(UNDATED) Albert Einstein (Time magazine’s “Person of the 20th Century”), Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) Henry Kissinger (the former secretary of state), Billy Wilder (the film director/screen writer), Kurt Weill (the composer of “The Three Penny Opera”) and Hannah Arendt (the political philosopher) …
What story do these six people share?
They were all Jews from Germany or Austria who escaped to the U.S. or England following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 — despite restrictive anti-immigration policies that limited the number of Jews who could find safety from Hitler’s death march.
Some individuals, including these half-dozen prominent Jews, eluded the Nazis and escaped the fate that befell 6 million fellow Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. Of those six, only Kissinger, now 86, is still alive.
Yet there were others, including German-born Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk, who died Sept. 12 at the age of 79. For more than two decades, from 1971 to 1996, he was president of Reform Judaism’s seminary, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Gottschalk was born in the small village of Oberwesel, where he witnessed the 1938 Kristallnacht anti-Jewish pogrom that destroyed his town’s synagogue and its sacred Torah scrolls. Gottschalk lost 55 — think of it, 55! — relatives during the Holocaust. That trauma left indelible spiritual and emotional scars on young Alfred after he arrived in America in 1939. His constant “remembrance of things past” motivated Gottschalk’s distinguished career as a rabbi, Jewish scholar, and community leader.
Because his father died in New York City at a young age, Gottschalk played semi-professional football to help earn money to feed his family. In a meeting many years later with President Reagan, Gottschalk thanked the former film star for teaching him English; the young German Jewish boy was an avid fan of Reagan’s films.
As seminary president, Gottschalk ordained America’s first woman rabbi in 1972, and three years later the first female cantor. In 1996, he ordained the first woman rabbi in Israel. Hundreds of other women have followed their paths, including my daughter, a rabbi. Gottschalk also opened the seminary’s four branches in Jerusalem, Cincinnati, New York and Los Angeles to gay and lesbian students.
Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925-2000) was another Jew who fled the Nazis as a child. During World War II, he was a U.S. Army ski trooper who was wounded in combat and received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Beginning in 1973 Schindler served as president of the Reform movement’s congregational arm, now known as the Union for Reform Judaism, until he retired in 1996.
It’s more than a little ironic that for the same quarter century, both the Reform movement’s synagogues and its seminary were led by two talented refugees from Hitler.
Schindler, too, was a religious pioneer. In the 1970s he pressed his fellow Reform rabbis to adopt the principle of “patrilineal descent.” Judaism traditionally traced one’s Jewish lineage through a Jewish mother, but Schindler urged its expansion to include children of Jewish fathers. He won that battle for change.
In 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected Israel’s first non-Labor Party prime minister in nearly 30 years, many U.S. Jewish leaders seemed unwilling or unable to relate to the new reality. But Schindler, who occupied a national leadership position at the time, brought Begin, Washington, and the American Jewish community together into a working relationship that led to the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.
Gottschalk and Schindler personified “Bildung,” a German term that denotes an emphasis on education and culture, and enlightenment in religion and politics. They’re both gone now, and with them goes an extraordinary chapter in American and Jewish history.
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)
