Leo Baeck

Leo Baeck was born on May 23, 1873, in Lissa, the son of a rabbi. He began his studies at the rabbinical seminary in Breslau before moving to Berlin, where he studied at the College for Jewish Studies and Friedrich Wilhelm University. He received his doctorate in 1895 with a thesis on “Spinoza’s First Influences on Germany” and then took up a position as rabbi in Oppeln. He returned to Berlin in 1912, where he worked as a community rabbi and taught at the College for Jewish Studies.

Baeck held various offices, including chairman of the General German Rabbinical Association from 1922 and chairman of the Central Welfare Office of Jews in Germany from 1925, and became increasingly central to the Jewish community in Berlin and throughout Germany, thanks in part to his talent for mediating between different points of view.

When, in the face of increasing anti-Semitic persecution, various Jewish associations joined together in 1933 to form the Reich Representation of German Jews, Baeck was unanimously elected president. In this role, he sought both to support the increasingly impoverished Jewish population and to facilitate emigration.

Baeck remained president even after the forced merger of all Jewish institutions into the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which was henceforth subordinate to the Nazi authorities. Despite having the opportunity to do so, he decided not to emigrate in order to continue supporting German Jews and to enable their escape.

In 1943, he was deported to Theresienstadt but ultimately survived the Holocaust. After the war, he emigrated to London and continued his political activism, serving as president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism and as a professor at Hebrew Union College in the United States, among other positions. He died in London on November 2, 1956.

The Leo Baeck Institute, founded in Jerusalem, New York, and London in 1955, which is dedicated to researching and preserving the heritage of German-speaking Jewry, is named after him.

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