FIVE

Careers Lost and Found

Paths of Professional Success and Failure and the Making of the “Last Generation of the German Rabbinate”

Working toward their professional future and thinking ahead were essential for the refugee rabbis, but it was their history and the trauma of their experiences that crystallized as an important factor that drove the future of many of them. None could forget the persecution they had experienced; the loss of family, friends, and congregants; their physical and cultural home; and the destruction of European Jewry resulting from the Nazi war against the Jews. They were grappling with the fact that the Holocaust and their people’s annihilation had started in Germany, the country and culture they had called home and had been so proud to embrace.

Modern Judaism was a product of Judaism’s profound encounter with German culture, which deeply affected modern Judaism’s and German culture’s Jewish identities. Every effort to build new lives and careers reminded them of their cultural differences, what they had left behind, the former seminaries or the Lehrhaus movement as centers of a world lost to them, and of a collective identity as modern “German” rabbis that had been shattered.

Displacement, Trauma, and Exploring the Chances for a Future of the German-Jewish Past after the Holocaust

This sense of trauma and loss was especially apparent among students at the Hebrew Union College (HUC), where the refugees had a unique presence and place, yet it resonated in the Reform movement more than anywhere else. None of the other American Jewish religious movements was tied as closely to the German-Jewish tradition, which had its own past and identity. As the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust revealed the full extent of the destruction of European Jewry, it became even more apparent that these refugees were the last of a special group: those who were to write the final chapter of the German rabbinate, German Judaism, and Wissenschaft, and who would take a uniquely modern approach to Judaism.

Historian Ismar Elbogen was aware of the historicity and paradigm shift of the time and his students’ role as standard-bearers of their tradition therein. Just before his untimely death on 1 August 1943, Elbogen had contributed an article titled “American Jewish Scholarship” to the American Jewish Yearbook on the centennial of Kaufmann Kohler’s birth.¹ Elbogen did not live to see its publication. The article was a written legacy to his fellow refugees, American colleagues, and friends at HUC.

In the article, he stressed how modern Jewish scholarship in Germany and the United States had long been intertwined and how they had developed a unique transnational symbiotic relationship in which people such as the German-born Kaufmann Kohler, former president of HUC, played a critical, creative, and inspiring role. This fruitful relationship, he supposed, had been extinguished by recent history. The noted Jewish historian postulated that Nazism and the Shoah² had changed what was to be the center and periphery of modern Jewish scholarship. The relationship depended solely on regeneration from within American Jewry because its European counterpart had ceased to exist. His article reads like a testament to his colleagues and friends and especially to the younger refugees, whom he called on to serve as the last representatives of this European tradition:

“Heinrich Heine aptly said that the Jew had a portable fatherland. Wherever the Jew migrated, he carried with him his spiritual heritage. Different countries at different periods of Jewish history have held the hegemony in Jewish studies. During the past fifty years, the mantle of Elijah has fallen on the United States. America was fast becoming a center of Jewish scholarship, and within the past decade it has become the sole center—with the exception of Palestine.”³

He ended by writing:

Soon Nazi brutality in Central and Western Europe compelled a goodly number of Jewish scholars to seek refuge in the United States. Their knowledge, expertness and scientific method will, given an opportunity, become real assets to American Jewish scholarship. . . . We are at the end. Our survey shows that from what small beginnings Jewish scholarship in America has developed. The growth has been rapid, even great. . . . For until recently American Jewry has had a constant influx of intellectual forces from Europe. This reservoir is now destroyed. American Jewry will henceforth have to produce native scholars of its own.⁴

Leo Baeck’s Global Leadership and the Remnants of His Students

Like Elbogen, Rabbi Leo Baeck, who survived years in the ghetto of Theresienstadt and was the intellectual and moral leader of the modern German rabbinate, worried about the future of modern Judaism and the German-Jewish tradition. Baeck settled in Great Britain, where a few of his former students and sectors of the refugee community reassembled around this iconic figure and the project to reestablish a liberal institution of higher learning in the form of the Jewish Theological College in London, the precursor of the Leo Baeck College.⁵ However, Baeck knew that it was primarily the American rabbinical colleges, especially HUC, that could successfully preserve this tradition.⁶ German Jewry had been destroyed, but Baeck hoped that the émigrés might uphold, develop, and even revive its spirit, dedication to humanity, and messianic hope.⁷

From 1948, Baeck worked from November to April at HUC in Cincinnati to complete Dieses Volk (This People), a manuscript he had begun before his deportation. He was also teaching a two-hour seminar. Most of the attendees were his former German students, but a few of them were Americans. The latter struggled to understand his English and references to Greek and Latin sources and histories as most of them were not as familiar with classical texts as the Europeans.

Among the students interested in attending Baeck’s lectures was Albert Friedlander, with whom Baeck had developed a personal relationship and shared the hope that the German Jews who had found a new home in the United States might revive the spirit of German Jewry and bring their European traditions back to life in the dynamic American environment.⁸

Besides Friedlander, who translated Baeck’s Dieses Volk into English and made his teacher’s words available to a new audience, there were many former Germans on campus, such as Joseph Asher, Ernst Conrad, Wolfgang Hamburger, Robert Lehman, Jakob Petuchowski, Alexander Schindler, Nathan Peter Levinson, and Steven Schwarzschild.

The significance of these young men to the future of modern Judaism and their role in the work of Baeck and other leaders of progressive Judaism is apparent when one considers that three of them were selected to be among the first liberal Jews to return to Germany for the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ), starting with Joseph Asher’s six-week trip in 1947.

Leo Baeck with students on the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College, ca. 1952: AJA, pc0212.07.

After Asher returned with a detailed report on the situation and needs of the communities, Steven Schwarzschild was sent to officiate as a liberal rabbi in Berlin from 1948 to 1950. At that time, Nathan Peter Levinson took over the liberal rabbinate there and focused on the situation of Jews and the prospects for liberal Judaism in Germany. In addition to Lily Montagu and Julian Morgenstern, Baeck, as president of the WUPJ, helped select this group of young men for these exploratory missions, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6.⁹

The influence of Leo Baeck and his connection to the refugees, the social fabric of their lives, and their communications defined these men as a special group inspired by a distinct memory and legacy. Even though Baeck’s reunions with his former students were quiet, reserved, and even seemingly impersonal encounters at a glance, Baeck’s survival and presence were enormously important to this group. Just how meaningful and emotional these encounters with their former teacher from Berlin were is illustrated in descriptions by former students and their biographers.

One example is a recollection from young Abraham Joshua Heschel, who called Baeck at his New York hotel during one of Baeck’s annual visits to the United States. Yet even after all the years that he had heard his former teacher speak on the phone, this time, Heschel was speechless; he simply lost the ability to talk. He was overwhelmed to hear this voice from the past and to realize that Baeck’s reappearance, his survival, and once again his availability to his former students built a bridge from that past to the present. The questions uppermost in Heschel’s mind about Baeck’s survival, his arrest in Theresienstadt, and the last days of the Hochschule in Berlin went unspoken but were keenly sensed by Baeck, who mastered the situation by complimenting Heschel on an article on the essence of prayer that Heschel had authored. Summarizing his plight in the ghetto with unexpected grace, Baeck stressed how important this work had been to him during his time in Theresienstadt.¹⁰

Nathan Peter Levinson described a similar scene that took place in 1947 at the Hotel Commodore next to Grand Central Station in New York. He and Wolfgang Hamburger had taken a long train ride from Cincinnati to New York to welcome their teacher on his first postliberation visit to the United States. At this reunion, the two former students felt incredibly moved to once again be in the presence of a man who had never lost his dignity, warmth, or genuine interest in those close to him and had never complained about his fate.¹¹

Baeck returned to Berlin for his first postwar visit in 1951. Levinson, who at that time had a pulpit in the city, picked up the former leader of German Jewry at Tempelhof Airport. Welcoming Baeck back to Berlin, the city that had once been his home, the center of Wissenschaft, and the place from which he had been deported to Theresienstadt, Levinson struggled with intense emotions, as he described in his memoir:

Words cannot describe the emotions that I felt, while I accompanied him [Baeck] for several days in Berlin—to the places of his former work, most of whom were in rabble and ashes, to the cemetery in Weissensee, where his wife was buried. He preached on Shabbat in the synagogue, talked to the delegates of the Central Council (of Jews), came to a reception that I had organized in my house . . . I do not remember what Leo Baeck said on that occasion. The press reported on it extensively. I am sure he encouraged the Jews of Berlin and did so without nostalgia and pathos, with theological and philosophical depth, with the understatement that was already typical for him, before he stayed in England. He always spoke without notes, in a style ready for print, and always he stood above things, the cardinal, how he was referred to in the past already so very appropriately. I remember lastingly the impression I had of Baeck on the pulpit in a Berlin synagogue. The patriarch of German Jewry, the formidable Jewish spirit of our century, proclaimed dead, who had taken back his position—he was a symbol of indestructible Jewish spirit, of the victory of Torah over destruction and death. Baeck embodied [the essence of his book] Dieses Volk [This People] that he started to write in Theresienstadt and had completed in freedom. A piece of eternity has become manifest by his life and work among us.¹²

Communitization and Transformation to “The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate”

These reflections and memories mirrored the deep collective trauma experienced by this group of refugees and ultimately forced them to recognize that, while the German-Jewish community as they knew it had not survived, the identity of the modern Jew that had grown from this community did have a chance to survive precisely because it was modern and portable. It had conquered the problem of a physical location and still had a functioning framework, especially in the United States. It was not necessarily tied to a physical place.

Rather than a physical place, the idea might replace the intellectual Heimat (home) that had been lost. Nathan Peter Levinson also expressed this idea in his autobiography Ein Ort ist, mit wem du bist, the title of which comes from a quote he attributed to John Steinbeck: “A place is not a place, a place is who you’re with.” He signaled that reconstruction was dynamic, did not depend on Germany as a physical center, and could thrive by way of the social and intellectual interaction and engagement of those who survived.¹³

The collective trauma of the refugees caused a deep crisis of meaning for that group. Not only were their chances for survival in question, their very identity was at risk, specifically German Jewry’s path of assimilation and social inclusion since the emancipation period.

The process of questioning that path had already begun in the 1920s and was enforced by Nazism, but it required active intellectual deliberations in the post-Holocaust era if modern Judaism was to survive. Markus Krah has recently discussed how American Jews constructed a “usable east European past” in reaction to the serious identity crisis they experienced after the Shoah. This constructed past reflected the widely held perception that modern Judaism in general and its German heritage in particular—which had so intensely impacted American Jewry during the nineteenth century—had ended in a major failure.¹⁴

Therefore, the confrontation with their identity, history, and memory stood front and center in their efforts to survive. Their rabbinate had a strong social and political presence in society, and their engagement with a modern Judaism met the needs of modern Jews therein. This included a commitment to analyze the events of the Holocaust and how such a thing could have happened and to preserve the memory and history of German Jewry, all of which helped the refugee rabbis in their reconstruction.

They not only documented what happened to their collective but also provided creative ways to deal with their crisis and create a “usable past.” Many of the refugees were trained historians and committed to a form of Judaism that they recognized was subject to history and change. Their sense of the role that history had played in Judaism must have spoken to them in this hour of need when their collective survival was threatened.

It is no surprise that liberal rabbis in particular took on an active role in society, representing the dynamic Jewish spirit assigned to liberal Judaism. They were instrumental in the communication of their history and the use of the past in the public sphere. The lessons they taught and the role models they presented resonated in this sphere because American Jews were in a state of insecurity, longing for solutions to current problems, and struggling with challenges and paradigm changes.

There was by no means an atmosphere of silence on matters related to the Holocaust, as claimed by historian Peter Novick.¹⁵ A closer look at American Jewish communities and their rabbinical leadership proves that dealing with survival, coping with the loss of Europe as a center of Jewish knowledge and civilization, and making sense of the Holocaust were issues of vital importance to popular, scholarly, religious, and political discourses at the time.¹⁶

Ultimately, the threat the refugees experienced prompted a search for meaning and opened up ways to develop a transgenerational self-image that ensured the survival of the collective group and sparked intense discussions about its past and history, antisemitism, racism, the failure of German society and religious groups, memory, and the future of modern Judaism.¹⁷

Their search for new meaning, their drive to inform the present of their past, and the connection they generated among the past, present, and future were part of a generation-building process and their formation as “the last generation of the German rabbinate.” This phrase was used repeatedly in their descriptions of their experiences as the last rabbi of a town, the last rabbi to leave Germany, the last students to be ordained in one of the seminaries, or the last witnesses of the destruction of a particular Jewish community. Their memoirs and autobiographies highlight their past and the new meaning they found in being part of the final chapter of their institutions and traditions and in accepting the resulting responsibilities.

The titles of their autobiographies and the Festschrifts published in their honor clearly show how they perceived themselves and were perceived over the course of history: Emil Fackenheim’s Epitaph for German Judaism, Levinson’s Ein Ort ist, mit wem Du bist (A place is not a place, but with whom you are), the memorial volume of former Berlin rabbis Gegenwart im Rückblick (The present in retrospect), W. Gunther Plaut’s Unfinished Business, Herbert Strauss’s In the Eye of the Storm, Joseph Asher’s Festschrift The Jewish Legacy and the German Conscience, Norbert Weinberg’s Courage of the Spirit, Walter Jacob’s The Seventeenth Generation, Paul Lazarus’s commemorative book titled Beiträge zur Würdigung der letzten Rabbinergeneration in Deutschland (Contributions to honor the last generation of rabbis in Germany), and Jakob Petuchowski’s Mein Judesein: Wege und Erfahrungen eines deutschen Rabbiners (My Jewish being: Paths and experiences of a German rabbi), the latter two of which—like Levinson’s autobiography—were notably only published in German!

Their messages were also echoed in the Festschrifts and histories of their former communities, congregants, and institutions, including commemorative volumes in their honor, such as To Leave Your Mark, a handbook for the college ministry, posthumously edited in honor of Alfred Jospe by his widow and son. This handbook provided meaningful instruction on how to involve the next generation of American college graduates in Judaism by using Jospe’s texts and highlighting the example he set.¹⁸

These refugee scholars left behind a large number of materials: autobiographical writings, including unpublished ones like the memoir of Alfred Wolf, a member of the “band of five”;¹⁹ film material (Glatzer and Trepp);²⁰ and extremely well-designed websites, such as the perfectly groomed site commemorating Leo Trepp,²¹ who passed away in 2010 but whose website keeps his memory and work alive with news to this day. All of these materials can be used to understand the history of the German rabbinate, document the refugee’s life experiences, and bring a special legacy into the twenty-first century and beyond. They are excellent resources for further textual and literary analysis, a task that cannot be done justice in this book and that deserves closer attention by scholars in the fields of autobiographical literature and Holocaust memoirs.²²

In the generation-building process, these publications and other societal, political, and religious platforms were essential elements in communicating the rabbis’ depiction as “the last generation of the German rabbinate” and the guardians of a special legacy.

The collection of biographical data in MIRA states that one special age cohort, mainly men born after 1895–1900 and the so-called second generation, stood out in this generation-building process. The data also reveals that most had a background in liberal Judaism or the American Reform movement. This may have been because men of this age had a large part of their lives ahead of them and thus the time to be part of or even shape such a transformation. The very nature of the liberal Reform rabbinate encouraged rabbis to take an active role in aligning the past with the present and emboldened them to communicate their concepts for “a usable past” to society more than was the case among more traditional Jews, who rejected historical Judaism. Their emergence as a special group with a unique legacy was supported by objects, individuals, institutions, rituals, and political themes that linked them with the past.

American seminaries provided both the central organizational framework and vehicles advancing this process. The seminaries were the place where the refugees’ past continued to have meaning and where these men received support in their professional transition. Even the hybrid identities of the second generation found a home on American seminary campuses.

The scholarly culture of the colleges, the German refugee professors who taught there, the interest in the curriculum and Wissenschaft, and the events that brought the group together time and again, such as commemorations and visits of survivors or those who pioneered returning to postwar Europe, resonated in the community. Most significant was the presence of Ismar Elbogen, former rector of the Hochschule in New York in 1943, whose funeral in August 1943 was attended by a large number of his students and colleagues. The same attention was given to Leo Baeck, who made regular visits and spent one semester each year in Cincinnati from 1947 on. Likewise, his portrait, painted by Eugene Spiro, reminded future generations of Reform rabbis and scholars of this icon of German-Jewish leadership in the rabbinate into the millennium.²³

The founding and naming of B’nai B’rith lodges after role models, like the Leo Baeck Lodge in New York, helped define this group as the last of an otherwise extinct German rabbinate, as did memorials, support for the formation and research activity of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), the refugees’ scholarship and teaching at the colleges, their publications, and the regular visits to their former German communities. These events, institutions, and exchanges enabled them as a group to present their collective memory and develop new meaning as the last of a special kind. The communication between the refugees and their new academic institutions was not a one-way street.

Nelson Glueck congratulating Hugo Hahn on his honorary doctor of divinity, HUC-JIR New York city, 1963: AJA, pchuc33ny.001.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the colleges recognized these men as the “last generation of the German rabbinate.” They gave them honorary degrees—sometimes in groups—later in their lives, thereby illuminating and honoring the historical context that had brought them to the United States and the institution. They honored their service and lifetime achievements for the respective religious movements and confirmed that these men had found a new intellectual and professional home.²⁴

This was an important recognition, far more significant than receiving a scholarly degree. It expressed that the respective rabbi had overcome a long, difficult, and sometimes painful transformation and had found a new personal and professional framework where he was at home. It was part of a professional metamorphosis and signaled that the recipient had completed a long journey to another culture.

This recognition was especially important to those refugees who had never been able to obtain a PhD in Germany due to the banning of Jews from German universities. They had thus felt that they were missing a crucial piece of their careers because this academic qualification had always been considered essential for German rabbis.

When Karl Richter gave a eulogy for his friend and colleague Ulrick Steuer on 21 October 1973, he emphasized that none of the rabbis who had received their education in Europe and were able to come to this blessed land during the years of the great upheaval had an easy road. “We had to begin anew. We had to learn to express our thoughts in a new language. We had to cross the barriers of custom and culture to become useful members of American communities. Ulrick Steuer felt that his tireless work was crowned with success when HUC-Jewish Institute of Religion acknowledged his contribution by awarding him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity, thereby making him an adopted son of the college. He told me that he considered this the greatest honor ever bestowed upon him.”²⁵

At the 2002 inaugural ceremony of David Ellenson as the new president of HUC in Cincinnati, a gesture by Wolli Kaelter likewise stressed that HUC had preserved a certain continuity for many of the refugees following the destruction of the Hochschule and their hometowns. The aged Kaelter handed the Torah scrolls of his hometown’s synagogue in Danzig—where his father had served as rabbi—to Ellenson, who accepted this treasure, thereby symbolically taking on the Holocaust victim’s legacy in the UAHC.²⁶

Contemporary discourse, the zeitgeist, and the unexpected challenges American Jewry faced as the largest diaspora community helped to communicate the professional, theological, and cultural expertise these men gained before and during Nazism and publicly enhanced their image as “the last generation of the German rabbinate.”

More specifically, these men were able to cultivate their role as the last generation and develop as the guardians of a special legacy in their new American environment, thanks to the opportunities that came with the emerging American civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the growing alienation within the American congregation, the efforts to make sense of the Holocaust through educational or memorial projects, the survival of modern Judaism, and the confrontation of postwar Germany.

Toward a Revival of Judaism in American Society: Cultural Transfers, New Leadership, and Keeping It “Involved”

Their engagement generated significant activity in this cohort and opened up new ways for them, as modern Jews, to connect with both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans in the post-Holocaust years. Although their American colleagues had taken a stand on many of the topics the refugees addressed, the refugee rabbis had been present during the actual crisis, had stood side by side with their congregations in the darkest hour of Jewish history, and had confronted Nazism. Their experiences made them a living link between history and the present, and they impressed many Americans with their desire for renewal. Their history gave them unparalleled authenticity, charisma, and authority when they talked about the past and the present, the societal and religious problems that existed then and now, and their suggestions for Jewish solutions to the crisis of the modern Jew.

American Jews were open to their messages. Marked by a strong commitment to pluralism, American Jews took on the unexpected role of the largest Jewish community globally and as natural spokespersons for the survivors of the Shoah. In many ways, American Jews were challenged by confronting Germans in the postwar era on restitution and Holocaust-related issues in the wake of the catastrophe. Representing the largest Jewish community in the diaspora and committed to a distinctly modern and participatory role of Jews in society, these men felt it was essential to continue to build a supportive and respectful relationship with other religious and ethnic groups in American society as Americans and Jews. Not surprisingly, the lasting segregation and persecution of African Americans in the American South and the civil rights movement irritated American Jews and posed questions about their own “whiteness.” Would America stand true to its promise of freedom for all? Had America learned the lessons of the Holocaust?²⁷

Scattered among many differing political and theological groups, American Jews lacked cohesion and community and thus felt it necessary to secure growth and Jewish survival. Congregational affiliation, however, was in sharp decline, and members knew they must deal with the changing demographics caused by intermarriage and suburbanization. New models for a meaningful and timely Jewish identity were especially needed by the children of the most recent immigrant generation from eastern Europe. These young people could not be reached by classic Reform Judaism with its highly Protestantized forms or by the prevailing traditional Orthodoxy.

While Orthodoxy tried to accept a timely, competitive, and yet traditional Judaism, which appealed to its congregants and allowed them to play a role within modern American society, the American Reform movement embraced the idea of Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and the newly founded state of Israel as the center of Jewish life, even if the reality of Judaism in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine) did not live up to its American pluralist ideals. Modern Judaism, with its strong emphasis on reason, progress, and social inclusion, seemed to have failed in light of the Shoah, a “fact” that seemed to crystallize over time in the very history of German Jewry.²⁸

The annihilation of Jewish education and knowledge in Europe was a major concern of American Jews, and they felt the need to preserve, develop, and define models for modern Jewish education inside and outside the synagogue and to revive community, knowledge, and the synagogue as a center of their activity.

Many communities fought the process of alienation, a development German Jewry was very familiar with because of its similar experiences with the high degree of assimilation that occurred starting in the late nineteenth century. Almost all of the refugee rabbis noted the ignorance of the basics of Jewish knowledge and their students’ and congregants’ inability to study Judaism using the ancient texts. These rabbis felt that educating and encouraging their congregants to actively engage with their tradition and bringing Judaism in line with modern times would be important assets for the future of modern Judaism.²⁹

The refugee rabbis—especially those who had officiated in Germany before their emigration, a younger cohort born after 1895 or 1900—provided meaningful and authentic answers to their American congregants in the synagogue or the religious movements of American Judaism. Unlike their American colleagues, these firsthand witnesses to Nazism had stood by their communities until they were forced to flee. This shaped their character, leadership, and professional experience and enabled them to speak to their American congregants with authenticity and authority, which was highly appreciated.

Their experience with alienation and the mission to reconnect their congregants to a meaningful and timely experience of Judaism helped them identify and address the problems in the American synagogue and on the minds of their congregants. In fact, it was precisely because they had been confronted with similar problems earlier in the German context that they felt a special call to act, to combat alienation, to instill the missing spirit of community, to fill the gaps in Jewish knowledge, to encourage study, and on the whole to promote a strong sense of how American Jews could make a uniquely Jewish contribution to American society.

These rabbis had been influenced by a Jewish revival during the First World War and the years of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). Their rabbinates in Europe had been innovative, had embraced eastern European culture and Zionism, and had defined new ways to reach out to congregants of all ages, according to their specific needs and interests in the community.

Their skills, experience, and knowledge appealed in a special way to American Jews, who found themselves after the Second World War and the Shoah confronted with new tasks related to their changing place on a new global map of the Jewish world. As the largest Jewish community globally, American Jewry was not only responsible for representing the interests of the Holocaust survivors in the United States; it had also become a hub for the survival of an explicitly modern and pluralistic Jewish diaspora.

At the forefront of these efforts stood the youth. Youth rabbis had emerged during the Weimar years to address the needs of the next generation of Jews in so-called youth services or congregations, which used customized educational materials such as youth bibles. The Jewish youth movement during the Weimar Republic had inspired the next generation. It had made Judaism attractive and provided ethnic cohesion and hope. Jewish history and identity had been communicated in an informal environment, which emphasized camaraderie, friendship, and belonging. It shaped a new, active, and conscious adolescent generation, which frequently also embraced Zionism.

Movements like the German Blau-Weiss, Wanderbund, Kadimah, the Kameraden, and even the Orthodox Ezra had pulled together an entire generation of German-Jewish youth in a revolutionary way. These movements helped them turn away from the highly assimilationist nineteenth-century lifestyle of their parents, which they felt did not provide solutions to their everyday challenges as young Jews in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s.

In many ways, the emerging Jewish youth movements embraced elements of the larger German youth movements (Jugendbewegung), which criticized some of the same societal issues and were very popular. However, these German movements often developed an attitude against young Jews. Jewish youth organizations became increasingly popular in the wake of growing antisemitism in German society and a general social crisis.

A growing understanding that the assimilationist model had failed and that most German Jews had lost their understanding of what it meant to be Jewish in their everyday life drove the successful recruitment of young German Jews in such innovative organizations. They tried to facilitate a discovery of the “subjective Jewish problem” of how to deal with two identities, German and Jewish, and to develop more “Jewish substance,” meaning in-depth knowledge of Judaism and an inherently Jewish lifestyle in which they found satisfaction and answers to their questions.³⁰ At the center of their approach stood a new form of pedagogy, which encouraged the young to explore, research, and discuss original Jewish sources independently from the prevailing hierarchical model of predefined knowledge under the supervision of a schoolteacher.

The youth movements gave this age group new agency to actively explore Judaism, create a community of their own, and experiment with a Jewish lifestyle apart from existing conventions. Joint study and a new social fabric—sometimes with socialist or Zionist leanings—replaced the boring and detached participation in a service with standardized prayers and a sermon given by a rabbi whose age usually set him apart from the younger generation.

Hiking, camping, scouting, spending time outdoors, camaraderie: this new social experience stimulated an entire generation of German Jews to infuse their lives with “Jewish substance,” meaning inner strength and resilience in life that grew from a strong and fulfilling identity as Jews. The new social interaction of boys and girls across the boundaries of class and gender spurred curiosity, group cohesion, and joint learning and allowed the youngsters to reinvent themselves as young Jews in an environment that provided creativity and responsibility.

Young and especially trained “youth rabbis” created at these camps an atmosphere of equality, friendship, discovery, a new spirituality, and deep inner connection to Judaism.³¹ These new concepts did not end at camp; they affected this generation in their everyday lives and continued to create a lifelong bond with the value system of the respective movements once the members had outgrown adolescence.

Identifying themselves as part of a new Jewish leadership with a special mission to form a new “German-Jewish identity,” many former members became leaders of their youth movements, found an intellectual home in the Lehrhaus movement inspired by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, or initiated new methods of Jewish learning at home and abroad.³² Signposts of these movements were projects like the School of Jewish Youth, founded by Joachim Prinz in Berlin in 1928, which established a school that was organized and conducted exclusively by its young pupils.³³

Like Prinz, the younger group of refugee rabbis were associated with these youth movements. They sought new ways to develop a German-Jewish identity because they were seeking new forms of community, study, and a meaningful reality as Jews or, as was the case for the so-called second generation of refugee rabbis, they grew up in these movements and were deeply affected by that experience. Some of these young rabbis were identified by their expressed values and Jewish substance on the HUC campus in Cincinnati, where they continued to participate in the Jewish camp experience and youth work. This group included Ernst Lorge, Herman Schaalman, Alfred Wolf, Wolli Kaelter, and Karl Weiner, who had been ordained at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau in 1938.

In the late 1940s, this group became the nucleus of a new type of Reform Jewish camp that incorporated its experiences from the German-Jewish youth movement. Schaalman, Weiner, and Lorge found employment as young rabbis in the Chicago area and had frequent and positive encounters with the American Protestant youth movements. This experience spoke to their own social experience and Jewish roots and underscored the great potential for youth work in American society, which had not yet been fully developed within the Reform movement.

Their careers in the rabbinate provided the necessary framework for this kind of youth work: Herman Schaalman was appointed as the new director of the Chicago Federation of UAHC and played a key role in recruiting resources and human capital for the purchase of Union Institute, which today is called the Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute (OSRUI).³⁴

In March 1951, the Chicago Federation of UAHC officially voted to purchase a camp in the vicinity of the city that would give the next generation of Reform Jews a place to gather regularly. At this meeting, German-born Ernst Lorge and his two American-born colleagues Joseph Buchler and Arnold Wolf enthusiastically supported the idea and found a suitable campsite called Briar Lodge in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Thanks to the involvement and successful fundraising of the local temple sisterhoods, the project was launched in late 1951. Efficient organization, an inspiring vision, and cooperation between lay and rabbinical leadership enabled the group to secure the deed for the camp in February 1952.

The property was officially incorporated in May of that year. The newly founded Union Institute worked closely with the National Foundation of Temple Youth (NFTY), a group within the UAHC that formally organized and rented campsites for the Reform Jewish youth. The establishment of Union Institute under the directorship of Schaalman was the first youth camp actually owned by the UAHC.

The institute introduced youth rabbis and designed daily schedules featuring baseball, storytelling, studying, group singing, and a high level of creativity. Group singing in particular played a special role in developing community and grassroots involvement and emotionally binding the adolescents to Judaism. This was recently stressed by Judah Cohen and cannot be underestimated in this context. Like in the German synagogue, music was essential to worship, community building, and the aesthetics of modern Jewish identity.

At camp, the repertoire included more than liturgical music; campers sang German folk songs from the emancipation era, like “Die Gedanken sind frei” (Thoughts are free), a song sung by the liberal movement before the German revolution in 1848 that idealized freedom of thought in the absence of freedom of speech.³⁵

In 1958, OSRUI opened up a Teacher Training Institute, reaching out to teachers at religious schools in the Reform movement. The facility flourished with the steady involvement of many German refugee rabbis in the region. Besides Schaalman, Lorge, and Weiner, Karl Richter, who officiated in Michigan, was also involved in the project. Its success was so compelling that it encouraged other regions to set up permanent camps and scouting activities for their adolescents and adults.³⁶

It is no wonder that this pilot project soon inspired the opportunity to establish a Reform Jewish camp, Camp Saratoga, in Southern California, where Rabbi Phineas Smoller was serving as regional director of the UAHC in Los Angeles. Smoller had once served in Chicago in the same position that Herman Schaalman held in the past. Following his departure, Smoller had been involved in the NFTY Institutes, the precursor to established Reform Jewish camps. In 1951, Smoller contacted Ben Swig, a layman and San Francisco philanthropist who offered to donate between $5,000 and $50,000 to establish a Reform Jewish camp in California.

In the summer of 1952, the first camp opened in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Herman Schaalman orchestrated a “happy marriage” when he invited his friend from the Hochschule and HUC Wolli Kaelter to visit the newly founded camp with his wife Sarah for a few weeks. At the time, Kaelter was seeking alternatives to his current employment as a community rabbi in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Both Sarah and Wolli were active in the German-Jewish youth movement and jumped at the chance to participate.

In the summer of 1953, Swig invested $25,000 in the Union Institute’s purchase of the 208-acre property in Saratoga, which enabled the Union Institute to launch its next project there and hire Wolli Kaelter, who was enthusiastic about its prospects.³⁷ Besides directing the new camp in Saratoga, Wolli Kaelter was also to become director of the Union Institute’s Pacific Northern California and Northern Pacific Northwest Region and director of the West Coast NFTY. He was expected to infuse this position with energy and enthusiasm. He owed his appointment not only to Schaalman’s recommendation but also to his own commitment and expertise and the strong connections between the Union Institute and the German camp leadership in Oconomowoc.³⁸

Once in California, Kaelter contacted Alfred Wolf, who had been part of the “band of five,” the group sent as refugee students from Berlin to HUC. Wolf held a pulpit as rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, where he gained experience with new camps Camp Hess Kramer and Gindling Hilltop Camp in Malibu. Kaelter benefited from his organizational experience locally and in 1953 launched Saratoga—The Camp for Living Judaism, which was named “Camp Swig” after the man who continued to be involved in the growth and prosperity of the enterprise.³⁹

Aside from the Reform movement, German Orthodox rabbis also were part of a transfer of elements of the German-Jewish youth movement into the American Orthodox education system. Data shows that ethnic refugee community congregations like Gates of Hope in Washington Heights reinstituted a youth rabbi among their ranks, a position for which they could recruit Rabbi Leo Adler, a former student of the ILBA in Würzburg. Adler had transferred from Würzburg to the Yeshiva Mir in 1935 to study there but had fled with the whole Yeshiva Mir to Vilna in 1939. He did not reach the United States via Shanghai until after the end of the war.⁴⁰

One of the most active Orthodox rabbis in this faction of Judaism was Michael Munk, a champion of Jewish education who left the American congregational rabbinate in the United States. Besides his work at the Beth Jacob School of Boro Park, New York, he launched a private Jewish summer camp called Camp Munk in Ferndale, New York, in 1955.

In an interview with the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, Munk stressed that the camp functioned as well as it did because he and his wife could draw from their German experience. Munk had been active in the Orthodox Ezra youth movement in Germany and was inspired by this experience when he and his wife set up Camp Munk in the United States. The campsite attracted students from all over the country and offered a wide range of education in Jewish and general studies, athletics, and outdoor activities. These opportunities were offered to boys of all ages, but not to girls. Like its liberal counterparts, the camp advocated self-administration and encouraged the older and better-educated boys among the campers, such as yeshiva boys, by making them camp counselors and even substitutes for young rabbis.⁴¹

It is unclear if Samson Raphael Weiss, director of the National Council of Young Israel from 1947 to 1956 and founder and dean of the Young Israel Institute for Jewish Studies from 1945 to 1956, was involved with the scouting programs of the new American Orthodox movement, however, further research in mid-twentieth-century Jewish pedagogy might expand on this topic and the involvement of refugee rabbis in plans to set up Orthodox education for girls.

Weiss was dedicated to the renewal of Jewish education. He headed Torah U’mesorah, the first Orthodox Jewish day-school movement in the United States and Canada. This movement offered compelling Jewish education to young Orthodox Jews who might otherwise have lost their connection to Judaism and Yiddishkeit (“Jewishness,” especially in a traditional east European Ashkenazi- and Yiddish-speaking context) in a solely secular environment that enforced assimilation. At the time, most young Jewish students created a nexus between Jewish and secular education by attending both public school and additional afternoon classes in a Jewish school, but this denied them a more integrated education that could merge secular and religious study. Instead, the Torah U’mesorah model combined a curriculum with Jewish and secular education in one school. The schools, which were only for boys, were directed by an ordained Orthodox rabbi who worked with an associate principal responsible for secular academic study. Together, they designed a curriculum that would meet both the religious and secular educational requirements.⁴²

Data indicates that as early as 1943, rabbis were among the founders of the Manhattan Jewish Day School, the first of its kind in Manhattan. One of these rabbis was Jacob Hoffmann, the former Orthodox rabbi of the Jewish community of Frankfurt and after 1938, the rabbi of the Hungarian congregation Ohav Zedek in Manhattan.⁴³

Finally, several refugees found meaningful employment at the Hillel Campus Organization of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith. Here, too, the desire to create future generations of college-educated, conscious Jews was at the center of their work. The Hillel Foundation had been founded in 1923 so as not to lose those talented young Jews who were getting a secular education at American universities to a secular and purely American world. As a campus organization connected to and founded by the B’nai B’rith, Hillel successfully created a presence on American campuses that equaled that of both Christian campus ministries and the typical American fraternities.

Organized by one or several rabbis, the “Hillel house” became a meeting place not only for students and faculty on campus—where the Shabbat and other holidays could be observed in a Jewish setting and according to Jewish law—but also for the diverse young community. The Hillel centers provided services for Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox students and organized Oneg Shabbat, the Friday-night meal after Shabbat services, in the setting of the respective academic community. In addition, the group offered the young students a family away from home, counseling, trips, lectures, and discussion and study groups on Jewish and secular topics to stimulate intellectually well-considered Jewish positions on contemporary issues. In short, Hillel provided common ground for the plurality of Jews at college to develop a universal Jewish bond, to bridge the Jewish diversity they experienced away from home, and to stimulate creative Jewish intellectual leadership among young American Jews.⁴⁴

Like the youth organizations of the religious movements in American Judaism, Hillel offered a number of German refugees a place to develop their enthusiasm and skills for youth work.

The fact that Leo Lichtenberg, the fifth student of the “band of five,” started his career in 1943 as the rabbi of Temple Israel and Hillel director at Florida State University in Tallahassee supports the idea that the Union Institute may have encouraged the five students from the Hochschule to engage in youth work. W. Gunther Plaut was the only one who did not pursue a career in that field.

Besides Lichtenberg, Rabbi Erwin Zimet served as a Hillel adviser at Vassar College from 1950 to 1970, and Rabbi Frank Fisher directed the Hillel organization at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina from 1980 to 1993.⁴⁵

The man who brought the Hillel organization to the national leadership level during the 1950s and 1960s was Alfred Jospe, a young Berlin rabbi who directed a number of local Hillel houses and led a local congregation after he immigrated to the United States. In 1939, he accepted the position as rabbi of the Tree of Life Congregation in Morgantown, Virginia, and served as Hillel director on the University of West Virginia campus from 1940 on.

His tenure in Morgantown as Hillel director must have been successful because he was promoted to Hillel director at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1944.⁴⁶ In 1949, he served as national director of the Hillel Campus Organization in Washington, DC, until he retired in 1971. His many publications demonstrate that he approached his work as a personal mission and did so in a systematic fashion by discussing the methods and purposes of Hillel programs on campus.

A sample reader of his writings published in his honor by his wife and son, Eva and Raphael Jospe, highlights his background, approach, and mission. His primary goals were to fight alienation from Judaism and provide an understanding of Jewish heritage and meaning, and help adapt these to a rapidly changing secular world and ever-emerging new challenges for every Jew.⁴⁷

As a Jewish leader in the 1950s and 1960s, Jospe was in the middle of an explosive transformation of American society. He noticed that in the postwar era, young Jews did not polarize religion and rationalism; they perceived the dichotomy as being between the “conventional faith of their parents” and a “highly individualized quest for salvation.” They wanted to rediscover the religion of their parents but on their own terms. Likewise, other young Jews were experimenting with new “quasi-religious lifestyles and communes and havurot” with a great interest in transcendentalism, subjects on which mainstream religions had little to offer.⁴⁸

Jospe’s children emphasized that the young rabbi’s mission was deeply affected by his close relationship with Leo Baeck. This connection and Jospe’s dedication to Wissenschaft des Judentums, his children claimed, were the foundation for his work providing the next generation with Jewish knowledge and a tool kit to incorporate Jewish meaning into their lives.⁴⁹

It was the personal approach, intellectual aura, and deep level of self-awareness that set apart the leadership, knowledge, religious perspectives, and social activism of these men of the last generation and created a sense of ethnic Jewish pride. They demonstrated that modern Judaism could connect to its traditions, that it contained eternal messages that would never lose their appeal, and that it was an important resource for providing answers to contemporary problems facing modern Jews. Patterns to create Jewish resilience they had experimented with or developed during the crisis in Germany made them outstanding leaders in American synagogues, communities, and secular organizations.

The rabbis who had officiated in Germany rarely rose to leadership positions in their respective religious movements; however, they gained status in congregations and Jewish organizations. Besides knowledge and training, their history, experience, and tenacity in standing with their communities and demonstrating unusual skill, credibility, and authenticity made these men role models in their synagogues and organizations in which they worked. They used their past experiences and the knowledge they acquired in Germany as a sort of social (or religious) capital with which to generate new meaning of life and enhance their Americanization and leadership in American society. Their concepts, approaches, and teachings of Judaism spoke to American Jewry, especially the youth, and enhanced the significance of their work and voices. More importantly, their experience was valued by American Jews who increasingly viewed it as paradigmatic of their own diaspora experience in a post-emancipatory age.

The sermons of Max Nussbaum, some of which have been collected in a commemorative volume published in his honor, illuminate how important the experiences and personal histories of the refugees were to services, the part they played in their spiritual messages to congregants, and how politics were woven into their ministry against the backdrop of the past and present.

In his sermon “Chosenness and Forgiveness” on Yom Kippur 1953, Nussbaum described to his congregants what the concept of “chosenness” meant for the modern Jew in light of the covenant. It was not a social privilege but a moral obligation: service to others in the spirit of God, even if personal suffering resulted from upholding these ideals. To illustrate the power of living up to these spiritual values, he presented the story of Werner Theshow (Tessier), one of the murderers of Walther Rathenau, the German secretary of state who was killed in 1922 by a group of antisemites. Twenty years after the murder, in 1941, Theshow happened to meet Rathenau’s nephew in the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Nussbaum described how the encounter took an unexpected turn. Instead of feeling hostility and hatred, Theshow was so touched to meet the young man that he confessed that he had killed his uncle. He then pulled out a slip of paper that he had carried in his pocket for the past twenty years and presented it to the young legionnaire.

It was a letter written by Walthers Rathenau’s mother, Mathilde, to the mother of his murderer, stating that she “in the name and spirit of him he has murdered, forgive[s], even as God may forgive.” Theshow told the nephew that this letter had changed his life and converted him from an active antisemite to an admirer and student of Jewish history and Hebrew who was profoundly dedicated to saving Jewish people by word and deed. Nussbaum concluded by saying that “this is the meaning of Israel’s election, our purpose and the very meaning of Jewish life.”⁵⁰

On Rosh Hashanah 1961, Nussbaum spoke about how the Eichmann trial and the Bar Mitzvah of the Israeli state were not coincidental but were an expression of the connection between memory and identity.⁵¹

At the height of the 1961 Berlin crisis, Nussbaum expressed his concern over American Cold War politics and the desire to protect Berlin and safeguard a potential reunification of Germany. He called this “a nightmare” for the Jewish refugee from Germany who had become an American citizen and concluded that “Germany could not possibly be divided into too many parts as far as the destiny of our people is concerned, as far as the peace of the world is concerned.”⁵²

Nussbaum’s first pulpit in the United States was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, but his rabbinate did not end there. He advanced to Temple Israel of Hollywood, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Temple Israel provided the perfect setting for young Nussbaum, who represented modernity and tradition, used the bimah like a stage, and had an illustrious history and reputation as a rabbi who had stood up to the Nazis, something he often referred to from the pulpit.

The handsome couple Max and Ruth Nussbaum were custom-made for Hollywood, and Nussbaum’s ministry reached many Jews and non-Jews, both locally and internationally. His presence affected and influenced those far beyond the synagogue. It extended to the vast secular public sphere and a wide array of typically secular Jewish organizations in America, such as the United Jewish Appeal, the Zionist Organization of America, the American Jewish Congress, and the World Jewish Congress. He was actively engaged in all of these organizations and even served as president of the American Jewish Congress in 1946, a remarkable position for a recent immigrant.

Joachim Prinz participated more actively in the US political arena than he had in Germany. In his autobiography, he explained how the US State Department suppressed the first reports on the mass extermination of European Jews, which were submitted by Rabbi Stephen Wise. This experience triggered survivor guilt and ignited in Prinz the growing conviction that “organized religion would go under unless it became a potent force in society . . ., that meant in political life. Unless religion became the guardian of decency and morality in the community and in the country, it had no right to exist.”⁵³

He continued to assert that both the synagogue and the rabbi had a responsibility to sharpen the political conscience of the congregation and society and engage actively in both. Some aspects of American society, especially the prevailing racism in the still-segregated American South, motivated Prinz and Nussbaum and many others to take action. The refugees’ experience of racial and social exclusion, degradation, and the denial of civil rights was still alive in their memory. They could not tolerate the discrepancy between the American ideal of freedom—promoted front and center in American politics during the cold war years—and the reality of racial and social inequality they witnessed in American society, especially in the South.

From the beginning, the American civil rights movement spoke to the refugee rabbis in a special way. The growing number of American-born rabbis involved in this movement as it gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, however, could not speak up for the civil rights cause with the same authority as Holocaust survivors or refugees from Nazism. Both of these groups had suffered racial persecution by a government that was officially acknowledged as inhumane and against the American ideal of freedom for all.

Their involvement not only served the civil rights movement and the public but also the refugees themselves. This was especially true of Joseph Asher. Asher felt uprooted after an almost global journey as a refugee and had considered going back to Melbourne, Australia, where he felt “at home.”⁵⁴ However, as he worked pulpits in the South—Tuscaloosa, Florida, and Greensboro, North Carolina—he found new meaning in his work and a new home in the engagement for the American civil rights movement. This movement provided an opportunity for meaningful involvement as a refugee rabbi with such a distinctive past.

In May 1963, Asher was invited to participate in the local Ministers’ Forum on behalf of Greensboro’s civil rights activists. After the event, he said to his friend and director of the UAHC Social Action Committee, Albert Vorspan, that the matter spoke to his heart in a special way and explained that this engagement had benefited him: “As for myself, I slept well last night. It [the meeting] may not have done anything for the Negro, but it did a great deal for myself . . . I have a feeling that subsequent to last night’s events, there will be other local white ministers who will want to participate in future mass meetings of this kind. I feel rather pleased that I should have been a pioneer.”

While we do not know if Asher suffered from survivor guilt like Prinz did, he clearly saw it as his duty and a special privilege as a refugee from Nazism to mediate between the African American cause and the white religious elites. Among these elites, he, a Jew and the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, was respected as a “white” element of their community but could point with authority to the injustices of American society like no one else could.⁵⁵

Joachim Prinz also became active in the American civil rights movement, although in a different way from Asher. The rabbi stressed the interconnectedness of the historical experience of Jews and African Americans in the Western world. At the famous March on Washington on 28 August 1963, he warned all Americans, particularly American Jews, against standing silently by while their African American fellow citizens experienced racially motivated exclusion similar to what Germany’s Jews had faced at the onset of the Nazi regime.⁵⁶ Then he proceeded to introduce the most important speaker at the march: Martin Luther King Jr.

Prinz, however, saw the alliance between Blacks and Jews as more than just a contribution to racial and social justice in America. He also viewed it as a way to alert American Jews to the crisis of modern Judaism in the diaspora of the post-Holocaust years. According to Prinz’s biographer David Jünger, the former Berlin rabbi perceived the crisis as a matter of survival for a [modern, meaningful, and socially dynamic]⁵⁷ Judaism in the diaspora, which had failed in Germany and was threatened with extinction. In Prinz’s eyes, American Jewry was the last standard-bearer of modern Judaism within a pluralistic diaspora, but it was standing at the edge of an abyss.

The Berlin rabbi considered the biggest threats to a dynamic, cohesive, and pluralistic American Judaism to be the loss of the intellectually inspiring influences of European Jewry, the broad acceptance of American Jews in society, and an Israeli-American relationship that curtailed American Jewry’s right to speak out for world Jewry. Prinz argued that these limitations would destroy the creative forces of a modern Judaism that could only survive, develop, and prosper in a modern and pluralistic society such as existed in the United States. Jünger believes that this was why Prinz turned to the civil rights issue.

While the rabbis’ political and social engagement on behalf of the American civil rights movement was itself a just cause, its main purpose was to mobilize millions of American Jews and enforce the impact of a living religion, a religion that put ethical values at the center of true humanity and had the potential to breathe new life into the idea of “religion.” Prinz hoped this experience would ignite an intense intellectual exchange among American Jews and secure the future of Judaism.⁵⁸ Jünger states that Prinz’s vision of a modern and dynamic Judaism linked to tradition, history, and Zionism grew out of the idea of a full-fledged Jewish civilization similar to Reconstructionism in modern Judaism.⁵⁹

Prinz and Nussbaum entered the political arena not only as rabbis and religious leaders but also as presidents of a number of Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. Abraham Joshua Heschel, however, stepped into the political arena as a theologian who emphasized that religion did not end in the spiritual realm but called for intense societal and political engagement based on the Hebrew Bible.

While Heschel is often characterized as representing an east European Jewish tradition because of his Hassidic family background⁶⁰—which undoubtedly is an important part of his theology—his scholarship must also be understood as a result of his encounter with modern rationalism and modern Judaism.

Like other young Jews raised in a traditional Jewish environment in countries east of Germany who studied and began a career in Germany, Heschel’s understanding of religion and the role it should play in the life of modern Jews was influenced by his training at the Hochschule and the intense intellectual contact with modern Jewish thought and scholarship in Germany. His background in traditional Hasidic Judaism and spirituality and a systematic philosophy of religion spoke to modern Jews precisely because of its unusual blend of tradition and modernity. Heschel, who rejected Prinz’s path of turning to Reconstructionism and Judaism as a “civilization,” wanted to maintain faith in modern religion, which he considered essential to reintroducing the reality of God to modern-day life.

Heschel criticized those who tried to substitute religion with rationalism and who gave up faith as a spiritual element. He tried to reawaken and nourish a deep inner piety as a leitmotif in people’s lives, arguing that there was a lasting relationship between humanity and God. The adoption of this concept was a pathway to developing a new or long-forgotten dimension of faith to solve contemporary problems and engage in worldly matters.

The study of religious texts and an ongoing conversation with God were to give people a new perspective on life and to reestablish a long-lost, dynamic personal relationship with the divine. In this theological model, God not only spoke to a person; that person would also be in close communication with God and would find guidance, answers to problems, and encouragement to political and social action.⁶¹ Putting the Hebrew prophets at the center of his theology, as he did in his dissertation in Berlin, Heschel claimed that their texts reminded all people to speak out for the voiceless, the poor, and the oppressed and encouraged social justice and political agitation as the result of the conversation between God and humankind.⁶²

While in Germany, Heschel found a home in the Lehrhaus movement aside from his studies at the Hochschule. There, new methods of learning, progressive pedagogy, and a desire to obtain innovative firsthand Jewish knowledge from original sources challenged antiquated methods of lecturing and preaching and was a means to reconnect assimilated Jews to their Jewish identity. First started by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber in Frankfurt, the Lehrhaus movement launched a revival of Jewish identity and experience in Germany that peaked during the Nazi years.⁶³

Heschel’s faith-based theology introduced a new spirituality, religious feeling, direct communication with God, and a new sense of Jewishness that spoke to modern American Jews, many of whom were overwhelmed by alienation and a Judaism eroded by criticism of its strong assimilationist orientation. Heschel’s theology allowed American Jews to connect with a lost tradition, reconstruct their identities as Jews within the modern world, and find ways to display a specifically Jewish standpoint in politics and society. For Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, Heschel was an ideal match among Jews.

The Exodus was a theme of King’s theology and movement as well as in the Hebrew Bible. His Christian faith was linked with politics, as was Heschel’s concept of Judaism, by his perspective on the prophets in the Bible. For many African American followers of King, Heschel represented a Jew who had experienced actual “enslavement” [and the onset of the Holocaust] in Germany in a war against Jews, but it was also evident that he could build a close theological, political, and personal relationship with King.⁶⁴

Heschel inspired American Jews to a spiritual renewal in the post-Holocaust era, fulfilling a need in many people. Heschel’s vita, theology, Hasidic background, and friendship with Martin Luther King prompted these two men and many Christians and Jews to fight America’s participation in the Vietnam War in the name of the civil rights movement. Besides his theological arguments, Heschel’s experiences as a refugee from Nazism and a Jew who had lost his family to Europe’s antisemitism, racism, and fascism resonated in his political activism.

Speaking out for universal freedom and equality and against America’s unethical war in Vietnam, Heschel enabled other American Jews to respond not only to the current crises but also to historical ones and thus to demonstrate that Americans—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—would act with more agency this time. After all, in the highly ideological conflict over Vietnam, the United States exhibited political tendencies and practices widely perceived as “fascist” by many within the political left and created a situation whereby those who had experienced and survived Nazism in Germany felt obligated to raise their voices with authority and authenticity.⁶⁵

In addition to Asher, Prinz, and Heschel, other refugee rabbis inspired American Jews with ideas that evolved from the transfer of Jewish thought from Europe to the United States and from the blending of such knowledge with their new American environment, where many people were unable to read the original German texts.

Besides the abovementioned Albert Friedlander, who translated Leo Baeck’s Dieses Volk (This People) into English, there was Orthodox scholar Alexander Altmann, who joined the Jewish studies faculty of Brandeis University in 1954, first as visiting professor, then as a full faculty member. In 1973, Altmann presented the first comprehensive English-language study on Moses Mendelssohn, which not only crowned Altmann’s career but also made Mendelssohn’s complex personality and scholarship accessible to an English-speaking audience. Altmann’s vision and ambition helped launch a number of projects that resulted in unique microfilm collections at Brandeis University, which provided the basis for future scholarship.⁶⁶

Stephen Whitfield impressively highlights how Simon Rawidowicz and Nahum N. Glatzer, both born in eastern Europe but trained in Germany, influenced the first decades of the Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis, a flagship Jewish institution. Glatzer, a student of Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber, had received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt and later taught there, replacing Martin Buber. Even though Glatzer was never ordained, he was closely associated with the Lehrhaus movement that emerged around his former teachers in that city and continued his career in the United States, where he taught in the Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies Departments of Brandeis University from 1950 until 1973.

He continued his career in the Religion Department at Boston University. Extremely productive as a scholar in his field, Glatzer introduced Americans to the life and work of Franz Rosenzweig with his translation of Star of Redemption and to Martin Buber with his translation of Buber’s letters and by deliberating Buber’s dialogical exploration of Jewish thought.⁶⁷

Glatzer impacted modern Jewish thought not only as a university teacher but also as the editor-in-chief of the Schocken Publishing Company, which he cofounded and worked for after the company moved to the United States. He also was a contributing editor to Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, whose editor in chief from 1961 to 1969 was his fellow refugee rabbi Steven Schwarzschild. The journal, published by the American Jewish Committee, provided an important platform for discussion of modern Jewish scholarship and the zeitgeist in the 1960s and 1970s.

Schwarzschild belonged to the so-called second generation of refugee rabbis and had studied at HUC in Cincinnati, where he received a doctorate in 1955 with a dissertation on Nachman Krochmal and Herman Cohen.⁶⁸ Schwarzschild’s neo-Kantian approach to Judaism—which he acquired as a student of Samuel Atlas at HUC—brought an ethical perspective on Jewish thought and identity to the forefront of his encounter with contemporary reality and introduced the American public to key elements of German-Jewish thought by publishing the works of Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and other European Jewish thinkers.⁶⁹

Unlike the cohort born around 1900, the youngest refugees, those trained and ordained in the United States, had a significant impact on the Reform movement in American Judaism. Their knowledge of Jewish history and tradition acquired first in Europe and later in the United States gave them with a unique self-awareness that allowed them to bridge the dichotomy between tradition and modernity in a special way. They were driven by the experiences of their survival and aware of the legacy they sought to secure; namely, the timely appeal and survival endurance of a modern Judaism for future generations.

W. Gunther Plaut, Alexander Schindler, Herman Schaalman, Ismar Schorsch, Walter Gottschalk, Jakob Petuchowski, Walter Jacob, Walter Würzburger, and Leon Feldman were among those who drew from their cultural hybridity when defining their leadership in their respective religious movements. They had a lasting impact on American Judaism because they combined traditional knowledge with a progressive outlook and turned Judaism into more than just a religion. In their hands, modern Judaism developed into a rich, meaningful, contemporary, and dynamic experience of community that spoke to American Jews—even Orthodox Jews—in a new and appealing way.

Walter Würzburger, the Harvard-trained rabbi, scholar, and president of the Rabbinical Council of America, raised questions about the relationship between American Orthodoxy and modernity, modern philosophy, pluralism, politics, and the ethics of halacha (the body of Jewish laws), which opened up avenues for the participation and new positioning of Orthodox Jews within American society. As a rabbi and scholar, he demonstrated an ability and openness to discuss controversial contemporary and religious positions with Reform and Conservative Jews.⁷⁰

Like Würzburger, Leon Feldman had been educated at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) and the New School for Social Research. He was ordained in 1947 and obtained in 1957 a Doctor of Hebrew Letters from the Bernard Revel Graduate School at Yeshiva University, the same university where he taught as professor of Jewish education from 1954 to 1962. After completing his training as an Orthodox Jewish theologian, he branched out to earn a PhD in Jewish History from Columbia University and started a very successful academic career at Rutgers University in 1962, where he taught Jewish studies until he retired thirty years later.

It is interesting that, although Feldman was trained at the RIETS of Yeshiva University, this Orthodox leader pursued a career as a scholar in Jewish studies and education at secular universities. In 1963, he successfully founded the Hebraic Studies Department at Rutgers University, making Jewish studies as a field broadly available to many students.⁷¹

Another refugee in the Reform movement, W. Gunther Plaut, was originally trained in German law before he joined the Hochschule in order to pursue rabbinical studies, which he had to do because he could not obtain a doctorate in law as he had originally planned. It is not surprising that, as a scholar, he had a uniquely broad perspective on Judaism and Wissenschaft and submitted the American Reform movement’s first non-Orthodox Torah commentary, in which he anchored modern Reform thought in the scholarly work of biblical exegesis.⁷²

Walter Jacob, one of the youngest refugee rabbis, became that movement’s first expert on halacha with a timely perspective on Jewish law and the challenges modern times posed for modern Judaism. He followed in the footsteps of Solomon Freehof as rabbi of Congregation Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh and also became the Reform movement’s expert on responsa, defining the legal and theological development of that movement’s perspective on Judaism for several decades, supported by traditional knowledge that could hardly be found among American-born Reform Jews.⁷³

Alexander Schindler, born in Munich, headed the UAHC as its president for twenty-three years, from 1973 to 1996. He led the UAHC in responding to many issues that made Reform Jewish congregations fit for a new era. Among the issues the Reform movement faced were the rising number of interfaith marriages and, as a result of these unions, the religious future of their offspring. Schindler argued that such a development did not have to dilute and weaken Reform congregations.

Ordination of Walter Jacob at HUC in Cincinnati, 1955: AJA, pc2005.01.

He claimed that if people had a clearly defined and informed concept of their identity as modern Jews, then they had the support and strength to reach out to those in intermarriage, their children, and also the unaffiliated. This effort might ignite a new and dedicated interest in Judaism among these people rather than losing them forever. Schindler encouraged the Reform movement’s decision to discuss and adopt patrilineal descent and the inclusion of non-Jewish partners. He supported the ordination of female rabbis and continued to bring up other pressing contemporary issues within the Reform movement because he felt it should have a defined position on issues like nuclear weapons, the arms race, rearmament, and the emerging AIDS crisis. He was not alone in supporting such bold moves.

Herman Schaalman, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) from 1981 to 1983; W. Gunther Plaut, who served in the same organization as vice president and as Schaalman’s successor as president of the CCAR until 1985; and Walter Jacob, who headed that organization from 1992 to 1994, also supported the bold moves being made within the movement. These tactics were backed not only by their leadership in the Reform Jewish rabbinical organization but also by the work being done in the movement’s ethics, responsa, and interfaith committees, which laid the groundwork for the massive shift the movement was making at the time.

The New York Times obituary of Alexander Schindler in November 2000 emphasized that Schindler had not only been dedicated to Reform Judaism as the modern face of Judaism but had also shared a deep sense of Yiddishkeit and felt at home in his father’s Hasidic world. That part of his empathetic and engaging personality and his political talent allowed him to build bridges within American Jewry and speak with authority for all American Jews, a fact that helped him find support as president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.⁷⁴

Finally, the academic centers of the Reform movement and the Conservative movement—HUC and the JTS, respectively—were headed in the late twentieth century by two refugees of the second generation. These men, Alfred Gottschalk and Ismar Schorsch, played a central role in preparing both movements for the twenty-first century.

Alfred Gottschalk served as president (1971-1996) and chancellor (1996-2000) of HUC and was one of the German-born leaders of the Reform movement in the 1970s and 1980s. HUC stood at the heart of the movement and connected the rabbinical organization of its graduates (CCAR) to the UAHC, where the college placed its graduates and thus shaped the movement’s growth and prosperity in an essential way.

Gottschalk’s leadership was important for the academic growth and orientation of the movement as well as for the practical implementation of changes within it. As a graduate of HUC, he headed the expansion of the college in the postwar era, a time when HUC was globally the only seminary training modern Reform rabbis.

After HUC merged with the Jewish Institute of Religion (JIR) in New York in 1950 to create its second campus, Gottschalk was actively involved in the expansion of the institution to Los Angeles in 1954, where he served first as director, then as dean from 1957 to 1971. He also strongly advocated for a fourth campus of HUC in Jerusalem. Establishing a Jerusalem campus was a historical accomplishment for two reasons.

Herman Schaalman: AJA, pc3966.05.

Alexander Schindler: AJA, pc4002.03.

Alfred Gottschalk: AJA, pc5001.

Leon Feldman: Yeshiva University, Gottesman Library, Special Collections, PR People Photo Box 61001.

First, it connected the movement with the newly founded state of Israel and created new avenues for the modern movement to use this campus for archaeological research in the Holy Land and thus link the movement to ancient Jewish history in a new way.

Second, it established a vanguard of the distinctly modern, timely, and pluralistic Reform movement in the Jewish homeland, where modern Judaism was rejected by an established traditional Orthodox state religion, a concept American Jews have always struggled with in their general support for the Zionist state.

Belonging to the youngest group of the refugee rabbis, Gottschalk spoke publicly about a special legacy and commitment to the development, growth, and prosperity of modern Judaism after the Shoah. He saw his position and profession as tools that allowed him to shape the training and ordination of a future modern Jewish rabbinate in a special way.

As the head of HUC for almost thirty years, he oversaw the ordination of the first female rabbi, Sally Priesand in 1972 at HUC in Cincinnati, the opening of the college’s doors to more female students, and also the ordination of the first female Reform rabbi officiating in Israel. In 1995, HUC accepted openly gay and lesbian students for the rabbinate.⁷⁵

In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and Germany’s reunification created an unexpected historical opportunity for Gottschalk and his peers. This opportunity might have been missed if key Reform Jewish leaders with a special relationship to Germany—Schaalman, Plaut, Jacob, Schindler, and Gottschalk—had not been in positions to make an idea come alive; namely, the founding of a modern rabbinical seminary just outside of Berlin that would revive an ultimately German tradition.

The founding of the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg in 1999 at the University of Potsdam was a significant achievement, for it provided a new perspective on modern Judaism in its historic center on the European continent and proved that “the last generation of the German rabbinate” had fulfilled its mission to secure the survival, if not the symbolic undoing, of Hitler’s destruction, an accomplishment that is discussed in more detail in chapter 6.⁷⁶

Ismar Schorsch, an ordained rabbi and secularly trained historian, headed the JTS as chancellor from 1986 to 2006. During his twenty-year tenure, he steered the JTS through a process of innovation. Schorsch supported the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in 1984, an institution linked to Conservative Judaism, to establish a broader perspective on Judaism in Jerusalem. He also helped create Project Judaica, an initiative that strengthened the education and resources of a new Jewish elite in Russia after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

He expanded Ramah (youth) camps and established a Conservative Jewish high school system across the country known as “Schechter Schools.” He was politically active during his tenure, speaking out and developing a distinctly Conservative point of view on issues like the separation of church and state, universal health care, welfare, and environmental concerns. He was actively engaged in the Arab-Israeli peace process as part of President Bill Clinton’s delegation in 1994.

While his official vita on the JTS website mentions his many academic credentials and achievements,⁷⁷ it overlooks his presidency of the New York–based LBI, part of a global research facility dedicated to researching German-Jewish history since 1955, with branches in New York, London, and Jerusalem. In this position and as part of his lifelong scholarship, Schorsch exhibited a special dedication to his German-Jewish heritage and the LBI.⁷⁸ This highlights Schorsch’s deep commitment to Wissenschaft, historical Judaism, and the role of history as a scholarly discipline in the interpretation and understanding of modern Judaism. This was particularly valuable for the Conservative movement in Judaism, which was committed simultaneously to a historical Judaism and to tradition. By its very nature, it continued to pressure Judaism to make difficult choices between tradition and modernity. Unlike its cousin movements, which leaned from the beginning toward Reform or Orthodoxy, the Conservative path was continuously challenged to fulfill both perspectives and remain authentic and true to its doctrines and traditions.

Ever since its founding, the LBI has been devoted to the memory and legacy of German Jewry and its history and has provided a central location for refugee rabbis to express their dedication to the refugee community.

For this special German-Jewish intellectual elite, the institute and its collections and publications provided a platform to uphold and study the German-Jewish legacy, address the role of the German rabbi posthumously, and explore the reasons why the once-promising German-Jewish experiment failed.

From the beginning, the refugee rabbis were deeply involved in setting up and supporting the institution as members (Leo Baerwald, Nahum Glatzer, Max Gruenewald, Alfred Jospe, and Dagobert D. Nellhaus) and leaders (Rabbi Max Gruenewald, the institute’s international president from 1974 to 1992).

Because many of the refugee rabbis had been trained as historians as part of their secular education, they incorporated their experiences, role models, and professional profiles into their work during the institute’s early years. Among them were contributors to the first volume of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, published in 1956: Max Gruenewald, with an article on the Reichsvertretung in 1956; Nahum Glatzer, with a piece on the Frankfurt Lehrhaus in the same year; and Alexander Altmann, with a piece on Jewish theology in the twentieth century.

In the second issue of the journal, Wolfgang Hamburger published an article on Leo Baeck, with whom he had developed an especially close relationship; Kurt Wilhelm, a rabbi who had fled to Palestine, presented a piece on the Jewish community in the post-emancipation period; Max Gruenewald discussed the professional profile of the “modern rabbi”; and Alfred Kober explored the history of religious instruction in Germany.

In the 1960 volume, Fritz Bamberger, a scholar of modern Jewish studies who graduated from the nonrabbinical track of the Hochschule, contributed an article on Julius Guttmann, Nahum Glatzer presented his thoughts on Leopold Zunz, Leo Adler elaborated on Jewish community organization in Württemberg, and Alexander Carlebach shared his autobiographical experiences in eastern Europe in 1961.⁷⁹

The rabbis’ commitment to memorializing their experiences and backgrounds remained strong long after the journal was first published. In the 1974 issue, which dealt with “typologies,” the authors once again discussed—after Gruenewald’s initial attempt in 1957—the professional profile of the “German rabbi.” Alexander Altmann wrote an explanation of this special “type,” and Alfred Jospe detailed the changes and challenges the profession experienced between 1910 and 1933. Both contributed to preserving the memory of their peers and themselves, a professional group that had ceased to exist decades earlier and whose traditions they upheld and shared until late in their lives. In the same issue, Max Gruenewald analyzed the professional profile of the modern Jewish teacher, Ismar Schorsch discussed German antisemitism after the Second World War, and Emil Schorsch, Ismar’s father, described the rural Jewish experience in Germany.⁸⁰

The list of examples of their participation in writing their history and shaping their legacy is long and continues to this day.

In this context, their record underscores once again that these refugee rabbis were the last of a group who sought to pass on its traditions to future generations. Because their understanding of Judaism and its history was dynamic and scholarly, their study and research of German-Jewish history was more than a chronicle of an extinct community from a lost time and place.

This research and documentation became part of larger historical contexts, such as German history, European history, and to a degree, American history, and serve as a model for the perception and history of Jews and other minorities in modern societies. German-Jewish history, the history of a minority with fewer than six hundred thousand members, has attracted researchers of diverse backgrounds who increasingly view German-Jewish history as a paradigmatic model for finding answers to questions of inclusion and exclusion posed in the context of other ethnic and religious groups in modern societies.

Aside from strengthening American Judaism and making the achievements of German Jewry available to a broader public in the United States, the Reform movement’s refugee rabbis dealt with questions about their experiences under Nazism. Even though they had become American citizens, were proud of their new citizenship, and wanted to leave their past behind, they realized that they were marked by a lasting cultural difference and therefore stayed connected with central Europe, if only to understand what had really happened to them and their former communities.

They publicly contemplated how their exclusion and persecution, which stood at the beginning of the Shoah, had been possible and to what extent, if any, they had been part of German society. They especially tried to understand why such a large portion of German society remained silent when Jews and others were ostracized, excluded, and persecuted in German society, and why the Christian churches showed so little solidarity with German Jewry, even those Jews who were baptized and members of their organizations.⁸¹

How could any religion ignore the common moral values, humanity, and respect of its members and, worse, contribute to the racialization of German society, which ultimately turned it into nothing less than a racial community?

Religiously motivated antisemitism, long present and established in European Christian churches, and the role of the state in the European religious landscape encouraged the Christian religious group’s complicity with Nazism and its racist goals.

While the practices of religious freedom and the separation of state and church in the American Constitution have hardly eliminated antisemitic stereotypes among Christian groups in the United States, their connection to a government or political party and their official establishment as a state religion was always legally impossible. American pluralism and the strength of an overarching “civil religion,” a concept that defined the commitment of the diverse nation to basic moral values, were responsible for mutual concern among religions for societal cooperation, and they helped American religions to stress shared values. Therefore, in the United States, interfaith cooperation had already been established in society when the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) was founded in 1928 in the wake of WWI atrocities. Among the movement’s leaders were Rev. Samuel Cavert, NCCJ president Rev. Everett Clinchy, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Jonah Wise, and Felix Warburg.⁸²

The Holocaust, the war, and other events in Europe alerted American religious leaders to the status of humanity and the failure of religion in modernity⁸³ and prompted a hence-unknown effort toward interfaith cooperation among Christians and Jews. The refugee rabbis were intensely involved in these efforts at both the local and wider public levels. After all, they could speak not only as theologians but also as authorities who had experienced firsthand the events around the Holocaust and the collapse of German society.

As theologians as well as representatives of secular Jewish institutions, the rabbis’ analysis mattered. They engaged deeply in interfaith dialogue, stressing that no one should forfeit their identity or demand that of another, but people should respect each other’s distinction and values.⁸⁴ The civil rights movement, its theology and rightful claim to civil equality, and its alliance with Christian churches provided a way for rabbis and their Christian counterparts to communicate with each other based on their shared commonalities.

This inspired the growth of the American interfaith movement. Abraham Joshua Heschel was appointed by the American Jewish Committee to join a commission of Jewish theologians and experts in groundbreaking negotiations with the Vatican in Rome in 1961. One year earlier, Pope John XXIII had approached the German-born Augustin Cardinal Bea, one of his closest advisers, about contacting the American Jewish Committee to discuss accusations against the Catholic doctrine of “teaching contempt” against Jews.

This was the beginning of a long and difficult process of negotiations throughout the early 1960s, which finally resulted in 1965 in the successful adoption and publication of a groundbreaking position paper by the Catholic Church toward non-Christian religions, called Nostra Aetate (In our time). The document encouraged the growth of ecumenical relations between Catholics and Jews mainly because it refrained from labeling Jews as “Christ-killers” and Judaism as a religion supposedly inferior to Christianity.

The events of the Holocaust resonated among those conducting the negotiations in Rome not only because the talks were mostly held in German, a lingua franca among the participants, but also because most of those willing to launch the project between Catholics and Jews had a historical connection to and a special concern for the country of the perpetrators.⁸⁵

The degree to which the Holocaust and the participants’ personal histories mattered in the negotiations is illustrated by Edward Kaplan in his book on Heschel. In September 1964, Heschel had a difficult and officially “failed” audience with the pope. He could not make the pope understand why Jews were unable to agree to a recent draft by the Church that expressed hope that Jews would ultimately convert to Christianity.⁸⁶

At one point in the conversation, Heschel could not hold back and departed from protocol by mentioning the history of Jewish suffering under Christianity. The pope then felt threatened and indicated that the discussed agreement was at stake. Heschel, hit in his most sensitive spot, “urged the Pope to condemn antisemitism . . . and to remove it once and for all from the church teachings.”⁸⁷

After the meeting, which had taken place amid the Jewish High Holy Days, Heschel did not hide his dissatisfaction and emotional involvement in the matter. He said publicly that he would rather go to Auschwitz than consider conversion—a message that was played up in the press and considered to be inappropriate pressure on the Vatican and a threat to the success of the historical dialogue.

Surprisingly, however, Heschel’s emotional outburst and powerful words contributed to the Vatican’s acceptance of the Jewish declaration in October 1965. The contested blame for “deicide” and the expressed desire for conversion to Catholicism had been removed. Thus the historic Nostra Aetate agreement with the Catholic Church broke the ground for a new and promising relationship between Judaism and Catholicism.⁸⁸ The episode highlighted the importance of Heschel’s involvement in the negotiations, of including a Jew who was not just a religious scholar but also a witness to and survivor of the Holocaust. Even though his behavior initially seemed inappropriate and offensive—even to the Jewish establishment—Heschel could not help but express his feelings with a clear voice and great pain in light of a history that the Catholic Church could not ignore after it had signaled it was prepared to depart from historical patterns.

While not quite as dramatic as these negotiations, interreligious councils sprung up during the postwar era in almost every American city and institutionalized the communication of religious leaders within a community. These councils not only enabled new exchanges on local matters, congregational cooperation, and communal collaboration among Christians and Jews; it also produced surprising friendships across religious boundaries, which in turn permitted religious leaders on both sides to develop new avenues for further cooperation.

Among the refugee rabbis who were particularly successful in this area was Rabbi Alfred Wolf of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, the third-largest Reform synagogue in the country. Wolf belonged to the “band of five,” the group of students from the Hochschule in Berlin who had continued their training in Cincinnati from 1935 on. Wolf’s first pulpit was in Dothan, Alabama, starting in 1941. In the years that followed, he officiated in Olympia in Washington State and at the liberal Hyde Park Congregation of Chicago. Then he served in the US Army until 1946, after which he continued his career in California as regional director of the UAHC and the Reform Jewish congregations, and served as a guest preacher at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where he joined Senior Rabbi Edgar Magnin as an associate in 1949 before he succeeded him as senior rabbi in 1984.

In this position, Wolf, a hands-on leader who was deeply committed to a “Judaism in the total context of humanity,” launched and oversaw two youth camps of the Reform movement: Camp Hess Kramer in Malibu (1952) and Gindling Hilltop Camp (1968). In the 1960s, he found a friend and companion in his fight for civil rights and interfaith dialogue in Monsignore Royale Vadakin, a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. With Vadakin, whom he had met during the Watts Riots, Wolf founded an Interreligious Council for the Los Angeles area, and both men embarked on a life dedicated to interfaith dialogue. Wolf authored Journey of Discovery: A Resource Manual for Catholic-Jewish Dialogue in 1989 and organized the first National Interreligious Conference for Seminaries in 1993. He also met with Pope John Paul II during his 1987 visit to Los Angeles.⁸⁹

In a similar fashion, Herman Schaalman began a deep personal friendship with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who had been appointed archbishop of Chicago in 1982 and soon after reached out to the communal leaders of other faiths by introducing himself as “their brother Joseph.” He founded a Council of Religious Leaders, which became the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago in 1984.⁹⁰ In 1995, Schaalman traveled with Bernardin to Jerusalem, and the two leaders walked down the Via Dolorosa before entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

On this trip, Bernardin presented his groundbreaking lecture “Anti-Semitism: The Historical Legacy and the Continuing Challenge for Christians” at Hebrew University. The friendship between the two religious leaders was so close that Schaalman was part of the mass in honor of Cardinal Bernardin at his Catholic house of worship.⁹¹

The friendship between Schaalman and Bernardin was extraordinarily close, but it was not unique; other refugee rabbis followed similar paths. Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky, who held the Reform Jewish pulpit in Madison, Wisconsin, for thirty-six years, was a beloved leader in the community and highly esteemed among his colleagues during his tenure, a fact emphasized by Marvin Zolot in Swarsensky’s biography.⁹²

Driven by the conviction that the Holocaust could have been prevented if religious leaders in Germany before 1933 had been able to create solidarity with Jews and Judaism that would have strengthened the value system of German society and precluded the persecution of its Jews, refugee rabbis looked to the American religious landscape for opportunities to build a new relationship between Christians and Jews, and the religious institutions educating the rabbinate supported this activity.

In 1981, HUC in Cincinnati established a professorship for Judeo-Christian studies for the first time in its history and appointed Jakob Petuchowski as the Sol and Arlene Bronstein Professor of Judeo-Christian Studies. Petuchowski started his career as Professor of Jewish Theology and Liturgy at HUC, and his scholarship connected him with the larger world of the Abrahamic religions and especially the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, a research area he explored from the mid-1970s on.

Midlife, Petuchowski was motivated to expand his engagement with Christian colleagues in Germany, although he had previously avoided any contact with his homeland. He wrote a number of works in German, including a short autobiography (published exclusively in his native tongue) in which he described his Jewish identity as being rooted in Germany: Mein Judesein: Wege und Erfahrungen eines deutschen Rabbiners (My Jewish being: Paths and experiences of a German rabbi).⁹³

It is interesting that Petuchowski referred to himself as a “German” rabbi on the cover of his autobiography after having lived over thirty years in other countries such as England, Scotland, and the United States. Geared toward a German audience, the book framed his scholarly work there with the story of his life, flight, and legacy as a rabbi. This put his engagement with religious dialogue in Germany in a special Holocaust context. It allowed him to highlight the historical significance of the German-Jewish tradition in Jewish history and thought, explain that current Jewish life in Germany had nothing to do with a past that was lost, and make a strong statement about why learning about Judaism was worthwhile, particularly for Germans.

Finally, the experience of the Holocaust in politics and collective memory enabled this last generation of German rabbis to present themselves as such and communicate their role and special mission. Even while the Second World War was still underway, the rabbis stayed in touch with their dispersed former congregants and cultivated the deep relationship they had created, supporting them by making sure of their whereabouts and experiences during their flight and under Nazism.

In 2007, Walter Jacob, the son of Rabbi Ernest Jacob, published with Gernot Römer a 472-page edited collection of the many letters his father had written to his former community members during and after the Shoah. In these letters, Ernest Jacob assured them that he continued to be their rabbi, their chaplain, the “last rabbi of Augsburg,” and the cohesive center of a community in dispersion. The publication not only underscores the strong personal bond Ernest Jacob maintained with his congregants long after his position in Saint Joseph, Missouri; it also demonstrates his self-awareness as a rabbi and spiritual leader who would not abandon them. After all, who else could effectively minister to them in their tradition, especially after their joint experiences under Nazism and the end of German-Jewish life in that city?

In the immediate postwar era, German refugee rabbis who spoke the language, who understood the consequences of Nazism, who witnessed the atrocities inflicted on Jews by the Nazis, and who knew the social and political problems Germany was facing in the 1920s and 1930s were wanted as experts and representatives of survivor interests in an American Jewish community that was challenged by the responsibility of representing the rights and concerns of Diaspora Jewry vis-à-vis postwar Germany. The moral qualities attributed to the German refugee rabbis, their firsthand experiences during the Nazi period, and speaking the language of the perpetrators made them effective and trustworthy negotiators on behalf of the refugees and survivors.

Therefore, it was no accident that the Conference on Material Claims against Germany appointed Joachim Prinz to be its spokesperson or that both Prinz and Nussbaum held major leadership positions in the American Jewish Congress, an organization that was involved in postwar negotiations with West Germany.

Emil Fackenheim, a Jewish philosopher and rabbi at the University of Toronto, claimed that after the Shoah, there was to be a “614th” commandment, or mitzvah, added to the 613 existing mitzvot. The new supplementary commandment was to instruct all Jews to maintain the moral imperative to secure Jewish survival. Through this commandment, all Jews, secular or religious, were called on to make it their duty to do everything they possibly could to work against the historic efforts like those made during the Holocaust to annihilate Judaism and Jews as a people. Jews were to stand loyal to their faith and people and fill their lives with new Jewish meaning.⁹⁴

Like Fackenheim, the refugee rabbis felt obliged to lead discussions on the legacy of the Holocaust for Jews, Judaism, and humanity. These activities spread from the local synagogue, where the pogrom of 9 November 1938 was commemorated; to the communities, where Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) was observed; and finally to national and international institutions, where Holocaust studies and Jewish studies programs were established and the memories of survivors were collected and archived.

Alfred Gottschalk and Joseph Asher were invited in 1980 to serve on the US Holocaust Memorial Council, the commission appointed by President Jimmy Carter to plan a national American Holocaust museum in Washington, DC. The commission contributed for over a decade to the design and establishment of this groundbreaking institution, which highlighted the legacies of the Holocaust for all Americans and reassured its Jewish community that their unique past and concerns about their future as Americans were being recognized.

To this day, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in the nation’s capital, which opened to the public in April 1993, is a central research body for the emerging field of Holocaust studies, raising funds and promoting the field’s growth and encouraging a previously unknown degree of international cooperation among archives and universities. Focusing on more than scholarly research, the institution has stimulated an intense social and political dialogue on the lessons of the Holocaust far beyond its historical framework in central Europe and has given the Holocaust a universal structure that has shaped the moral fabric for the definition of “human relations” in Western societies ever since.

For many of the refugees, the professional and intellectual engagement with their persecution during Nazism and their loss of home, family, friends, wealth, and cultural context was an attempt to come to grips with a difficult and painful rupture in their lives. Once they had dealt with the immediate consequences of flight and displacement and had established themselves in American society, many of them wanted to fill in the gaps of their memories and come to terms with their shattered identities, whereby a difficult past continued to shadow the present.

These feelings and the passing of time facilitated their return to their birthplace and a culture they still faintly remembered. They knew that there, and only there, they could finally find answers to the many questions about their lives and those of their families. They came to understand their identities and their past.⁹⁵ They also knew that the most powerful and sustainable statements and actions regarding their past could and should be made in the place where the persecution happened.

Chapter 6 examines the many facets of refugee returns to Germany, a process that began even before the Second World War ended and continues to this day. The refugee returns were an essential part of their generation’s identity as the “last generation of the German rabbinate” for themselves, American Jews, Germans, and even the postwar Jewish communities in Germany, which largely consisted of displaced persons and Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe who deliberately referred to themselves as “Jews in Germany” to underscore that German Jewry had ended with the flight and dispersion of that community and its annihilation in the Holocaust.⁹⁶ The journeys of these refugee rabbis back to Germany also constitute a hence-unknown element of transnational engagement, one that played an essential role in German-Jewish post-Holocaust relations.