Benno Cohen (rabbi)

Benno (Benjamin) Cohen (born April 11, 1895 in Altona ; died March 31, 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German rabbi , educator and author .

Live and act

Benno Cohen was the son of the Klaus rabbi Jacob Cohen (1865–1943), who was murdered in Sobibor , and his wife Henriette (Jette), née Franck (1866–1943, Sobibor concentration camp ). His grandfather was the Klaus rabbi Binjamin de Yona Cohen (1826-1880) from Meknes . After attending the municipal high school in Altona, Benno Cohen studied philosophy and Semitic studies from 1914 to 1920 at universities in Berlin , Frankfurt am Main , Hamburg and Giessen . At the same time he studied rabbinical theology in Hamburg, Preßburg , Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1921 he received his doctorate in Giessen. Cohen was a soldier in World War I.

He then briefly taught religion at the Orthodox Israelite Synagogue Community of Adass Yisroel in Berlin . He also preached in two private synagogues in Berlin. From 1921 to 1922 he worked as a rabbi for the Orthodox religious community Adass Jeschurun ​​in Heilbronn . Then he went to Berlin-Schöneberg , where he worked as a rabbi for the liberal Sephardic Synagogue Association Lützowstrasse.

Cohen was involved in the Agudat Jisra'el and was interested in the Portuguese Marran movement . In 1923 he worked as a rabbi at the Steglitz synagogue in Berlin and from 1925 to 1928 in Schönlanke . He then worked until 1938 as the youngest district rabbi of Friedrichstadt-Flensburg in Friedrichstadt and later as the last regional rabbi of Schleswig-Holstein.

In 1937 Cohen, who regularly worked as a pastor and preacher in Altona and Hamburg, moved permanently to Hamburg. Here he joined the German-Israelite Congregation in Hamburg and the Portuguese-Jewish Holy Congregation of the Sphardim Beith Israel . After the Reichspogromnacht he spent some time in the Fuhlsbüttel and Sachsenhausen concentration camps . At the end of 1938 he left for Amsterdam, where he worked as a Klaus rabbi in a Portuguese synagogue that had contacts with the Ets Hayim Foundation.

In 1941 Cohen, his wife Bertha, née Malina, (born in Regensburg in 1869) and their daughter Mirjam were deported to the Westerbork concentration camp . He was then transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and killed there at the end of March 1944.

literature

• Michael Studemund-Halévy : Cohen, Benno . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 6 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1025-4 , p. 59-60 .
• Esriel Hildesheimer, Mordechai Eliav: The Berlin Rabbinical Seminar 1873-1938. Berlin 2008, ISBN 9783938485460 , p. 96.
• Julius Carlebach , Michael Brocke (eds.): The Rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945 (Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner 2). Edited by Katrin Nele Jansen, Jörg H. Fehrs, Valentina Wiedner. KG Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-24874-1 , pp. 131-135

Web links

• Literature by and about Benno Cohen in the catalog of the German National Library