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Das deutsche Rabbinat im amerikanischen ExilGerman Refugee Rabbis in the United States of America, 1933–1990

The DFG funded project German Refugee Rabbis in the United States 1933–1990 traces migration paths and careers of German rabbis who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany after 1933. It seeks to explore their impact on American Judaism, American Jewish communities and their travels or returns to post-war Germany. It also makes available resources for further research on this group on both sides of the Atlantic.

The German Rabbinate

The German rabbinate emerged in the German lands early in the 19th century as a result of Jewish emancipation. More than any other segment of Jewry, Jews in Germany developed a systematic path that would allow them to take on a role in the modern age, to participate as citizens in society, and for Judaism to embrace the zeitgeist.

In this process the traditional rabbi underwent a major role change: While he largely lost his legal authority and traditional communities crumbled, the new, modern German rabbi, became an employee, depending on the State and his congregation. He also took a central role in the process of setting Jews on the path toward their new role in civil society and in balancing the tensions between their group and the surrounding society. In order to serve as mediator and to represent his community effectively, he was required to engage in secular university studies, acquire a Ph.D., and engage in “Wissenschaft”, or the academic and critical study of Judaism. He served as a central agent in the transformation of Jews in Germany to German Jews and shaped a new critical, historic understanding of Judaism as “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” by crafting new approaches toward a modern Judaism that became a model for Jewish negotiations of modernity both among liberal and Orthodox Jews. In this process secular universities in combination with new academic institutions that embraced the concept of Wissenschaft began to substitute the traditional yeshivot, traditional centers of higher Jewish learning, in order to educate a modern rabbinate.

The first such institutions, that combined the study of Jewish Wissenschaft with secular university training were the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau (1854), the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (1872), and the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin (1873). It is no accident that a similar academic institution, the Hebrew Union College, was founded in the United States in 1875. Although the college represented a theologically more radically liberal form of Judaism, the American Reform movement, it had emerged as a result of German Jewish mass emigration and from its very beginning had a very close relationship with its sister institutions among liberal Jews in Germany. A close relationship also emerged between the JTS in Breslau and its sister, the JTS in New York, founded in 1882. While German orthodoxy stood out in its early years in its unique encounter with modernity, it also became a hub for a modern orthodoxy that spread on both sides of the Atlantic, and was part of the emergence of a scholarly approach to Judaism in newly founded institutions such as Yeshiva University.

The project defines as German Jews those who received their education at one of these seminaries (even if their citizenship was not German), those who were born in Germany, and those who were German refugees and were outspoken about coming from a German rabbinical tradition, even if educated in an American seminary after emigration.

The Nazi Years and the German Rabbinate

During the Nazi years, the Jewish communities in Germany became central agents of Jewish life and survival. Increasingly excluded from German society, German Jews depended more and more on their communities, their practical assistance, and spiritual leadership. In order to cope with their daily challenges, to plan and prepare for emigration, and to find community and identity, Jews flocked to their Gemeinde. Rabbis were in great demand as negotiators, representatives, and spokespeople of their communities, and as chaplains. They also contributed to the tremendous efforts of their communities to re-build venues for Jewish education, training, and self-help. Their roles unavoidably turned political and were — especially among a younger generation — sometimes openly critical about the Nazi government.

Nazi persecution first forced out of the country those rabbis who taught as scholars and university professors. Affected by Nazi exclusion, they could not pursue their professions at German state universities any longer. Younger scholars lost any perspective for a career in Germany and consequently left Germany. By 1937/38, the rabbinate that served in synagogues and communities was increasingly targeted as special Jewish leadership, and faced a massive and concerted effort to expel them during the pogrom night of November 9th, 1938, when rabbis throughout Germany were almost uniformly arrested, held in concentration camps or Gestapo prisons, and only set free after they promised to leave Germany in a very short time frame.

Finding quick refuge was difficult in 1938 — the volume of refugees skyrocketed that year and the prospects of finding safe host countries within Europe were increasingly waning.

Emigration: Why the United States of America?

The United States offered a unique relocation opportunity for German Jewish rabbis.

This was due to the religious setup and religious pluralism in the United States and in the American Jewish community which allowed the individual congregations to govern themselves religiously and define their religious identity. German Jews, particularly their intellectual leadership, who had so vehemently embraced modernity and the academic study of Judaism, frequently did not fit into the religious and social fabric of their new homes. Although cultural differences certainly persisted, the United States provided both a religious structure in which refugee congregations and their leadership could thrive and an American Jewish identity that was itself very much at ease with modernity, allowing these immigrants to fit in and continue their careers even within American Jewry.

In fact, when American Jewish seminaries noticed the onset of mass departure of Jewish scholars and intellectuals from Germany, rescue efforts incorporated the idea of benefitting directly from the brain drain among the leading scholarship in Germany. This and the projected “University in Exile” deeply involved American Jewish seminaries in a coordinated rescue effort. German rabbinical schools soon increased their activities to assist their students in finding scholarships to attend their American sister institutions. After 1937 immigration of the communal rabbinate dominated the rescue activities of the centers of American Judaism. This effort mainly consisted of a broad cooperation of the scholarly centers of the American Jewish religious movements (Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Yeshiva University in New York, and Dropsie College in Philadelphia) with the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany (NCC), National Refugee Service and its subcommittees, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and the National Committee on Refugee Jewish Ministers and the International Student Service. Many of their efforts benefitted from the existence of the non-quota immigration visa that was available to clergy. This regulation allowed the centers of American Judaism to offer opportunities for short-term rabbinical positions of two years at a minimum salary in exchange for immigration visas for qualified refugees from Germany. This non-quota visa literally opened the doors for their rescue: Roughly two hundred refugee rabbis, rabbinical students, and scholars found their way to the United States after 1933.

For reasons related to the quantitative evaluation of this larger group, the collection of biographies in this database distinguishes between “rabbis” and “scholars” and also allows us to evaluate the emigration of both as one group. Some individuals may be mentioned in both groups, such as those who were ordained but, rather than serving a congregation, pursued a career in the academic world, or had an academic career before or after emigration only.

As “rabbis” we have classified those who were ordained or received a semicha, those who were not formally ordained but held the status of a “reverend” within an American congregation, and, in very few cases, those whose emigration was made possible under the assumption that they were going into the rabbinate or would continue their studies for the rabbinate.
The group of “scholars” consists generally of scholars who relocated to the United States with the assistance of the rabbinical seminaries providing a non-quota visa and employment or research opportunities as faculty. Included are also students of the seminaries who did not study for the rabbinate, ordained rabbis who did not officiate and pursued scholarly careers, and rabbis who have played a significant role as scholars in the development of their religious movements or seminaries.

Re-Settlement and Re-invention in the United States of America

Re-settlement in the United States was not an easy task, but was facilitated by factors already mentioned above. The American centers of Jewish learning, also the centers of the American Jewish religious movements turned into central vehicles for promoting these immigrants’ integration. Those who were not at ease with the respective American Jewish movements and clung to the German model of the Gemeinde, or could not find a congregation they would fit in ethnically, still found a wide array of opportunities, such as leading an independent congregation, teaching, and building up new forms of Jewish social and religious organizations. Nevertheless, a surprisingly large number of the refugee rabbis did continue their careers as rabbis in the narrower sense in the United States. Some however, such as Joachim Prinz, Max Nussbaum, Alfred Jospe, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Walter Würzburger, Alexander Schindler, Herman Schaalman, and Gunther Plaut embarked on extraordinary careers that shaped American Judaism in the postwar years.

In addition to the success stories, this database also documents the less fortunate refugees, their struggles and failures after emigration.

Research Questions

This project attempts to trace the emigration of this refugee group from Germany to the United States, and explores its impact on American Jewry and its role in transatlantic relations in the years 1933–1990. If relevant, it will reach beyond the historical caesura of German unification. Because the group includes a large number of individuals with extremely varied backgrounds and biographies, the compilation of core data in a database offered a tool for quantitative analysis of this group as a whole.

The database will serve as a basis for a monograph discussing the history of German refugee rabbis in the United States and their role as “last generation of the German rabbinate”.

Research Funding and Support

This resarch project has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (www.dfg.de). Special thanks go to the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies of New York University, the American Jewish Archives, the Leo Baeck Insitute in New York, the Yeshiva University Archives, the Archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York Public Library, the Archives of the Insitut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and the Archives of the German Foreign Office in Berlin for their support of this research project.

Bildnachweis

The images in the header of this web page are taken from the following sources, from left to right:

Martin Luther King and Joachim Prinz at the March on Washington, August 29, 1963:

Image 543593, Walther P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

Jewish refugee children wave at the Statue of Liberty as the President Harding steams into New York harbor:

Photograph 96464 (photographer: Fred Mann), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Anita Willens.

Burning Synagogue of Hannover, Germany, November 9/10, 1938:

HAZ Hauschild Archiv, Historisches Museum Hannover.

AbkürzungenAbbreviations

LizenzLicense

Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 (Namensnennungattribution, Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungenshare alike)

Conference Presentations

DFG sponsored Conference “The German Rabbinate Abroad”, organized by PD Dr. Cornelia Wilhelm and Dr. Tobias Grill, Abteilung für Jüdische Geschichte, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, in cooperation with the Akademie für Politische Bildung Tutzing, October 18–21, 2009.

Cornelia Wilhelm,
“The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate: Memory and Legacy German Refugee Rabbis in the United States” in panel: Migration, Memory, Gender, and Generations, unpublished paper given at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, Denver, CO, October 6, 2013.

Cornelia Wilhelm,
“After Nazi Persecution: German Refugee Rabbis and Diversity in American Society” in panel: Nazi-Era Refugees Confront the American World of Difference, unpublished paper given at the Biennial Scholars’ Conference in American Jewish History, Atlanta, June 12, 2014.

Cornelia Wilhelm,
“American Refugee Rabbis and the old ‘Heimat’: Moral Leadership, Memory and Righteousness” in panel: After the Holocaust: German-Jewish Refugees and Transnational Encounters with Germany, unpublished paper given at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, Kansas City, MO, September 19, 2014.

Publications

Cornelia Wilhelm and Tobias Grill (guest editors),
“The German Rabbinate Abroad,” Leo Baeck International Yearbook 57 (2012).

Cornelia Wilhelm and Tobias Grill (guest editors),
“The German Rabbinate Abroad,” European Judaism 45 (2012).

Cornelia Wilhelm,
“German Refugee Rabbis in the United States,” European Judaism 45 (2012): 78–89.

Cornelia Wilhelm and Tobias Grill,
“The German Rabbinate Abroad,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 57 (2012): 1–6.

Cornelia Wilhelm and Tobias Grill,
“German Rabbis Abroad as Cultural Agents?” European Judaism 45 (2012): 2–7.

Press Reports

Jüdische Allgemeine Nr. 43/09, 22. Oktober 2009, page 19.

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