The oldest refugee rabbi dies

The oldest Reform rabbi was a refugee. Here is why it matters.

Rabbi Herman Schaalman (1916-2017)

This past week, the oldest Reform rabbi died, at the age of 100 years old – just weeks after his beloved wife, Lotte, had died.

Rabbi Herman Schaalman served as the spiritual leader of Emanuel Congregation in Chicago for more than thirty years, where he continued his connection for decades beyond his retirement.

He was a leader in interfaith activism.


He was a founder of the Reform movement’s camp, Olin-Sang-Ruby, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where he continued to touch the lives of young people, well into his upper 90s. (They called him Yoda!)

He was a distinguished president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

He was one of American Judaism’s greatest rabbis.

His story matters.

Herman Schaalman was born in Germany in 1916.

As a young man, he studied at the great institution of liberal Jewish learning in Germany — die Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums – “The Higher Institute for the Scientific Study of Judaism.”

This was the institution of higher education for Germany’s Reform Jews – in the place where Reform Judaism had begun.

It was becoming clear to German Jewry that the greater darkness was coming, and that it would soon become inescapable.

In 1935, Hebrew Union College, the rabbinical seminary of American Reform Judaism, offered scholarships for five rabbinic students at the Hochshule to come to Cincinnati.

On the list was Gunther Plaut and Wolli Kaelter.

There were four finalists for the remaining three slots: Herman Schaalman, Alfred Wolf, Leo Lichtenberg — and a young man named Heinz Schneemann. They were ushered into a room, in which they had to decide among themselves which of them would go.

Initially, Schneeman had been selected.

But, he decided that he did not want to leave his fiancé, and therefore, he decided not to go.


Plaut, Schaalman, Kaelter, Wolf and Lichtenberg were able to leave Germany. They were known lovingly as the “gang of five” – five rabbinical students from Germany.

Rabbi Schaalman recalled what it was like to leave Germany:

I will never forget hanging out of the window of the train of the Munich station and waving a handkerchief and seeing their handkerchiefs waving goodbye. And somehow or other I had an anticipation . . . I felt terribly lost and alone.

At the time, Herman Schaalman had no idea that he would not see his brothers or parents until twelve years later.

Rabbi Plaut once reminisced about his arrival in Cincinnati:

We arrived in Cincinnati early in the morning….Nelson Glueck, Professor of Bible and future world-famed archeologist, was there to greet us. So were reporters from the local newspapers. We were the first refugees to arrive in town and we were news. We said little that was worth printing. We could not tell the truth, so we thought, for fear that our families might suffer grievously. We were afraid, and the reporters were disappointed. Thus ended our first meeting with American freedom: in our failure to use it.

The German immigrant students did not have an easy adjustment to their new world.

First, the religious adjustment.

Reform Judaism in Germany was more traditional than American Reform Judaism. On their first Shabbat in America, the five students attended services at a major Reform synagogue in Cincinnati.

They were all wearing hats.

The senior rabbi told them, in no uncertain terms, that if they ever came into the synagogue again wearing hats, he would physically throw them out.

Second, there was a language adjustment. Rabbi Plaut recalls seeing a headline on the sports pages of a newspaper: “Reds Murder Cardinals!”

He surmised that the Communist revolution had come to the Vatican.

And third, there was a cultural adjustment – to the dark underbelly of American culture.


There was apparently a rabbinical school classmate, who insisted on referring to the German students as “Heinies,” which was a derogatory insult for Germans, left over from World War One.

For, in fact, the German refugee rabbis who came to this country were lucky. They came at a time when Germany allowed them to leave, and when America allowed them to enter.

There would come a time when Germany would have forbidden them to leave, and America would have forbidden them to enter.

Remember that there had been one other student who could have come to the United States — Heinz Schneeman.

He does not appear in Google — which is to say, he has disappeared from history.

Heinz Schneeman was not alone. Many other students in Berlin perished.

We can only wonder: what kind of career would Rabbi Schneeman had in the United States? How many students would he have taught? How many lives would he have touched?


Those answers are now lost in the ashes.

Herman Schaalman, the last refugee rabbi, died, as the Trump administration tries to ban Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

Of the refugees who want to leave Syria and come to our traditionally welcoming shores: how many would have become doctors, surgeons, scientists, economists, authors, teachers, business people, or simply plain “ordinary” Americans?

Today, a federal appeals court rejected a request by the Justice Department to immediately restore President Trump’s travel ban.

I think that, in eternity, Herman Schaalman is smiling.

And Heinz Schneemann?

He, and his lost classmates, are rushing to embrace their classmate, who had become one of America’s most influential rabbis.

I hope that he is smiling — knowing that this blog puts him in Google.

It is an immortality that he richly deserves.

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