Joseph Carlebach

Joseph Hirsch (Tzvi) Carlebach (January 30, 1883, Lübeck, German Empire – March 26, 1942, Biķerniecki forest, near Riga, Latvia) was a German Orthodox rabbi, natural scientist, and scholar of the history of the Jews in Germany.

Joseph Carlebach was born in Lübeck on 30 January 1883, the eighth of the twelve children of Rabbi Salomon Carlebach (1845–1919), chief rabbi of Lübeck, and Esther Carlebach née Adler (1853–1920), a writer and poet.^[1][2] Esther was a daughter of Rabbi Alexander Sussmann Adler (1816–1869), Salomon's predecessor as rabbi of Lübeck. Joseph thus belonged to the wider intermarried Yoel–Adler–Carlebach rabbinical dynasty, descended on his father's side from his grandfather, Hirsch Joseph Carlebach.^[1][3][4] Several of Joseph's brothers also became rabbis, among them Emanuel Carlebach (in Memel and Cologne), Ephraim Carlebach (in Leipzig) and Hartwig Naftali Carlebach, the father of the "singing rabbi" Shlomo Carlebach; his nephew Azriel Carlebach became founding editor of the Israeli newspapers Maariv and Yedioth Ahronoth.^[3]

He attended the Katharineum, a classical secondary school in Lübeck, and passed the Abitur (the German university-entrance examination) at Easter 1901.^[5]

In 1919 Carlebach married his former pupil Charlotte ("Lotte") Preuss (1900–1942), a daughter of the physician Julius Preuss (1861–1913).^[1] They had nine children.^[3]

From 1901 Carlebach studied mainly mathematics and the natural sciences at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, passing his state examination as a senior secondary-school teacher (Oberlehrer) in 1905.^[1][6] After a period teaching in Jerusalem from 1905 to 1907, he worked as a secondary-school teacher in Berlin while preparing his doctorate.^[6]

In 1909 Carlebach was awarded a doctorate at the University of Heidelberg for a dissertation on the medieval philosopher, exegete and astronomer Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides), published as Lewi ben Gerson als Mathematiker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Mathematik bei den Juden (Berlin, 1910).^[1][7] Alongside his university studies he attended the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin as a guest student,^[6] and was ordained a rabbi in 1914.^[1]

Having qualified to teach mathematics and the natural sciences, the 22-year-old Carlebach was offered a teaching post at the Lämel School in Jerusalem, an institution that aimed to give its pupils vocational and general education alongside religious studies. The offer was made in Berlin by the school's director, Ephraim Cohen-Reiss.^[8][9]

Between 1905 and 1907 Carlebach lived in Jerusalem and taught at the Lämel School, years that coincided with the beginning of the Second Aliyah.^[9][10]

His background and manner opened to him the homes of leaders of both the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv. He met the aged Rabbi Shmuel Salant (1816–1909), the young Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who had reached the country about a year earlier, and knew Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), David Yellin (1864–1941), with whom he kept up an extensive correspondence after returning to Germany, and Yehiel Michel Pines (1843–1913).^[9][11]

Leiman likewise records that Carlebach was befriended by the chief rabbi Shmuel Salant, who "left an indelible impression" on him.^[10] By his own later account the Jerusalem years were "the happiest years of my life ... such happy years will never return".^[9]

Because the Lämel School taught secular subjects, it was caught up in the dispute between the Old and New Yishuv over modern education, and the Haredi rabbis of Jerusalem signed a ban on such schools. After returning to Germany, Carlebach published a detailed essay defending his decision to teach there and arguing that the ban did not fit present circumstances.^[9][12]

He recorded his impressions of the country in lectures and in the German and English Jewish press. One lecture, Das heilige Land ("The Holy Land"), delivered to the Montefiore Society in Berlin, was published as a booklet in 1909.^[9] In the lecture, Carlebach praised the new Jewish agricultural colonies as the brightest sign of the country's revival. He argued that a Judaism cut off from the Land of Israel could not endure. He closed the address in Hebrew, with the traditional words "Next year in Jerusalem."^[9]

During World War I Carlebach served in the imperial German Army, at the beginning as telegraphist. In 1915 he was assigned as educator - after recommendation by his brother-in-law Leopold Rosenak, a German Army Field Rabbi active in promoting German culture among the Jews of Lithuania and Poland during the German occupation (1915–1918).

Erich Ludendorff's intention was to evoke pro-German attitudes among Jews and other Poles and Lithuanians, in order to prepare the installation of a Polish and a Lithuanian state dependent on Germany. Part of the effort was the establishment of Jewish newspapers (e.g. the folkist Warszawer Togblat, וואַרשעווער טאָגבלאַט), of Jewish organisations (e.g. Joseph's brother German Army Field Rabbi Emanuel Carlebach (1874-1927) initiated in Łomża the foundation of the hassidic umbrella organisation Agudas Yisroel of Poland, part of a non-Zionist movement founded in Germany in 1912) and of modern educational institutions of Jewish alignment. Joseph Carlebach founded the partly German-language Jüdisches Realgymnasium גימנזיום עברי (academic high school) in Kaunas (Kovno; the interwar capital of Lithuania) and directed it until 1919. The school was based on the German Torah im Derech Eretz model. The school provided both Jewish and secular studies both for men and women (separately) and was the model for the Yavneh network that Carlebach later founded in collaboration with Leo Deutschlander. In 1925, Yavneh was taken over by Joseph Leib Bloch (1860-1930), who relocated it to Telšiai (Russ.: Telshe, Yidd.: Telz טעלז) and incorporated it into the Rabbinical College of Telshe, which managed to re-establish in 1942 in the USA.

From 1919 to 1921 he was rabbi of his native home town Lübeck. In 1921, Carlebach became headmaster of the Talmud Torah high school in Hamburg. Between 1925 and 1936 he served as chief rabbi of the Hochdeutsche Israeliten-Gemeinde zu Altona, after which he changed as chief rabbi to the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde zu Hamburg, where he served until his deportation into death in 1941. Israeli jurist Haim Cohn described the effect Carlebach had on his students (as well as illustrating Carlebach's fairly unusual position that Orthodox Jews may visit churches):

He spent a full day with the boys in the Cologne Cathedral, expertly explaining every detail of the statues, the glass windows, the ornaments, and the intricacies of the Catholic faith and ritual; but I was not allowed to participate, being a Cohen who may not be under the same roof with a corpse or with tombs, lest he become impure; and although, according to the letter of the Law, it is only the Jewish dead the contact with whom renders impure, and not the non-Jewish dead, still Carlebach held that the least possibility that among the dead buried in the cathedral may have been a person of Jewish origin (even though ultimately converted to Christianity), sufficed to make the place taboo to me.^[13]

After Nazi Germany banned Jewish students from attending German schools together with "Aryan" German children, Rabbi Carlebach set up a number of schools throughout Germany to educate Jewish children. His schools bore his name and were known as Carlebach-Schulen.

He was deported to the Nazi concentration camp Jungfernhof by the Nazis, where he was murdered on March 26, 1942 during the mass shooting of approximately 1600 Jews, mostly older people and children, that became known as the Dünamünde Action.^[14] This occurred in the Biķerniecki forest, near Riga, Latvia, which was the site of numerous other shootings perpetrated by the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators, in particular, the Arajs Kommando.

His wife and younger children were also killed during the Holocaust. Of his surviving children, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach became the mashgiach ruchani ("spiritual supervisor" [of students]) at the Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, New York City after the war. Joseph Carlebach's other son, Julius Carlebach, became a renowned academic and Jewish communal leader in the UK, and was the author of Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), among other books, while his third daughter became Professor Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, who emigrated to Israel in October 1938. She taught Education and Hebrew reading at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan. In 1992, she became the head of the Joseph Carlebach Institute at Bar Ilan University and has dedicated herself to researching her father's writings as well as the writing of other Jewish leaders of the same time period.^[15]

Rabbi Joseph Carlebach's wife managed to send her elder children to England, and they survived the war.

On 18 August 1954 Jerusalem honoured Carlebach's work, among others at the local Lämel School, by naming a street (rekhov) after him, Rekhov Carlebach/Karlibakh (רחוב קרליבך), in the Talpiot neighbourhood.

The memory of Joseph Carlebach is held in great honor by the City of Hamburg and its Jewish community. In 1990, part of the University Campus, the Bornplatz Synagogue, the former location of the Main Synagogue of Hamburg and Carlebach's last pulpit, was named as the "Joseph-Carlebach-Platz", 'Joseph Carlebach Square'. In honor of his 120th Birthday in 2003, the "Joseph-Carlebach-Preis" ('Joseph Carlebach Prize') for Jewish studies was established, awarded every two years, by the State University of Hamburg.

• Carlebach, Joseph. Die drei grossen Propheten Jesajas, Jirmija und Jecheskel; eine Studie. Pp. 133. Frankfurt am Main: Hermon-Verlag, 1932
• Carlebach, Joseph. Les trois grands prophetes, Isaie, Jeremie, Ezechiel. Traduit de l'allemand par Henri Schilli. Pp. 141. Paris: Editions A. Michel, 1959
• Carlebach, Joseph. Moderne paedagogische Bestrebungen und ihre Beziehungen zum Judentum. Pp. 19. Berlin, Hebraeischer Verlag "Menorah", 1925
• Carlebach, Joseph. Mikhtavim mi-Yerushalayim (1905–1906): Erets Yi'sra'el be-reshit ha-me'ah be-`ene moreh tsa`ir, ma'skil-dati mi-Germanyah. (Ed. and transl. Miryam Gilis-Karlibakh). Pp. 141, ill. Ramat Gan: Orah, mi-pirsume Mekhon Yosef Karlibakh; Yerushalayim: Ariel, c1996
• Carlebach, Joseph. Ausgewählte Schriften mit einem Vorwort von Haim H. Cohn; Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (ed.). 2 vols. Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms Verlag, 1982
• Carlebach, Joseph. Lewi ben Gerson als Mathematiker; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Mathematik bei den Juden. Von Dr. phil. 238, [2]. Berlin: L. Lamm, 1910
• Carlebach, Joseph. Das gesetzestreue Judentum. p. 53. Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936.
• Carlebach, Joseph. Jüdischer Alltag als humaner Widerstand: Dokumente des Hamburger Oberrabiners Dr. Joseph Carlebach aus den Jahren 1939-1942. Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (ed.). p. 118. Hamburg: Verlag Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte, 1990
• Gerhard Paul; Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (ed.). Menora und Hakenkreuz: zur Geschichte der Juden in und aus Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck und Altona (1918–1998). p. 943. Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag, 1998

• Joseph Carlebach Institute
• Personality of the Week - Carlebach at www.bh.org.il
• Review of the book: Ish Yehudi: The Life and the Legacy of a Torah Great, Rav Joseph Tzvi Carebach
• Joseph Carlebach at the Mathematics Genealogy Project