Our mission

As of now, no academic study has looked into the worldviews of German rabbis who perished in the Holocaust. According to our findings, some 100 German rabbis found their death at Nazi camps or due to other atrocities during the Second World War. The clear majority of these rabbis were well-educated, and have earned high diplomas from leading German universities. Many of them specialized in Judaic Studies, mostly adhering to the Wissenschaft des Judentum movement’s goals and methods. These rabbis were all well integrated within intellectual circles of German Jewry, as theologians, publicists, spiritual leaders, and halakhic arbiters. Yet only a handful of these leaders, the elite of German Jewry’s religious communities, have been made the object of academic studies thus far.

These rabbis, among the others who did survive the Holocaust, generated an endemic hub of intellectuals, alienated both by their peers from the non-Jewish, grossly anti-Semitic, intellectual circles of Germany, and by their colleagues, East-European rabbis who didn’t share their worldviews and religious dispositions. Thus in Germany, a rare cultural discourse, combining traditional and liberal rabbis, flourished. In the proposed project, we wish to trace the theological and philosophical foundations of this discourse, and to reveal the trends, conventions, and conceptions that characterized it. We believe that tracing the forgotten works of these religious thinkers, mainly dissertations, sermons, halakhic works, and publications in communal and rabbinic journals, may create a wide aperture to the spiritual world of the Jewish German community, that has been effectively destroyed during the War.