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna, received an offer from HUC for two fellowships for Austrian students.¹³⁰ The students were Joshua Haberman (Habermann) of Vienna and Nachum Norbert Müller. Since Müller was denied a visa to the United States for unknown reasons and therefore could not accept the fellowship, another student was nominated, David Lanner. Lanner also had to decline from participating in the program because of his advanced status as a student. It is unclear if a substitute was ever nominated to replace him.¹³¹

The generosity HUC offered to central European students dramatically changed the ethnic composition of its student body, of which 15 percent were German-speaking students. But they were not the last refugee students to come to this campus, even though Julian Morgenstern in 1938 noted the college’s intention to halt the enrollment and support of refugee students for a few years before the next arrivals.¹³²

A second group of former students of the Hochschule arrived in 1941 and included Ernst Conrad, Walter Plaut (younger brother of W. Gunther Plaut), Nathan Peter Lewinski (Levinson), and Steven Schwarzschild.

Ernst Conrad lost his father, a liberal rabbi, at age eight and had been placed in an orphanage as a teenager while his mother worked as a matron at a Jewish home for the elderly. He arrived in Cincinnati early in 1939 without any family. His admission seems to have been part of a decision to extend special support to the son of a colleague who deserved special assistance within the larger college family. Conrad had been studying at the Hochschule since 1938 and left Berlin after the Kristallnacht pogrom of 9 November and the resulting closure of the Hochschule. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Cincinnati and HUC and was ordained as a rabbi of the American Reform movement.¹³³

The next arrivals were Walter Plaut and Nathan Peter Lewinsky, who changed his name to Levinson after arriving in the United States. Levinson had been one of the last students of the Hochschule before he left Berlin with his parents on an unusual path via Siberia early in 1941 and entered the United States in Seattle, Washington, on 18 April 1941.¹³⁴ While he initially tried to gain admittance to the JTS in New York, where the family settled, he—like many German students—struggled with the seminary’s admission regulations, which required a BA. Since he did not yet possess a bachelor’s degree, he could not be accepted into the program in New York. His plans to study for the rabbinate were finally realized after his mother found out that a seminary in Cincinnati, HUC, admitted students without a bachelor of arts degree due to the pressures imposed on the college by the general draft.¹³⁵ In the fall of 1941, Nathan started his studies on the campus of HUC, where he graduated in 1948 shortly after Walter Plaut, who was ordained in 1947.¹³⁶

Steven Schwarzschild, who also attended classes at the Hochschule in Berlin in the 1930s and had to hastily leave the city after Kristallnacht in early January 1939, arrived in New York City in the spring of 1939, where he first attended American high school to earn the necessary diploma. With this document, he was admitted to HUC in Cincinnati to continue his studies for the rabbinate. He was ordained in 1948.¹³⁷

Two other young men who began studying for the rabbinate before departing from Europe found their way to HUC, both under difficult circumstances and somewhat delayed plans. Wolfgang Hamburger, whose mother was not Jewish, was among the last students of Leo Baeck in Berlin and was ordered to forced labor in 1941. With the support of his mother, he followed Baeck’s advice to leave the capital of Berlin and hide in Stettin, a small town on the Baltic coast. There Hamburger managed to survive until liberation in 1945. He was among the first Jewish preachers in postwar Berlin and enrolled as a student at the reopened Humboldt University in 1946. The following year, he left Berlin for the United States where he continued his studies at HUC and the University of Cincinnati. He graduated and was ordained in 1952.¹³⁸

Joseph Ansbacher was born in Heilbronn and raised in an Orthodox family with a father who served as an Orthodox rabbi in Wiesbaden. In 1939, he and his parents left Germany for Britain. While living in London, he attended Etz Chaim Yeshiva and the London School for Jewish studies, where he was ordained. In 1940, he was interned to Australia on the ship Dunera and served throughout the war in the Australian Army as a chaplain.¹³⁹ Immediately after the war ended, he traveled to London to visit his parents, who had stayed there throughout the war. It was during this visit that he met Leo Baeck, who recruited him for a special mission in the rabbinate and an exploratory trip to Germany in 1946 for the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) and acquainted him with HUC in Cincinnati. Although Ansbacher had an Orthodox training and family background, these intense experiences in the war and postwar era and the encounter with Baeck motivated him to seek a future in the liberal rabbinate. He relocated permanently to the United States via England and eventually arrived in Cincinnati to attend HUC in 1947. At that time, Ansbacher changed his name to Asher.¹⁴⁰

Like HUC, the JTS was challenged by the volume of applications for fellowships to the rabbinate from German students. It was also contacted by the ECAGS about placing students there who sought the opportunities offered in the United States. As a result, the seminary appointed Rabbi Herbert Parzen as chairman of the Committee in Aid of Foreign Students of the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative rabbinical organization.

Unlike the Reform movement, which had a robust connection with Germany historically, the Conservative movement was more conscious and skeptical of the cultural differences between the German and the American rabbinate. Therefore, the seminary suggested and sometimes explicitly demanded that already ordained and established German rabbis undergo additional qualifications for the American rabbinate before being placed in an American synagogue. Preparations included taking additional classes in homiletics (the art of preaching or delivering sermons), which was a key qualification in the modern rabbinate where expectations differed considerably between German and American congregations. Younger graduates were sometimes required to earn an American doctorate in divinity to have long-term prospects in the American rabbinate. The minutes of JTS faculty meetings note that Rabbis Ernst Appel, Leo Ginsburg, and Oscar Adler, all established rabbis in Germany, were attending additional homiletics classes at the JTS.¹⁴¹

By 1937, the seminary was accommodating several students from Germany, including Bert Woythaler. Woythaler was originally from Danzig and had studied a few semesters at the Hochschule in Berlin before he immigrated to the United States in 1936. His enrollment at the JTS may have been arranged through the Hochschule, where his advanced Jewish training distinguished him from his peers. He had been privately tutored, which may have qualified him to continue studying at the JTS. The administration obviously found a way to bypass his lack of a bachelor of arts degree.¹⁴² Among others who applied for admission in 1937 were Hans Lewkowitz, a student at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, and Leon Wind, originally from Turka in Poland.¹⁴³

The Refugee Students as a Challenge for the Seminaries in Cincinnati and New York

All German and other European students encountered serious admission problems at the JTS because the school considered itself a graduate institution and therefore required a bachelor of arts degree from its applicants. Since neither that degree nor an equivalent existed in the German (and many other central European) university system at the time, European refugee students could not be admitted to the JTS in a timely or simple manner.¹⁴⁴ To evaluate its applicants’ qualifications, the JTS had them take an examination prepared in New York and administered by the students’ European professors or teachers abroad. In Breslau, professor Isaak Heinemann, faculty chairman of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar, performed this task for students from the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar; Rabbi Lewin of Turka did so for Polish student Leon Wind.¹⁴⁵

These were the circumstances under which not only Leon Wind but also Manfred Rösel (born in 1916 to Isaak Rösel, rabbi of Tilsit) and Helmut Galliner (born in 1910 to Rabbi Julius Galliner of Berlin) were admitted. Galliner had made an exploratory trip to New York in 1937 and seized the opportunities offered by his father’s close relationship with the seminary in New York.¹⁴⁶ He applied to the rabbinical school at the JTS, although he had not pursued this career and never intended to become a rabbi. In November 1937, he was admitted to the JTS as a “special student.”¹⁴⁷ This was the preliminary status of most refugees because the JTS felt they needed special preparation for a successful career in the American rabbinate, meaning special language training and courses to help them understand their future role as rabbis in the United States. By January 1938, however, Galliner asked to be admitted as a regular student, a move that was rejected and that complicated matters between him and the seminary.¹⁴⁸

While the JTS seemed more hesitant to admit refugee students in the mid-1930s, the faculty minutes show that by 1938, the applications of German and other European students dominated the meeting discussions. The faculty repeatedly tried to obtain solid information on the applicants before they considered their applications or even permitted them to take the admissions test.¹⁴⁹

Early in 1938, German-born and German-trained chief librarian Alexander Marx, who had many contacts in Germany, presented the applications of three German students at the JTS in New York:¹⁵⁰ Ernst Blau, who had been teaching a course on library research with Abraham Heschel in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus;¹⁵¹ Reinhold Herz, a rabbinical candidate from Speyer who had experienced humiliation and degradation by Nazi authorities since 1933;¹⁵² and Hans Grunewald.¹⁵³ The growing number of applications overburdened the seminary, and the faculty rejected Blau because it was felt that he would not be able to pass the entrance exams. Consideration of Grunewald’s application was made dependent on an admittance test.¹⁵⁴

In Europe, German Jews desperately tried to exploit the loophole that a nonquota visa presented for their youth. Even Leo Baeck intervened on behalf of two students who had just completed their Abitur and only planned a career in the rabbinate. But even his vocal support was rejected at the JTS because neither student met the formal qualifications, such as a bachelor of arts degree.¹⁵⁵ In May 1938, Sigmund Szobel, a former student of the Orthodox Rabbinerseminar in Berlin, arrived in New York to continue his studies at the JTS. His application was facilitated because of his depth of traditional Jewish knowledge and a brother who sponsored him.¹⁵⁶

The admission policies of the JTS were strict and did not reflect the empathy and transnational sense of “family” directed toward European students at HUC at this time. From 1938 on, the JTS faculty minutes indicate a growing number of rejections. Among them were the applications of Rabbi Egon Loewenstein, who had traveled as far as Chile, and an advanced student from Breslau named Franz Rosenthal, who also studied at the Charles University of Prague.¹⁵⁷ The wave of applications from students in central Europe kept the JTS busy and raised questions of admittance and rejection that the seminary tried to coordinate with other institutions of Jewish higher learning in the country. In May 1938, the minutes show that a request was made to explore whether the other seminaries had developed a formal policy regarding the admission of German students, who were flooding the rabbinical schools with their applications.¹⁵⁸ By June 1938, the faculty meeting decided to inform nine pending foreign applicants “that the Seminary cannot at present consider the admission of any more foreign students,” including Dr. Oscar Adler,¹⁵⁹ Dr. Asher Bombach, Hans Lewkowitz from Breslau, Jakob Stahl, Karl Weiner,¹⁶⁰ Dr. Hermann Reinitz, Dr. Josef Babad (community rabbi of Vienna), David Lanner, and Nachum N. Müller (these last two students of the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna who had been previous candidates for HUC).¹⁶¹

By the late fall of 1938 but before the pogrom of 9 November, Gertrude Adelstein, secretary of the JIR, voiced her concerns over the growing number of applications from Germany and Austria that were overwhelming HUC and JIR and over the future job prospects of the graduates, if admitted. She explained that the college had not presented a definite policy on refugee students due to the complexity of their cases and underscored that HUC felt it should consider each case on its own merits rather than develop a rigid and perhaps unsuitable general policy that might not be in the best interest of each student.¹⁶² Yeshiva College did not respond to these concerns, and no respective communication was preserved, so we do not know what attitudes dominated the admission policies in the largest of the Orthodox seminaries at the time.¹⁶³

In June 1938, the JTS faculty admitted Rabbis Solomon Geld of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau and Kurt Klappholz of the Rabbinerseminar in Berlin as postgraduate candidates for a Doctorate of Hebrew Letters (DHL) at the JTS in New York. The faculty once again stressed that graduates of German seminaries would be admitted not as regular students but as “special students.” The application of Dr. Alexander Scheiber of Budapest was rejected, as was that of Dr. Hermann Reinitz. Reinitz had been admitted ten years earlier but turned down the opportunity, which was considered a mark against him in 1938.¹⁶⁴ Rabbi Curt Arndt’s application was referred directly to the provost, Louis Finkelstein.

Arndt’s story highlights the difficulties faced by applicants who were officially admitted and should have had easy access to a nonquota visa. With little to no support from officials because he had left his peers in Germany and studied in Italy, Arndt corresponded with Louis Finkelstein for more than four years about his immigration to the United States.

Arndt was born in Germany and began his rabbinical studies there, but he left Germany after the Nazi government came into power. He completed his studies at the Collegio Rabbinico in Rome. Late in 1938, after the formation of the German-Italian Axis, Arndt was under increasing pressure to leave Italy quickly. But where could he go? He certainly could not return to Germany. While he was desperately exploring possibilities to be accepted as a regular student by the JTS and to obtain a nonquota visa to continue his career in the United States, the JTS issued him a statement that should have allowed him to apply for a nonquota visa in Italy in December 1938. The American consulate in Naples, however, informed him that he had to wait “his turn” in accordance with quota limitations. Not only was this inaccurate information, (Arndt had already been admitted to the JTS and was applying for a nonquota visa) staying in Italy put his life at risk.

In early 1940, Arndt’s letters appeared among the correspondence of Louis Finkelstein. He explained that he relocated to Bournemouth, England, because of the consular information from Naples and his precarious situation in Italy. He was staying with a relative there and working through the US consulate in London to obtain his visa. The correspondence stops until later in 1940 when Arndt’s letters reappear in the Finkelstein correspondence.

At this time, he was an inmate of a Canadian internment camp in Ottawa just across the New York state border. Although the camp was close to the US border, it was impossible to make the crossing due to immigration restrictions. Finkelstein patiently continued the correspondence, but Arndt could not understand why his admission at the JTS would not remain valid for three years and that the outbreak of the Second World War had changed the situation regarding the seminary and his position. Arndt never received the nonquota visa.

With the help of Alexander Burnstein and the National Committee in Aid of Jewish Ministers, he was finally released from the internment camp in May 1942. It had been a painful experience for an observant Jew, and he eventually found employment as a rabbi at the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue in Montreal, a position that improved his situation and reinstituted him as a rabbi.¹⁶⁵

Arndt’s formal admission was recorded in the faculty minutes of 23 November 1938 along with the admissions of Werner Lampel¹⁶⁶ and Heinrich Kraus¹⁶⁷ as special-status students. Kraus’s brother was prepared to support him, but none of these men ever arrived at the JTS. Multiple factors may have contributed to their decision not to pursue careers in the United States. In Arndt’s case, tragic historical circumstances and an uninformed or unwilling consular officer who blocked Arndt’s emigration from Italy led to his change of plans.

There might have been other reasons why these students never arrived at the seminary in New York City. The high volume of applications and unused admissions suggest that the seminaries and students in Germany and Austria knew that the opportunities offered by nonquota visas for students of American seminaries could expedite their plans to leave Germany, but they applied at multiple institutions and might have had a variety of preferences and options, or their plans did not materialize for personal, financial, or administrative reasons.

Sometimes, the reasons were dramatic, as in the case of Rabbi Fritz Kempner. He was considered for admission in January 1939, but his application was forwarded to Alexander Burnstein for his advice because Kempner either had a degree or was close to completing one. This extra consideration stalled the process. In the meantime, Kempner continued to officiate at the synagogue on Heylstrasse in Berlin-Schöneberg until 1942. He never made it to the United States. His biographical record shows that he was deported to Auschwitz on 29 November 1942.¹⁶⁸

Even those who had faced harrowing situations experienced rejection. Luitpold Wallach, a recent graduate of the Hochschule, had been arrested in Dachau after Kristallnacht. His admission to earn a DHL at the JTS was rejected.¹⁶⁹ He subsequently applied successfully for a visa as a community rabbi, led several American congregations until 1948, and then switched to an academic career and became a successful medievalist.¹⁷⁰

While the college almost categorically rejected applications from foreign students and graduates from mid-1938 to 1939, it did admit two candidates on 15 May 1940: Elihu Kushelevsky and Julius Eidenbaum.¹⁷¹ These two men were probably the last students admitted by the seminary before the war and the onset of the Holocaust prevented Jews from emigrating from central Europe.

A closer look at the admissions and graduation charts of German seminaries and the faculty minutes of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau suggest that after 1935/36, German seminaries understood that the opportunities for their students in Germany were decreasing, despite the fact that rabbis were urgently needed. After the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, faculty and seminary leadership explored alternatives for their students abroad, even though these students were not prepared for the US environment and did not recognize American Judaism as a developed Jewish culture.

An essential problem for students of modern Jewish Wissenschaft was that fewer and fewer of them could complete their doctorates at German universities. Even though the seminaries gradually dropped the PhD as a prerequisite for ordination, these young men felt incomplete as modern rabbis without this qualification because the degree was part of their professional ethos.

Several of them may have followed Harry May’s example and traveled to German-speaking universities outside of Germany, such as in Prague, to complete their degrees. After studying for ten semesters at the JTS in Breslau, Harry May could not continue his secular studies due to the restrictions from the Nuremberg Laws.¹⁷² One solution would be to continue his work at the Charles University in Prague, but if May completed his PhD there, he would not be allowed to return to Germany—especially to Breslau—to finish his rabbinical studies. A similarly modern Jewish seminary did not exist in Prague.

In August 1938, he applied for admission to the JTS in New York and was supported by the local HICEM office, a global Jewish aid organization.¹⁷³ He was also backed by a number of influential friends such as Dora Magnus, sister-in-law of Max Warburg, and Elisha Friedman.¹⁷⁴ Friedman warmly spoke on his behalf to the college leadership, stressing his qualities and potential as a rabbi.¹⁷⁵

Cyrus Adler responded to May’s request for admission by stating that many (young) men were seeking refuge under the wings of the JTS in New York and their number was growing due to the increasing Nazi terror in Czechoslovakia and Italy. Willing to provide aid but keenly aware of the limited means available to a college that could not predict the number of refugees hoping for admission, Adler concluded that only a small number of applicants could be admitted. However, he also mentioned the increasing efforts to work with the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany (NCC)¹⁷⁶ and the British Chief Rabbi to provide refuge to rabbis fleeing central Europe and place them in English-speaking countries.¹⁷⁷ In September 1938, Harry May received an answer from Joseph B. Abrahams of the JTS referring him to the Rabbinical Assembly Committee in Aid of Foreign Students led by Rabbi Herbert Parzen, who successfully obtained May’s visa and placement. By 1941, May was a rabbi in Sedalia, Missouri, near his brother-in-law Rabbi Karl Richter, who had found a pulpit in Springfield, Missouri.¹⁷⁸

While the JTS leadership was aware of the language and acculturation problems of the refugee students who flocked to the seminary from central Europe, it was obvious that these problems could usually be fixed by thorough training or retraining provided by the seminary.

One student, however, was in a class by himself when it came to misusing the loophole the nonquota visas provided to rabbinical students. Helmut Galliner was the son of Julius Galliner, a prominent Berlin rabbi and scholar who belonged to the Berlin Jewish establishment. On a trip to New York in 1937, Helmut explored the possibilities for immigration and contacted the JTS. Encouraged by his father and able to use his name to open doors, Helmut applied at the JTS in October 1937 as a “special student” to the rabbinate for the study of Hebrew, Jewish literature, and history—yet all he really wanted to do was complete his training as a librarian, which he had begun in Berlin.¹⁷⁹ Hoping that he could benefit from the ability to receive foreign currency transfers from Germany, work part-time in the college library, and live reasonably in the dormitory, Galliner was admitted as a special student on 19 November 1937. He was expected to take courses on the Talmud, the Bible, Hebrew, the Midrash, and other subjects.

At this point, he asked to be admitted as a regular student rather than a special one and was told by Louis Finkelstein that this decision would be made after his first semester.¹⁸⁰ The JTS offered him a scholarship for room and board in the dormitory of the seminary,¹⁸¹ and Galliner proceeded to submit these materials for a visa application at the American consulate in Berlin. On 15 December 1937, the consulate informed him that to receive a nonquota visa, he must be admitted as a “regular student,” and the college was to specify the contributions it made to him with its “scholarship.”¹⁸²

On 29 December 1937, Louis Finkelstein presented a new letter to Galliner, confirming that Galliner had been admitted, detailing what the scholarship covered, and explaining that only after the first semester would the college faculty make a decision on Galliner’s status and whether he could be a candidate for the rabbinate and advance to the status of “regular student.”¹⁸³ With the hasty intervention of Ismar Elbogen, who was still at the Hochschule in Berlin, and Eugen Mittwoch, who sent a cable to Louis Finkelstein¹⁸⁴ underscoring the urgency of the matter and suggesting that Alexander Sperber at the JTS could provide more information on the applicant,¹⁸⁵ the seminary finally admitted Galliner as a “regular student.”¹⁸⁶

Galliner arrived in New York City on the Queen Mary in March 1938 with a nonquota visa for one year. Since this visa did not grant him permanent immigration status, Galliner, like many others, traveled to Havana, Cuba, in November 1938 to apply for a permanent visa for the United States. To facilitate the process, he received a loan from the seminary¹⁸⁷ and help from Joseph Abrahams, Louis Finkelstein’s secretary, who referred him to some relatives in Havana. But in February 1939, Finkelstein complained about Galliner. Although he had been admitted as a regular student and was expected to study for the rabbinate, it was reported that Galliner was not attending any courses and seemed to be disinterested in the rabbinical profession. Louis Finkelstein was quite upset and vocal about what he thought should be done: even if Galliner chose to attend his courses, he should not be permitted to do so under the current conditions. Finkelstein suggested to Cyrus Adler that he put Galliner on the payroll of the library instead.¹⁸⁸

Cyrus Adler approved the cancellation of Galliner’s scholarship, and one week later, Alexander Marx announced that Galliner had returned from Havana and resumed work in the library with the understanding that this position would allow him free room and board in the dormitory.¹⁸⁹ The new regulation forced Galliner to work forty hours a week for his room and board and put him under quite a bit of financial pressure.

In April 1939, he again explored his status at the JTS but was informed that since he was a permanent resident of the United States, he would be required to work for his room and board.¹⁹⁰ By this time, Marx intervened on Galliner’s behalf because he felt the punishment by the seminary’s leadership went too far and put Galliner under impossible financial pressure during the summer when the college did not provide food.¹⁹¹ This interference once again forced the seminary to provide small subsidies to Galliner.

The tension culminated early in 1940 when Galliner wrote a letter to Finkelstein stating that he no longer considered himself to be a student of bibliography, expressing his conviction that he had advanced to the level of a full-time staff member under Alexander Marx, and requesting a salary adequate to this position.¹⁹² In March 1940, Finkelstein answered Galliner to clarify his status at the seminary, once again underscoring the unpleasant relationship Galliner had with the seminary.

First, Finkelstein offered to reconsider his status as a student should Galliner be willing to continue his studies for the rabbinate. Second, Finkelstein clarified how unrealistic Galliner’s hope was to eventually be offered a permanent position in the library and advised him to make other plans for his career. By offering his assistance in discussing Galliner’s options, Finkelstein took on the role of a concerned father figure, pushed the young man to move forward with his life, and once again offered Galliner one last scholarship, if only to help him support himself.¹⁹³

It is unclear who provided the funds for this final scholarship for Helmut Galliner in his last year at the seminary in the academic year 1941–42, but the extensive communication between Louis Finkelstein and Frieda Schiff Warburg suggests that she may have done so, just as she previously supported the seminary’s efforts to save German refugee rabbis and students. Finkelstein made it very clear to Galliner that he was to use this last year of support to leave the college and provide for himself in the future.¹⁹⁴

Soon after that exchange, Galliner found employment contributing to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, but the salary was so small that he could not afford housing. He struck a deal with the JTS that allowed him to pay a low rent to live in the dormitory until 7 June 1942.¹⁹⁵ It was not until September 1942 that Helmut Galliner removed his belongings from the dormitory and moved on to another institution.¹⁹⁶

Unlike other American seminaries, Yeshiva University was likely not part of the larger initiative to admit German students during the prewar years. One reason may have been the strained financial situation of the newly emerging academic institution and its RIETS after the Depression years. Due to missing records in Yeshiva University’s archives in the admissions department, its registrar’s Hartstein Collection, and the Bernard Revel papers, information on the applications and acceptance of students from Germany is sparse. Other sources do, however, indicate how hesitant the institution was toward modern German Orthodoxy for ideological reasons. The Rabbinerseminar reached out to colleagues in New York to find ways and means for an organized transfer of faculty and students in 1938, but this attempt failed.¹⁹⁷ Even though former students and faculty managed to immigrate to the United States, few of them benefited from a nonquota visa obtained by Yeshiva University, which would have facilitated direct immigration to the United States. Instead, it seems that some of them were ordained so they could obtain a nonquota visa as a rabbi (Alfred Jacobs, Max Kapustin, Kurt Klappholz, Eric Löwenthal).

A high percentage of the former students of the Rabbinerseminar who could be identified for this study came to the United States only after they had found preliminary refuge either in Great Britain on the emergency visa of the Religious Emergency Council of the Chief Rabbi (Immanuel Lewy, Victor Moses Shulwass, Ephraim Carlebach, and Joseph Hirsch Dünner) or had relocated to the United States from Palestine after a short stay there (Hermann Dicker).

Finally, some were admitted by the JTS in New York, as was the case for Sigmund Szobel; others turned to the Conservative movement for a future in the rabbinate, reflecting a trend that was also noticeable in the placement of modern Orthodox rabbis from Germany: the modernity of the German Orthodox movement had a hard time fitting into prevailing American Orthodox congregations for reasons of religious outlook and ethnic background, which often did not match the community’s expectations and preferences. Therefore, some of the students and young rabbis found a new home with a Jewish training that was considered an advantage in the Conservative movement of American Judaism.

Unlike German-trained rabbis in the Orthodox spectrum, a second generation of German refugee students, those who fled as children and grew up in the United States, found a home and intellectual and financial support at Yeshiva University, which prepared the way for their academic careers. This group includes such people as Leon Feldman, Walter Würzburger, Manfred Fulda, and Ib Nathan Bamberger. Their numbers and names have not yet been researched in the university’s histories,¹⁹⁸ but a thorough study of who and how many of the postwar students at RIETS came from German refugee families would be revealing. A closer look at smaller yeshivot, such as Yeshiva Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn as well as other local yeshivot regarding the admittance of German refugee students would also be helpful and is an area that has been overlooked because it was thought that no contact existed with modern German Orthodoxy.

These institutions, however, hired German scholars like Joseph Breuer, educated a number of young German refugees for the rabbinate, and provided an education for the sons of economically challenged refugee families who qualified for a career in Jewish organizations, like Henry Siegman—despite his controversial attitude toward parts of the community later as president of the American Jewish Congress.¹⁹⁹

Hans Steidle’s work on Jakob Stoll and the last years of the ILBA in Würzburg²⁰⁰ reveals that the institution’s director, Jacob Stoll, presented invitations from the Mesifta Talmudical Seminary in New York to a number of students who were arrested during the pogrom night of 9 November 1938 and detained in Dachau. While it is unconfirmed that these students could have used that invitation to escape, it is clear that this Orthodox community nonetheless had its own channels to facilitate its students’ emigrations.

The ILBA’s most important US contact was young Herman Neuberger at Ner Israel College in Baltimore, who exploited the potential of the nonquota visas for students and brought many of his former fellow students at the ILBA to Ner Israel. Several of them were later ordained as rabbis. Among them were Eric Levi, Jacob Wiener, Avraham Zentman, Meir Steinharter, Hans Ney, Irwin Mayer, Ludwig Fleishman, Naftali Henry Carlebach, Ernst Neumann, Lou Steinhouser, Ludwig Bodenheimer, and Ib Nathan Bamberger, a great-grandson of Seligman Baer Bamberger. Ib Nathan arrived at Ner Israel after his family had managed to survive in Denmark and Sweden. He went on to continue his studies at RIETS of Yeshiva University.²⁰¹

“‘א גרופּע דייטשע ישיבה בחורים אין דער באלטימאָרער ישיבת ‚נר ישראל.” Jewish American, Family Magazine and Gazette 37, no. 36 (7 July 1939): 1. Yeshiva University, Gottesman Library, Special Collections, courtesy of Shulamith Berger.