CONCLUSION

The history of the “last generation of the German rabbinate” provides a perspective that is absent from the multifaceted narrative of this leadership at the heart of German-Jewish history. It emphasizes how the unique leadership of the “German” rabbis was dedicated to putting a Jewish solution to Nazism front and center, before, during, and after the Nazi era.

In this effort, they succeeded in upholding and strengthening what Nazism targeted namely, the German model of a modern Judaism that saw itself and the modern Jew as an integral part of modern society. This model continued to be their guiding principle even though it faced criticism for its assimilationist attitudes and was suspected—as German Judaism was thought to have done—of facilitating a similar catastrophe in the future in the United States.

The long-term analysis of this group proves the opposite, namely, that they actively confronted history and the supposed shortcomings of their tradition in a unique effort to provide answers to essential questions that modern Judaism had to deal with in the postwar era. In fact, they were essential in answering many questions American Jews had at the time and were architects of a postwar revival of modern Judaism that made the United States its new center.¹

A close look at what happened in German-Jewish communities in the 1920s, however, reveals an enormous transformation by the impact of Zionism and the reemergence of a Jewish ethnic identity was already taking place that would help German Jews find answers during a similar crisis triggered by Nazism. For them, finding inner strength, if not pride, in a distinct Jewish identity was essential and created resilience. In this process, a dynamic young generation stood out, one that rebounded to a large degree in the American rabbinate after being rescued by their colleagues in the United States.

Dedicated to a modern and hence authentic Judaism from their own life experience, German Jews felt responsible for finding answers to the questions facing modern Judaism in post-Holocaust America and for writing the last chapter of the modern German-Jewish rabbi. Their systematic expulsion from Germany from the mid-1930s on and especially after the pogrom of 9 November 1938 seemed to have destroyed a proud German-Jewish religious elite that understood itself as a communal leadership dedicated to a timely Jewish identity in modern society, to the zeitgeist, and to modern Jewish Wissenschaft. Persecution, flight, and subsequently the Holocaust seemed to have destroyed their scholarship, identity, cohesion, communication, and professional networks. Displacement in new and sometimes completely foreign cultural contexts as well as the loss of those who perished in the Shoah threatened the continuity of a distinctly modern Jewish identity, which had had its historic center in German-speaking Europe.

While the refugee experience meant survival, it came at a high price: dislocation, uprootedness, cultural estrangement and adaptation, and the loss of home, family, security, community, and a sense of belonging. The trauma of being expelled or forced to flee remained with the refugees, shaping their lives forever. While their flight technically ended upon arrival in the United States, their experience of flight, displacement, destruction, and relocation did not.

This fact is often neglected, as the methodology, practicability, and lack of in-depth knowledge about the receiving communities prohibited long-term studies, group biographies based on extensive data, and the thorough evaluation of data that tracked more than flight or survival. For practical reasons, few studies can invest enough time and resources to look at the larger picture. Therefore, most biographical studies focus on individuals and neglect to reveal the deep intellectual encounter of this postwar community with the Holocaust. That is why this book focuses on the individual rabbis’ personal thoughts and recollections of their roles, trauma, memories, and attempts at building a legacy, especially as they gained a new agency as Jewish leaders in the process.²

The analysis of the refugees’ careers; their lives from cradle to grave and across political epochs, global migrations, and transnational networks; their late-life returns to Germany; and their exchange of knowledge and scholarship shows that it was the very nature of their Judaism, one dedicated to societal engagement, that made it portable and adaptable and that helped most of the refugees not only to survive in their professions but to develop promising careers. This ultimately led to the creation of a legacy and a future for the movement, one that continued to thrive, created a new center in the United States, and experienced a postwar renewal in which these rabbis played a central role.³

Approaching this project via the digital humanities allowed a more nuanced analysis of the approximately 250 biographies of refugee rabbis and revealed who these people were, where they came from, what guided them, and how they concluded their lives after their sometimes global migrations. Many of them had been born shortly before or after 1900 and were affected by societal trends and movements that developed around the First World War: reflections on the loss of an original Jewish identity by assimilation, exposure to eastern European Jewish role models and lifestyles, the experience of the war, the rise of Zionism, and the growing encounter with antisemitism.

Fifty percent of the students for the German rabbinate were from parts of Europe east of post-1918 Germany. These central or east European regions had either belonged to Germany before the war or maintained an intense cultural relationship with Germany or Austria that drew young men westward to attend German universities and rabbinical schools. They usually arrived in Berlin and Breslau with an excellent knowledge of traditional Jewish scholarship as well as a great curiosity for modernity and secular studies.

These factors created a new and distinct youth culture that was revolutionary, curious, innovative, and rooted in Jewish knowledge.⁴ These students challenged the Jewish establishment by popularizing new role models and searching for a lively and deep-seated inner Jewish identity that they passed on to their congregants. As rabbis and youth leaders, these men exhibited a fervor for Judaism and inner renewal. Jewish knowledge drove their social and political roles in society and the community, especially after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Their leadership shaped the men who later became known as the second generation of refugee rabbis, those who emigrated as children and studied in the United States but whose Jewish ideals remained rooted in the difficult but dynamic years spent in their Jewish communities in Germany.

During these difficult years and more than ever before, such ideals, practices, and religious teachings were not only in high demand in a community facing humiliation, persecution, mass flight, and ultimately destruction, but turned into a form of capital that transformed synagogues into centers of Jewish resilience and mutual support—the only support this minority could hope for at the time. For many congregants, this meant more than just practical assistance in their difficult lives.

Their Jewish being came alive, and they found a home in the synagogue. The experience with community, learning new skills and practices, political structures, and the ability to connect the present with Jewish history and identity remained with them in their new surroundings. Their knowledge and methods were implemented in their new communities in a cultural transfer that has rarely been seen in a refugee group. Their political messages fit well into the American synagogue and sometimes exceeded the expectations of their new congregants. While American Jewry was not on the brink of outward collapse, some refugees felt that the lack of Jewish knowledge, indifference, and the weakness of the Jewish identity among American Jews had led them to the edge of an abyss that might endanger the survival of modern (Diaspora) Judaism. They felt that it was their responsibility to act against that threat.⁵

This was particularly true for the liberal and Reform groups among the refugees, who found a new home in and around the Hebrew Union College. The college facilitated their integration into the American Reform movement more than any other movement in American Judaism. Because this religious movement of American Judaism shared their German heritage, it is far from surprising that their careers benefited from their efforts to come to grips with their past, to communicate intensely with society on political and religious issues, and to facilitate transfers of knowledge not only from Europe to the United States but eventually also from the United States back to Europe.⁶

Some of the formerly liberal refugee rabbis and students were integrated into the Conservative movement in American Judaism, but that movement embraced far fewer of the German refugees than the Reform movement. This was mainly due to the ethnic composition of its congregations, a reluctance to burden the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) with too many German refugee students in a short period, and the fact that German students needed an American BA degree to join the JTS. The students and rabbis who found a home at the JTS influenced the institution with their presence and leadership; however, their visibility as “Germans” was less obvious, and the institution hastened their Americanization with additional training and strict guidance from the beginning.

While many modern Orthodox Jews fled from Germany to the United States, very few found a home in the congregations of the American Orthodox movement or in the rabbinical department of Yeshiva University, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Very few found a place in an American Orthodox congregation and managed to satisfy the ethnic and religious expectations of their congregants and fit into their cultural backgrounds. The majority of the refugees who were part of the Yeshiva University system were either second-generation refugee rabbis who graduated from that institution or found a place for themselves in education, in publishing, in scholarship, in the youth movement, in the administration of American Orthodoxy, or at secular universities.

Nevertheless, the experience of Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore and Herman Naftali Neuberger’s dedication to rescuing many students from the Israelitische Lehrerbildungsanstalt of Würzburg proves that a closer look at smaller schools and Orthodox networks can reveal surprising insights.

Although the history of German Orthodox refugee rabbis in the United States is an important part of this study, it is not complete, for it depends on the large number of small independent refugee communities whose records are in private hands. Such a study would focus on the educational institutions and a number of independent yeshivot in the United States, where the presence of these refugee rabbis was felt. Their history is hard to trace due to the absence of a cohesive archive, a record of the multiple facets of their new lives outside Germany, and the dispersed transnational nature of their individual groupings after they lost their centers in Germany.

As we have learned from this research, a more detailed analysis of this community has to bring together the rescue effort of the Vaad Hatzalah and that of the modern German rabbinate, as several of the “German” rabbis started their flight from Nazi Germany with a stay in eastern Europe in the prominent yeshivot of traditional Orthodoxy. Here they were confronted with the Nazi’s aggressive invasion that drove them farther east, via Shanghai to the United States.

Not only does the global dispersion of this community deserve scholarly attention but so, too, do the Breuer family and the legendary Kahal Adass Jeshurun of Washington Heights in New York City, where Rav Joseph Breuer reassembled a part of his former Frankfurt Orthodox separatist community to continue his teachings and those of Samson Raphael Hirsch. By establishing the Rabbi Joseph Breuer Foundation, his family launched a transfer of knowledge from the Hirschian legacy by ensuring the translation of the most important works of their intellectual leaders into English and other languages and by disseminating these books.⁷

Based on the data collected and processed in the digital humanities database MIRA, it was possible to trace the individual paths of flight and resettlement, career development and academic recognition, and professional affiliations and placements of this large and diverse group of rabbis and scholars. The evaluation of this data revealed the role that old and new professional networks have played in the rebuilding of their careers.

The refugees who thrived in the United States were not only the young English-speaking rabbis but also those who found a professional network that valued their history and cultural differences and assisted them professionally and personally in transitioning to the American rabbinate, thus enabling these rabbis to contribute their unique intellectual and personal perspectives. Here the American rabbinical schools played a unique role in the assimilation of the German rabbis, the transfer of knowledge and scholarship, and the societal and congregational resonance of their messages to the public and respective movements in American Judaism. The schools became a framework for communicating concerns and positions in a generation-building process of these men as “the last of a special kind,” a generation with a special legacy. This process was most significant in the American Reform movement, whose history was so deeply rooted in a German-Jewish past.⁸

More importantly, the refugees’ public negotiations of their past and legacy paved the way for new careers in the political arena, either locally or as national leaders of American Jewry. In their effort to explain who they were and where they derived their special motivation to contribute to major post-Holocaust discourse, they communicated their past and personal experiences with Nazism, antisemitism, and racism, and continued to build a bridge between the past and the present.

In this way, the refugees not only presented themselves as “the last generation of the German rabbinate”; they also created a special legacy, one that would ensure the survival of their Jewish tradition and knowledge, that adapted it to new societal challenges, and that was determined to provide Jewish leadership, knowledge, and inner strength to the next generation of modern Jews globally. Their contribution to shifting the center of modern Judaism from central Europe to the United States in the postwar era, where their messages were heard in both the Jewish community and scholarly institutions, was remarkable and inspiring and made the United States the center of modern Judaism and Jewish scholarship after the Holocaust.

The knowledge transfer embraced modern Jewish scholarship, which became a special blend of modern and traditional Jewish knowledge with new forms to ignite people’s interest in Judaism and provide new paths to finding and incorporating the personal God in their everyday lives. This was an important achievement for many modern Jews who had lost that connection not only through assimilation but also because of the Holocaust. The refugees from Nazism had unique messages and experiences to share and were heard far beyond the synagogues. Their words reached other religious movements and the larger American public. Beyond their scholarship—teaching at prominent academic institutions, publishing scholarly works that were translated into English—their personal experience of racism, antisemitism, and Nazism drove their commitment into the political arena and society at large.

The refugees’ support of the American civil rights movement had a religious but also biographical background. They considered the commemoration, research, and education of the Holocaust to be important not only for Jews but also for society at large because they feared that a similar societal and political collapse would result in a second Holocaust.⁹ Interfaith dialogue played a crucial role in the efforts to prevent this. Such a dialogue had been absent in Germany, where the churches had failed to support the country’s Jewish community in times of crisis and had not questioned Christianity’s historical positions toward Jews or their own historical antisemitism.

Finally, the reflections of the refugee rabbis on their fractured pasts and hybrid identities resulted in return journeys to postwar Germany late in their lives. These trips frequently helped them come to grips with their past and find answers to questions that had preoccupied them since their hurried and difficult flight. Their visits also helped the Germans participate in essential postwar exchanges about their history, the shortcomings of German society, and its history of antisemitism. Their presence buttressed and defended the existence of a small but visible community of liberal Judaism in postwar Germany amid the many newly formed or restructured Jewish communities under the authority of traditionally Orthodox east European Holocaust survivors who in no way felt fully at home in the country of the perpetrators.

Globally dispersed, while a new and culturally different community of Jews slowly grew from the survivors of the death marches at the end of the Second World War in Germany, they continued to negotiate their values, pasts, and futures in Germany.

Just as the refugee rabbis found unique opportunities in a demographically expanding and increasingly diverse united Germany with a growing and increasingly pluralistic Jewish community, the second generation of the refugee rabbinate also saw the chance to reinstitute modern Jewish training in central Europe, starting with the Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg at the University of Potsdam in 1999.¹⁰ They thereby secured the reinstitutionalization and survival of modern Judaism for the next generation of European Jews. Ultimately, “the last generation of the German rabbinate” was not the last liberal rabbis to be ordained in Germany. Neither did Jewish life in Germany end, as had been expected only several years earlier. Both of these facts deeply satisfied those who had returned to Germany, for they felt they had not only met the expectations their teachers had instilled in them but had also concluded this last chapter of the German rabbinate. They set up new centers for modern rabbinical training just outside of Berlin, the city where the Haskala and their history had originated in the nineteenth century, and they were supported in this endeavor by their new American Jewish home institutions, which helped them survive, readjust, and “rekindle the flame.”¹¹

While the return of the diverse modern rabbinical seminaries could not (and will not) bring back a Jewish culture like the one destroyed by Nazism and the Shoah, the efforts led by the refugee rabbis to train modern rabbis in German-speaking central Europe helped to fill the leadership void there. These new leaders were dedicated to defining their role as Jews in post-Holocaust Europe within European societies, especially at a time when a newly united Europe provided the space where modern Judaism was once at home, long-lost central Europe.

Using the digital humanities to analyze the history of this relatively large group of refugees helped structure their biographies and compare the collected data on their lives and careers. The digital humanities also made it possible to analyze their migrations in more detail, to explore the transnational nature of this dispersed community in a more cohesive fashion, and to draw conclusions about the survival of modern Judaism within a globally mobile cohort, whose global interactions in the post-Holocaust period, aside from the focus on the United States, is a desideratum.

The results of this study provided new insights into the group as a whole and ensured that the details that characterized their biographies and illuminated their experiences as refugees from Nazism were not overlooked. Being able to systematically collect and compare these details allows us to better comprehend the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany and the role played by the synagogues, the rabbinate, and the Gemeinde and to understand why the rabbinate and community were targeted by the Nazis. Both the leadership demonstrated by German rabbis in Nazi Germany and the rescue of the German rabbinate, students, and scholars by the rabbinical schools in Germany and the United States illuminate the agency and solidarity they demonstrated during the crisis.

The details of their biographies highlight the rabbis’ battles against everyday problems resulting from persecution and social exclusion, their level of self-organization, and the remarkable agency they gave their communities. Even if they could not prevent Nazi persecution, the rabbinical seminaries (and communities) managed to rescue a number of their leaders through emigration. This mainly included young scholars, students, and former graduates who were either willing to leave or were so intimidated by the Nazis that they could no longer work in their profession. When discussing the leadership of the German-Jewish rabbinate during this time, we must also remember those rabbis who did not emigrate but stayed with their communities and ultimately perished with them in German concentration or extermination camps. Although they cannot tell their stories, they lived up to the ideals that inspired them, and their experiences also deserve further research.

Among those who were able to flee Nazism, it was those who relocated to the United States who had the best options to continue their careers in American Judaism. Their close relationship with the American rabbinical seminaries and especially the connection between the American Reform movement and liberal Judaism in Germany enhanced their agency after displacement and gave them the institutional support to re-create a certain continuity, build a legacy, and reach out to American Jews with the messages they drew from their experiences. Their communications were part of a discourse on Judaism, Germany, the Holocaust, Nazism and racism, and interfaith dialogue that not only resurfaced in American society after the Second World War but also addressed existing concerns.¹²

Their messages spoke to non-Jewish and Jewish Americans alike and were underscored by Hasia Diner’s criticism of Peter Novick’s conclusions on the prevailing “silence” over the Holocaust in American culture in general and American Jewish culture in particular after the Second World War.¹³ The MIRA database houses archival and digital materials on this refugee group and their endeavors to educate people about the past and transform society and religion to prevent in the United States what they had experienced in Germany. This resonated strongly in American society and allowed modern Judaism to flourish in the United States, turning that country into the new center of modern Judaism in the post-Holocaust world, which was not only the result of a renewal of east European traditions alone.¹⁴

I hope that this book, in conjunction with the digital humanities database MIRA, will enhance scholarly interest in this group of refugees and ignite more in-depth research on individual rabbis and their experiences, Judaism, social activism, and scholarship. The development of a global perspective would also be important, one that can examine the other major destinations of the German refugees, such as Palestine and Great Britain. Research like this will allow us an even more nuanced interpretation of the migrations and post-Holocaust activities of the refugee rabbis.