Bernhard Brilling

Bernhard Brilling (born June 3, 1906 in Tremessen , Province of Posen ; died July 7, 1987 in Münster ) was a German rabbi and historian.

Live and act

Brilling attended grammar school in Prenzlau and then studied history , classical philology and economics in Berlin and Breslau from 1924 to 1932 and at the same time attended the rabbinical seminar in Berlin . After the beginning of the National Socialist rule , he was forcibly de-registered and banned from dissertation.

After he had previously worked in the archives of the rabbi community in Breslau (Central Archives of Silesian Synagogue Communities), he was in charge of this facility from 1932 to 1939. He was also a teacher and rabbi in various Silesian places. Arrested in the course of the November pogroms in 1938 , Brilling was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp until January 1939 . After his release from prison, he had to emigrate under pressure from the Nazi authorities. He went to Tel Aviv and built the city archive there.

In 1957 Brilling returned to Germany, received his doctorate in 1958 in Münster and also became a research assistant at the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum . Within the institute he set up a department for the history of the Jews in Germany . He became custodian in 1963 and was a lecturer in Hebrew palaeography and the history of German Jewry from 1966 to 1971 . In 1979 he became a professor at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster.

Brilling was a member of the Historical Commission for Silesia , the Historical Commission for Westphalia (since 1965) and the Commission for the History of the Jews in Hesse . In addition to other publications, Brilling mainly worked on the history of the Jews in Silesia and Westphalia (his civil status archive is now in the possession of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt ). In 1982 he received the Leo Baeck Prize .

Brilling was one of the most important experts on the history of German Jewry in his time .

Fonts (selection)

• Bernhard Brilling, Helmut Richtering : Westfalia Judaica: Sources and regesta on the history of the Jews in Westphalia and Lippe. Vol. 1: 1005-1350. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1967.
• Bernhard Brilling: The Jewish communities of Central Silesia: Origin and history. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1972 (Studia Delitzschiana; Vol. 14), ISBN 3-17-220011-6 .

literature

• Peter Freimark, Helmut Richtering (Ed.): Commemorative publication for Bernhard Brilling. Christians, Hamburg 1988 (Hamburg contributions to the history of the German Jews; 14), ISBN 3-7672-1054-1 .
• Bernd Haunfelder : North Rhine-Westphalia. Country and people. A biographical manual. Aschendorff, Münster 2006, p. 89.
• Peter Honigmann : Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Brilling on the establishment of a central Jewish archive in post-war Germany. In: Klaus Hödl (ed.): Historical consciousness in the Jewish context. Strategies, aspects, discourses. Innsbruck u. a. 2004, pp. 223-241.
• Esriel Hildesheimer, Mordechai Eliav: Das Berliner Rabbinerseminar 1873-1938 , Berlin 2008, ISBN 9783938485460 , p. 79
• Brilling, Bernhard , in: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 4: Brech-Carle. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-598-22684-5 , pp. 59-67.
• Robert Jütte : The emigration of the German-speaking "Wissenschaft des Judentums": the emigration of Jewish historians to Palestine 1933 - 1945 . Stuttgart: Steiner 1991, pp. 196-199
• Brilling, Bernhard , in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (eds.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 95
• Brilling, Bernhard , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 47

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernhard Brilling in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jewish Museum Frankfurt about Brilling
• Biographical information on the website of the Historical Commission for Westphalia