Abraham Joseph Reiss

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Abraham Joseph Reiss

Abraham Joseph Reiss , also Reis , from 1840 Abraham Rice (* 1802 in Gochsheim , Lower Franconia ; † October 29, 1862 in Baltimore , Maryland , USA ) was a German Talmudic scholar, the first officially appointed rabbi in the USA and spiritual head of the American Jews.

Life

He was the son of Meir Reiss , his sister was Blume Reiss . Reiss had to limp all his life after an accident as a toddler. At the time of his birth there was an Orthodox Israelite religious community in Gochsheim with around 150 members. In addition to a synagogue, there was a Jewish school and a mikveh in the Judenhof . Reiss was brought up accordingly Orthodox. He received his further Orthodox stamp at the Würzburg yeshiva with Chief Rabbi Abraham Bing , later he studied at the yeshiva in Fürth with Rabbi Wolf Hamburg . As a 30-year-old Reiss himself taught as a professor of Talmud at the yeshiva in Zell am Main .

There he met Rosalie Leucht (1812–1878), the daughter of Shmuel (Samuel) Halevi Leucht , whom he married around 1835. Colleagues and sponsors finally persuaded Reiss to emigrate to America in order to be the first officially appointed chief rabbi to help establish Israelite religious communities. Because between 1825 and 1860 the Jewish population in the United States grew very quickly from just 6,000 to over 150,000.

After a two-month voyage on board the SS Sir Isaac Newton, which had only been built the year before (1839) and arrived in New York City on July 25, 1840 - his sister Blume had accompanied the couple - Reiss found "chaotic conditions" there, in his own words . Uneducated people would have "the rabbinical cap on" without ever having studied the Talmud. Since he was not accepted by the New York Jews, he wanted to build a church in Newport, Rhode Island , but he soon failed there too. When he returned to New York, he met the German Aaron Weglein , who was chairman of the Nidchei Yisroel congregation in Baltimore. Weglein invited him to become a rabbi in Baltimore. The Jewish community there had 600 members at that time. At the end of August 1840, Reiss arrived in Baltimore as Abraham Rice . In 1845 he founded a Jewish school, one of the first in America.

In accordance with his strict Orthodox training, he fought vehemently against the emerging liberal Judaism and was therefore heavily criticized by his parishioners. He cracked down on Jews who violated the laws of the Sabbath , and adhered to traditional burial rituals as well as the traditional rite of prayer. He wrote to his former teacher Wolf Hamburger in Germany: “Religious life in this country is on the floor. Most people eat non- kosher foods and publicly break the Sabbath. I seriously wonder whether it should be allowed to live as a Jew in this country at all. "

He became increasingly alienated from his parishioners. A clear sign of this was that in May 1842 , Moses Hutzler finally founded the Har Sinai Association in his house with reform-minded Jews based on the model of the Hamburg Temple Association , held his own church services in the house and even hired his own rabbi in 1855 with David Einhorn .

Finally, after eight years (1849), Reiss was forced to give up his office as rabbi. However, he founded his own strictly Orthodox prayer group. For his own living he worked as a haberdashery and grocer. Due to his regular publications in the Jewish monthly magazine The Occident , the first Jewish periodical in the USA, his name remained known in Jewish circles in the USA. As the spiritual head of the American Jews, he often had to clarify legal issues in terms of the Halacha and founded a Beth Din . At that time (1850), in addition to his wife Rosalie, the children Caroline (3), Fanny (6), Sarah (20) and adoptive daughter Caroline (20) belonged to his household, others had died in childhood.

In 1862 he was appointed rabbi for a second time by his previous congregation, but Reiss died of a heart attack just five months after taking office . His grave in the Jewish cemetery in Baltimore is still popular with Orthodox Jews after 150 years. His written estate is now archived in the Abraham Rice Collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in New York City.

In 1871, the Nidchei Yisroel community finally joined Reform Judaism . Reiss' wife Rosalie lived until 1878 and received a pension of $ 300 a year. On March 15, 2010, 50 of the couple's descendants met in Baltimore at the Jewish Museum of Maryland to commemorate the famous rabbi.

Publications (selection)

  • The Messiah , in: The Occident , September 1843 ( online )

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jacob Rader Marcus, Abraham J. Peck, Jeffrey S. Gurock: The American rabbinate , 1985, p. 75 ( digitized version )
  2. ↑ In the register list of the Gochsheim Jewish community, a second-hand dealer Maier Isaak Reiss is mentioned in 1817 and Maier Reiss' widow in the middle of the 19th century .
  3. ↑ Rabbi Abraham Rice and Descendants
  4. ^ Yitzchok Levine: Abraham Rice. First Rabbi In America , Part 1 (PDF file; 21 kB)
  5. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums , Volume 27, 1863, p. 27 ( digitized version ).
  6. ^ John Arthur Garraty, Mark Christopher Carnes: American national biography , Volume 18, Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0195127978 and ISBN 9780195127973 , p. 402 ( excerpt ).
personal data
SURNAME Reiss, Abraham Joseph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rice, Abraham Joseph; Rice, Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German rabbi; first official rabbi in the USA
DATE OF BIRTH 1802
PLACE OF BIRTH Gochsheim , Lower Franconia
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1862
Place of death Baltimore , Maryland, United States