Alfred Wolf (rabbi)

Alfred Wolf (born October 7, 1915 in Eberbach , † August 1, 2004 in Los Angeles ) was a rabbi in Los Angeles and a representative of interreligious dialogue.

Life

He was the son of a Jewish textile merchant in Eberbach, where he attended secondary school up to 11th grade. The parents belonged to liberal Judaism . Alfred Wolf joined the Bundischen migration movement as a teenager . From the spring of 1933 he attended the Jewish seminar in Berlin with Julian Morgenstern . He sent Wolf and four fellow students to the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati as part of an exchange program .

Wolf stayed in the USA and thus avoided the increasing persecution of German Jews by the National Socialists. In 1941 he took American citizenship and a few days before the USA entered the war he was able to buy his parents and grandmother out of the Gurs concentration camp . In 1941 he became a rabbi in Dothan , Alabama , where, under the impression of the persecution of the Jews, he campaigned against the racial segregation that still prevailed at the time . In 1946 he became head of the Union of Hebrew Congregations in Los Angeles. Under his leadership, around a dozen Jewish reform communities emerged, which can be assigned to liberal Judaism. In 1949 he became rabbi at the side of Edgar Magnin in the Whilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, the place of worship of the third largest Jewish community in the USA. There, too, he campaigned for interreligious dialogue, which he carried far beyond the borders of his Jewish community in the 1950s.

Starting in 1950, he initiated tent camps for young Jews based on the model of the Bundische Wanderbew movement, from which the American Jewish Youth Camping Movement developed. Together with Royale Vadakin he founded the Interreligious Council of Southern California in 1969 , for which both received honorary doctorates from Loyola Marymount University in 1990 . After Edgar Magnin's death in 1984, Wolf soon retired from work, but remained committed to interreligious understanding. In 1986 he co-founded the Skirball Institute on American Values ​​of the American Jewish Committee and chaired it until 1996. He has also taught at the University of Southern California , Hebrew Union College , Loyola University, and California State College . He also remained connected to his hometown Eberbach, which he visited again in 1980, and with his extensive memories he contributed to the documentation of the history of the Jewish community in Eberbach .

literature

• Helmut Joho: Rabbi Dr. Alfred Wolf, Los Angeles. A native Jewish Eberbacher as a mediator between the religions. In: Eberbacher Geschichtsblatt 104 , Eberbach 2005, pp. 200–203.