European Judaism

It is a privilege to welcome as guest editor of this issue Dr Cornelia Wilhelm, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the Historical Seminar of Ludwig-Maximilians Universität-München. Our collaboration goes back to a conference organised by Tobias Grill and Dr Wilhelm in Tutzing, Germany, in October 2009. The theme was ‘German Rabbis Abroad’, and they gave the introductory lecture on ‘German Rabbis Abroad as Cultural Agents?’ I contributed a paper on ‘Rabbi Dr Werner Van der Zyl and the Creation of Leo Baeck College. The German Rabbinate Abroad: Transferring German Jewish Modernity Into the World?’ The organisers agreed to edit the proceedings of the conference for publication in this journal. At the time they noted that

From 20–22 May 2025, the research project ‘Trials and Transmissions: Mapping the Legacy of the German Refugee Rabbinate’ of LMU München and the Jüdisches Museum Franken in Fürth invited a group of experts to a workshop to gain a larger global and comparative perspective on the cultural transfers, the discussions, constructions, deconstructions and uses of their ‘Jewish heritage’ by refugee rabbis who had left Germany during the Nazi period and beyond. The event was generously supported by the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung in Munich, the Münchner Universitätsgesellschaft, the Bavarian-American Academy and the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Leo-Baeck-Institute in Deutschland and was hosted by the Jüdisches Museum Franken in Fürth and its director, Dr Daniela Eisenstein, whom I would like to thank again for her warm hospitality and the welcoming spirit of her and her team for this group of scholars.

This article examines the experiences of two German rabbis in exile in Jerusalem during the 1930s and 1940s: the orthodox Rabbi Isak Unna, founder of the Binjan Zion synagogue, and the liberal Rabbi Kurt Wilhelm, leader of the Emet ve-Emuna congregation. Both established communities in Jerusalem's Rehavia district, seeking to preserve German-Jewish heritage through prayer rites, educational initiatives and communal political orientation. Fleeing Nazi persecution, Unna and Wilhelm adapted their traditions to a new environment while maintaining distinct orthodox and liberal identities. Their efforts highlight the transfer and transformation of German-Jewish religious life in exile, balancing continuity and adaptation within the rapidly changing context of Mandate-era Jerusalem.

In the late 1930s in New York, Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany decided to re-establish the religious congregation they had just lost. Subscribing to the Neo-Orthodox stream of Judaism designed by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, these refugee families concentrated on building social and educational symbols and institutions to preserve their German-Jewish heritage in the American milieu. A critical analysis of the historical development and structure of the Breuer community in Washington Heights uncovers the depths of the Neo-Orthodox cultural transfer to the United States, revealing nuances in the extent to which the German-Jewish diaspora acclimated to the New York setting and adapted their heritage against other Jewish streams.

Austria, as part of the German-speaking world, has a long history of Jewish communities and community rabbis. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vienna was the third largest Jewish community in Europe, after Budapest and Warsaw. This article analyses the work and experience of rabbis from Austria who emigrated to Palestine after the ‘Anschluss’ in March 1938. Only few of them were able to regain positions as rabbis in Israel. The article focuses on the cultural heritage of the rabbis. It also tackles cultural transfer from Central Europe to Israel, and traces a two-fold challenge: on one side, rabbis who followed their old communities, and on the other side, rabbis who searched for a new enterprise.

The flight of Jewish refugees to Latin America in the 1930s brought a significant change in the local communities. This article attempts to trace some of the lines of ‘import’ of liberal conceptions of religious Jewish culture, in particular the legacy of the Haskalah – symbolised by the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau – which materialised in 1962 with the founding of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires. It will also examine the emergence of a network of Central European Jewish communities on the South American subcontinent (CENTRA) that represented and linked the German-Jewish experience there in the promise to keep alive and preserve the legacy of Moses Mendelssohn in these new lands.

Various aspects of German Jewish Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox and Haredi societies have received scholarly attention since the 1960s. This includes studies that focus on communities in German-speaking lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ideology, theology and worldviews of political, spiritual and religious leaders, streams within German Orthodoxy and Haredism, internal tensions and criticisms, educational institutions and rabbinical seminaries, and approaches towards Zionism and the Zionist movement. Less attention has been devoted to internal Orthodox and Haredi critiques of their German brethren, including the criticism brought up in order to demonise and delegitimise their unique effort to blend Judaism with modern society. Based upon a book published by Yerahmiel Domb in 1990, this article offers an initial critical historical insight into a poignant attack on the legacy and heritage of German Orthodoxy and Haredism, which, according to Domb, is altogether wrong, deceiving and destructive.

This article explains an innovative digital approach to writing history: the construction of a digital research portal on German refugee rabbis in the United States after 1933, which is currently funded by the German Research Foundation. It attempts to explain the opportunities and challenges for this new type of publication and approach to history for both disciplines involved, the historians and experts in data science. It also explains the features and options of the specific database.

The author introduces two grassroots remembrance projects available online and relevant for research on the biographies of German rabbis, the Remembrance Project on Jewish Teachers (BLLV) and the Remembrance Book for the Prisoners of Dachau Concentration Camp. The Dachau Remembrance Book collects biographies of prisoners of Dachau Concentration Camp, while the Bavarian Teachers’ Association's ‘Remembrance Project’ collects biographies of Bavarian Jewish teachers from the end of the nineteenth century until 1942. The biographies are researched by volunteers, mostly historical laypeople, many grammar school students. The biography of the Canadian rabbi Erwin Schild (1920–2024), who was arrested as a student of the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary (ILBA) in Würzburg in November 1938, serves as an example.

This article presents germanrabbis.org, a digital humanities project documenting ninety-nine German rabbis murdered in the Holocaust. Combining archival research, memorial sources and mapping tools, it reconstructs their intellectual, cultural and religious world, shaped by Wissenschaft des Judentums, Bildung and rationalist scholarship. Analysis of dissertations and career patterns reveals denominational differences, the centrality of Breslau, and varied migration trajectories, including failed refuge in the Low Countries. The project's website serves as a ‘mnemotechnical’ tool, transforming scattered data into a coherent, accessible corpus that preserves and interprets the final generation of the German rabbinate's moral, scholarly and spiritual legacy before its destruction.

On the centenary of Franz Kafka's death, there is an opportunity to reflect on his centrality to contemporary Jewish religious and spiritual life. By paying attention to his intuitions about his own life, he saw into the human condition and the possibility that ordinary everyday life was ‘a form of miracle’. His writings – novels, diaries, letters, parables, aphorisms – while enigmatic and elusive, offer insights into themes such as alienation, guilt, de-humanisation and the struggle to retain hope in a world shorn of hopefulness. For Kafka, writing was ‘a form of prayer’, and his body of work can be seen as a secular Torah, offering intimations of how the sacred is incarnated in daily life and in the stories we tell about it.

Daniel Taub, Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement, Hodder & Stoughton, 2025