Alexandre Safran

Alexandre Safran (1994)

Alexandre Safran ( Romanian Alexandru Șafran , born September 12, 1910 in Bacău , Romania ; died July 27, 2006 in Geneva , Switzerland ) was a philosopher and rabbi . From 1940 to 1948 he was Chief Rabbi of Romania, then until 1989 Grand Rabbi ( Grand-rabbin ) of Geneva.

Life

Alexandre Safran was the third son of ten children of Bezalel Seew Safran (1867-1929), the rabbi of the Romanian city of Bacau. Alexandre became his father's secretary at the age of eleven and a rabbi at the age of 18. He then lived in Vienna until 1934 , where he completed a Talmudic course at the Israelite Theological Institute there and at the same time obtained a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna . In Vienna he made the acquaintance of Sigmund Freud and dealt with his dream interpretation .

In 1940 he was elected as the successor to Jacob Itzhak Niemirower (1872–1939) as Grand Rabbi of Romania, then the world's youngest representative of this office, and at the same time became an ex officio member of the Romanian Senate . 800,000 Jews lived in Romania when the Second World War broke out . When the fascist and anti-Semitic Iron Guard first took part in a Romanian government in the summer of 1940 , anti-Semitic ordinances based on the model of the Nuremberg Laws were immediately passed. Together with Wilhelm Filderman , chairman of the Union of Romanian Jews until 1938, Safran made every effort to counteract anti-Jewish tendencies. In 1941 Safran and the Union of Romanian Jews persuaded the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu to withdraw the order to wear the Jewish star with the help of Nicodim Munteanu, the patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church . When all Jewish organizations in Romania were banned shortly afterwards, Safran and other leading members of the Jewish community went underground. In 1942 Safran was able to persuade Antonescu, with the help of contacts to diplomats, the Queen Mother Elena and the Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo, to resist the German demands for the complete deportation of Romanian Jews to Transnistria . 57% of Romanian Jews survived World War II.

After the end of the war, Safran refused to cooperate with the communist authorities and in 1947 came to Geneva via Budapest , Prague and Paris , where he was appointed Grand Rabbi in 1948 and remained until the end of his life. As part of the Christian-Jewish dialogue , he took part in the Seelisberg Conference in 1947 and continued to maintain numerous contacts with high church representatives, including Cardinal Augustin Bea , Bishop Pierre Mamie and Karl Barth . He taught Jewish religious philosophy at the University of Geneva and was one of the Jewish participants in the Second Vatican Council in 1965. He wrote about 200 books and articles on Jewish topics, including Kabbalah .

In 1997 he was accepted as an honorary member of the Romanian Academy . In 2001 he was awarded the Prize for Judeo-Christian Friendship France. He died in Geneva in 2006 and was buried in Bne Brak , Israel.

plant

In 1990 Safran presented the "Draft of a Jewish Religious Ethics" to the Jewish Ethical Colloquium of the Hillel Academy in Paris, which appeared in Judaica Zurich in June 1991 and is printed in his late work "Jüdische Ethik" (JE). In it he criticizes the fact that Judaism resists "... establishing an ethic and creating moral values", "... in concern for the honesty of the individual and for justice in social life" (JE, p. 20/21). As for the question of God's righteousness, he refers explicitly to the Talmud and The Zohar because "... know that your field of vision is limited to survey the past, present and future, and the cause and meaning of yours When you see everything like God, who embraces everything in one glance, then you see that it is good, even very good: >> even suffering and even death << are >> very good 'in this << included "(JE p. 31).

Publications

• The Kabbalah. Franke Verlag, Bern 1966
• "The Wisdom of Kabbalah". Francke Verlag, Bern and Stuttgart 1988. ISBN 978-3317016438
• "Torn from the flames". The Jewish Community in Romania 1939–1947. Memories . A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen 1995. ISBN 3-7720-2148-4 .
• Israel in time and space. Basic motifs of being a Jew. A. Francke Verlag, Tüngen 1984
• Jewish ethics and modernity. A. Franke Verlag, Basel and Tübingen 2000

literature

• Encyclopedia Judaica , Second Edition, Volume 17, p. 663.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cicad, May 7th 2009 (accessed on 27 April 2016 French.)
2. ↑ Uri Kaufmann : Alexandre Safran. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
3. ^ Agence de presse oecuménique, April 30, 2001 (accessed April 27, 2016, in French)
4. ^ Şafran Family YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe