2003
ISSUE 62
23
itler’s rise to power in the
winter of 1933 was fol-
lowed almost immediately by an
initial implementation of his
antisemitic ideology: on April
1
st of that year Nazi storm
troopers took up positions in
front of Jewish businesses bear-
ing placards that warned
customers to keep away; Jews
were assaulted in the streets and
in some instances murdered.
Students and faculty at the
College could scarcely ignore
what was happening to their
brethren. They participated in
the boycott of German
goods; they discussed
ways to stimulate
American public
opinion
against
Hitler, to
advance the
cause of
German
Jewry via
diplomatic
channels,
and to secure
relief for the
refugees. Five
years later, in
November 1938,
when German synagogues
went up in smoke during the
infamous
Kristallnacht
,
HUC
students sent a barrage of
telegrams to President Roosevelt
and urged their bi-weekly con-
gregations to do likewise. Some
of them helped to organize and
publicize a giant protest meeting
in Cincinnati’s Emory
Auditorium.
The College had a special rela-
tionship to German Jewry. The
founders had all come from its
ranks, and to a large extent the
Board of Governors was still
composed of men whose parents
or grandparents had emigrated
from Germany. Various
American-born members of the
faculty, beginning with
Morgenstern [HUC President,
1921-1947]
had received their
doctorates there and had made
the intimate acquaintance of
German Jews. But what, con-
cretely, could the College, as an
institution, do?
As it turned out, there was a sav-
ing, even unique, kind of action
that HUC was able to perform.
With the future of German Jewry
becoming ever more hopeless,
Ismar Elbogen, the head of
the
Hochshule
(
now
degraded by the
Nazis to
Lehranstalt
)
fü
r
die Wissenschaft
des Judentums
,
and Julian
Morgenstern
worked out an
arrangement
whereby a few
students of the
German liberal
seminary could
pursue their rab-
binical studies at the
College. If conditions
permitted, they would return
to Germany after ordination; if
not, they would seek positions in
the United States. Despite the
College’s continuing financial dif-
ficulties and the ongoing lack of
pulpit vacancies, its board agreed
to underwrite fully the expenses
of the five young men who
arrived from Germany in the fall
of 1935. In the next few years,
three more rabbinical students
from the Continent came to
study in Cincinnati.
“
HUC’s rescue of
European scholars is a
deed which has a unique his-
torical value and will remain
memorable for all times. It is a
noble rescue, not alone of the Jewish
teacher, but also of Jewish teaching.”
Letter to HUC President Julian
Morgenstern, April 23, 1939,
from Michael Guttmann, head
of the Budapest seminary and
father of Alexander
Guttmann
“
The Jewish School in Exile” at Hebrew Union College
(
From left) Samuel Atlas, who had taught Talmud at the Institute of
Jewish Studies at Warsaw; Abrahan Joshua Heschel, formerly of the
Juedisches Lehrhaus at Frankfort-am-Main and the Institute of Jewish
Studies at Warsaw; Michael Wilensky, who had worked with Chaim
Nachman Bialik in the Dvir Publishing House in Germany before fleeing
Nazi Germany for Lithuania where he lacked work and citizenship;
Eugen Taeubler, Professor of History at Heidelberg until his dismissal
by the Hitler government; Julius Lewy, formerly Professor of Semitic
Languages and Ancient Oriental History at Giessen and Director of its
Oriental Seminary, Curator of the Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian
Antiquities at the University of Jena and editor of the publications of
the Vorderasiatisch-Aegyptische Gesellschaft of Berlin; Julian
Morgenstern, HUC President; Alexander Guttmann, who had taught
Talmud and Mishnah at the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des
Judentums at Berlin; Isaiah Sonne (hidden), who had taught at the
Rabbinical College in Florence and later was Director of the Rabbinical
College on the Island of Rhodes until Italy adopted the anti-Jewish
laws of Germany; Eric Werner, formally Instructor in Jewish Music and
Liturgy at the Theological Seminary of Breslau; Franz Landsberger, for-
merly Associate Professor of History of Art at Breslau; and Franz
Rosenthal, a prize-winning Semiticist who had fled Germany.
Hebrew Union
College’s Rescue
of Scholars During
the Holocaust
(
continued on page 25)
From Michael A. Meyer,
Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion at One Hundred Years
,
HUC Press, 1976.
H