PREFACE

As a scholar of German-Jewish history, I have spent long periods of research on the campus of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in the American Jewish Archives. During these visits it crystallized to me, how the German refugees of the 1930s had been part of this college community and how their mark still resonated there.

For many years I wondered how their history could be written and presented as a solid empirical study which would also provide deeper insights to the realities of those who were forced to flee, a decision which turned their lives upside down, left them marked for life, but also secured their survival in a place that had become a new home for them. Our digital humanities database and this book may give the refugees and their families now the long-deserved visibility and recognition and will hopefully stimulate more research in this area.

All this work would have never been possible without the generous funding that I received from a number of organizations and foundations, most of whom have distributed public funds toward this project. I would like to underscore this fact, is important in this context and might be meaningful for the families of those who were forced to flee, that this project was funded by the German taxpayer. Therefore, I would like to thank the many funders in a special way:

The first enthusiastic funding came, - no surprise, - from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives on the campus of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, with one of their wonderful fellowships. This first opportunity to explore this topic in more depth was essential for the growth and conceptualization of all that followed. The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish archives have not only been a great resource for this work, but also an emphatic partner in this project form its very beginning.

Once the topic had been developed, it was generously supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and by the German Academic Exchange Service during my tenure as Distinguished DAAD Visiting Professor at Emory University from 2010 to 2016. Living and working in the United States allowed me not only to use libraries and archives there, but also to connect to many individuals and families in person which added to this project’s depth and visibility in the United States.

After my return to Germany in 2016 I received generous funding from the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation, and from the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich to complete this manuscript and the database and am grateful for this opportunity to complete this work.

Currently a more comprehensive sophisticated digital research portal on the German rabbinate after 1933 is once again funded by the German Research Foundation in its priority program “Jewish Cultural Heritage” and allows us to provide a digital platform to analyze and research this group of refugees more intensely in the future.

Beyond the funding, it was a large group of scholars and colleagues who deserve special mention as ongoing mentors, supporters, and experts with a topic that had to be gradually uncovered and explored over time. Among them are Michael A. Meyer, Michael Brenner, Stephen Whitfield, Ismar Schorsch, Hasia Diner, Jonathan Sarna, David Jünger, Judah Cohen, Astrid Zajdband, Jonathan Magonet, Frank Mecklenburg, Raphael Thurm, Gary Zola, Dana Herman, Shuly Berger, Naomi Steinberger, Eric Goldstein, Deborah Lipstadt and the late Eli Faber and I want to underscore how indebted I am to them for their patience, wisdom, inspiration and collegial interest in my research.

Last but not least, I would like to thank the many individuals and family members, the refugees and their children, who all supported this work with stories, documents and memories and had time and great confidence to share such information with me. Among them are Abraham Lowenthal, Ismar Schorsch, Eli Faber, Gustav Buchdahl, Ralph Kingsley, Elizabeth Petuchowski, Elliott Bondi, Meta Bechhofer, Hillel Cohn, Yosef Schwab, Michael Leipziger, Norbert Weinberg, Hillel Cohn, Raphael Asher, Dan Wolf and Susannah Heschel.

This book is dedicated to the refugees and their families and was written to honor their memory!