In The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate, Cornelia Wilhelm traces the experiences of the more than 250 rabbis, rabbinical scholars, and rabbinical students who were forced to flee Germany for the United States after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The refugee rabbis were a small number of those Jews able to escape Europe before the Second World War, but Wilhelm demonstrates their importance to the wider history of the Holocaust. In her brief outline of the history of the German rabbinate, she points out how its modern professionalization transformed the position of rabbi from “legal expert and communal authority” to “mediator, spiritual leader, social worker, scholar, and representative in society” (3). The rabbis were particularly targeted by the Nazis because of their critical role in the Jewish community, their leadership in “confront[ing] exclusion and persecution,” and their ability to inspire their congregants to “obtain or maintain a proud sense of Jewishness” (4).
Wilhelm uses both qualitative data, from autobiographies, memoirs, and oral history interviews, and quantitative data, predominantly from the database “German Refugee Rabbis in the United States after 1933,” held by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitӓt München. She demonstrates, in concert with recent academic refugee history and Holocaust scholarship, that this is neither a German story nor an American story but a transnational one. Networks based on friendships and alliances which cut across national borders were essential in aiding the rabbinate's flight. This transnational experience also underpinned rabbis’ post-war contributions to Holocaust commemoration and the renewing and rebuilding of Jewish communities both in the United States and in Germany (6).
The Last Generation begins by setting out the context of the rabbinate after 1933. Chapter One shows how rabbinical scholars and students were amongst the first to be targeted by Nazi racial laws against Jews. After April 1, 1933 Jewish scholars were removed from the state university system and quotas prevented Jewish students’ access to higher education (21–22). In response to the escalating crisis, Jews found leadership from their rabbis. Both liberal and orthodox pulpits encouraged their communities towards a new relationship with their Judaism. Rabbi Joachim Prinz remembered that he used his sermons in this period to urge his community to recollect and uphold “their own nobility, [which] went back thousands of years—a nobility of love and not hate, of humanity and not brutality” (32). However, as persecution intensified—almost all of the 250 refugee rabbis reported public harassment in Nazi Germany (35)—they increasingly encouraged their students to leave and explored routes to flee themselves.
Why the United States? Professionally, America made sense for German rabbis: they had professional connections there, for some rabbinic scholars an English-speaking academy was preferable to relying on the Hebrew language in Palestine, and across the Atlantic they would be guaranteed the freedom to research and write. In the United States there was also the available help (36–37). American seminaries proved essential to the rabbis’ flight. Seminaries could also benefit from a loophole in US immigration policy, the so-called “non-quota visa”. This allowed an international network of places of Jewish learning to bring in people outside of the restrictive US quota if they could prove that a US institution would provide the rabbi with a position and funding.
Chapter Three takes up the analysis by focusing on communal rabbis. Wilhelm succeeds in highlighting some of the personal journeys of individual rabbis, stories which were each unique for the challenges faced. These stories often reveal the pre-war Nazi policy of enforced emigration. Rabbi Simon Schwab was offered a pulpit in Baltimore in September 1936. His passport, confiscated by the Nazis, was returned to him only to allow him to leave (85-86). Obtaining a visa was far from easy. Abraham Joshua Heschel first applied for a visa in June 1938 but in October was expelled by the Nazi state to Poland. He was informed that his lack of teaching experience—a result of Nazi restrictions against Jewish scholars—was holding up his application. He fled Poland in July 1939 for England but a visa was still not obtained until January 1940, allowing him to finally leave for the United States in March that year (54–55). After the November Pogrom of November 1938, the situation worsened still further for rabbis, making their flight all the more urgent. Communal rabbis were often more prominent targets for humiliation, violence, and arrest. Rabbi Hans Hirschberg was forced by stormtroopers to set his own synagogue alight (97).
In Chapter Four, Wilhelm turns to the refugee rabbis’ experiences in the USA, tracing the challenges of their transition into American Jewish life. For the younger rabbinical students, this was less complicated: seminaries enabled this cultural shift by giving them insight into a new way of life and friendship networks which helped them to navigate it. American society was a much more profound shock to the older scholars and communal rabbis; however. Refugees accustomed to eminent academic positions were now reduced to temporary visiting contracts. Rabbis of German communities sometimes struggled to live up to the expectations of American congregations.
Becoming US citizens would eventually help many of the refugee rabbis to finally begin to feel settled in their new homes, but, as Wilhelm outlines in Chapter Five, in the post-war years the rabbinate were “by no means” silent about the trauma of the Holocaust (142), illustrated in the wealth of materials which they collated documenting their refugee journeys. The loss of homes and families, Wilhelm argues, enabled communities to reconstruct not around a physical place but around “the social and intellectual interaction and engagement of those who survived” (141).
Indeed, their special status as German refugees, as witnesses and as survivors, enabled some rabbis to speak powerfully to the challenges with which their new home grappled in the post-war years. Joachim Prinz famously introduced Revd. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in August 1963. Abraham Joshua Heschel's leadership was central in the conversations which led to Nostra Aetate in 1965 and a historic realignment of the relationship between Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church (173). Refugee rabbis led their communities in navigating the war in Vietnam and pioneering Holocaust commemoration. As Wilhelm explores in the final chapter, in returning to a new Germany, either in the immediate aftermath of the war or later, they supported the renewal of Jewish life in the country they had been forced to flee.
Wilhelm has produced an important analysis of a curiously neglected but critically important aspect of the history of Jewish refugees during and following the Nazi period. Despite its necessarily restricted scope, limited to a small sample of the larger history of Jewish refugees, in its “long-term analysis” of “biographies and life-cycles” (4) The Last Generation reveals the individuals behind the immigration figures, the worlds they left behind, and the communities which they joined and shaped in the post-Holocaust years, illustrating the points of connection between Jewish life before and after catastrophe. She brings to the forefront the international networks which enabled the rabbis’ flight. Perhaps most powerfully, in closely following the challenges inherent in this activism, and the failings of these networks as well as their successes, Wilhelm also ensures that the reader remembers those members of the rabbinate whom the rescuers were not able to help. Rabbi Fritz Kempner, whose visa was never finalized due to delays in establishing his degree status, served the synagogue on Heylstrasse in Berlin-Schӧneberg until 1942 (76). Rabbi Kempner was murdered in Auschwitz on 29 November 1942.
