EXCERPTS FROM THE ADDRESS DELIVERED BY DOCTOR LEO BAECK AT THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA ON JANUARY 6TH, 1946 WHEN HE WAS AWARDED THE HONORARY DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF DIVINITY AT A SPECIAL CONVOCATION IN HIS HONOR
New York: JTSA, 1946. Item #42549
1st edition. Original stapled mimeograph (“stenciled”) sheets, 4to (letter size), 4 sheets.
Dated January 17, 1946, this set of excerpts, “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE,” lists the JTSA office of Rose Feitelson as the press contact; Feitlson was, interestingly, also a close friend and translator of Hanah Arendt. Baeck, here traveling to the US for the first time and with the assistance of his English-speaking kindertransport-saved granddaughter, Marianne Berlack (later Dreyfus), opens his comments here in typically generous style by holding up Solomon Schechter and Jacob Schiff as models of Jewish teaching and leadership, and then examining what is the meaning of “Jewish Theology” and “Jewish Tradition.”
Leo Baeck (1873-1956) was a 20th-century German rabbi, scholar, and theologian. He served as leader of Reform Judaism in his native country and internationally, and later represented all German Jews during the Nazi era. After the Second World War, he settled in London, in the United Kingdom, where he served as the chairman of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. In 1955, the Leo Baeck Institute for the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry was established, and Baeck was its first international president. The Leo Baeck Medal has been awarded since 1978 to those who have helped preserve the spirit of German-speaking Jewry in culture, academia, politics, and philanthropy….
In 1933, after the Nazis took power, Baeck worked to defend the Jewish community as president of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden, an umbrella organization that united German Jewry from 1933 to 1938. After the Reichsvertretung was disbanded during Kristallnacht in 1938, the Nazis reassembled the council's members under the government controlled Reichsvereinigung. Baeck headed this organization as its president until his deportation. On 27 January 1943, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp….
Baeck's lectures [at Theresienstadt] were credited with helping prisoners survive their confinement. Heinrich F. Liebrecht said Baeck's lectures helped him to discover wellsprings of strength and the conviction that his life had a purpose….
Up until his deportation, numerous American institutions offered to help him escape the war and immigrate to the United States. Baeck refused to abandon his community and declined the offers. Nevertheless, he managed to survive the Holocaust, though three of his sisters perished in the ghetto” (Wikipedia).
Rose Feitelson was “a friend to Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher” who was “known as one of Arendt’s ‘Englishers’ – ‘our closest friend’ who ‘arranges my English’.....
Arendt and Feitelson saw each other frequently in New York, professionally and socially, and they travelled together. In 1951, Hannah acknowledged Rose's help publicly in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism…. And in 1965, in a letter of recommendation, she wrote about her friend: ‘I have known Miss Feitelson for over twenty years; for more than fifteen years, she edited and sometimes re-wrote my books and articles, and I have always valued highly her intelligence, her great sensitivity for language and style, her ability to grasp and assimilate all kinds of information and knowledge’” (https://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/75/114).
None on OCLC-Worldcat. Nor could we could locate no listed copies of this anywhere using a google search.
Toning, and a bit of corner-wear, but solid and bright Very Good Condition, very well preserved. Rare and important (Holo2-160-56).
Price: $325.00