Free Jewish Teaching House

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The Free Jewish Teaching House was a Jewish adult education institution . It goes back to the Jewish Adult Education Center in Frankfurt am Main , which was founded in 1920 .

The first head of this facility was Franz Rosenzweig , who, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, was on the lookout for community-building elements for European Jews. Unlike Zionism , Rosenzweig saw Jewish culture and not a state of its own as decisive. This view formed the basic idea of ​​the Free Jewish Teaching House. The overriding goal was to win back the self-confident, educated Jews who had their spiritual and intellectual home outside Judaism for Judaism , to familiarize them with the metaphysical and religious backgrounds of traditional beliefs.

Shortly after it was founded, Rosenzweig named the Jewish Adult Education Center “Lehrhaus”, based on traditional Jewish religious and language schools. The most important subject was the Hebrew language , conveyed using the Bible and later texts. Among the largely assimilated German Jews, however, only a few teachers could be found on these subjects. That is why Rosenzweig and his staff developed structures in which learners and lecturers worked together on the texts and not in frontal lessons (“Instruction of the ignorant by the ignorant”). This new educational concept quickly became popular, so that numerous prominent scientists came to the Freie Jüdisches Lehrhaus as lecturers, including Martin Buber , Leo Löwenthal , Benno Jacob, but also natural scientists such as the doctor Richard Koch , the chemist Eduard Strauss , and the feminist Bertha Pappenheim and Siegfried Kracauer , a popular cultural critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung . Among those who later became famous were SY Agnon , who received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Gershom Scholem , the founder of modern studies on Kabbalah . The expressionist writer Alfons Paquet , who addressed the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, also took part in the courses.

In contrast to “German” adult education centers , participants in the courses were mainly members of the upper middle class. The Orthodox Jews, who made up about a fifth of Frankfurt's Jewish community, boycotted the Lehrhaus. In 1922 there were 1,100 listeners. That was about four percent of the entire congregation, which then had about thirty thousand members. This made the Free Jewish Teaching House one of the busiest adult education centers of the time and probably the most important institution for Jewish adult education. In addition, it was a place for programmatic discussions between the various political currents of European Jewry. When after a few years attendance at the Lehrhaus declined, this was also due to the high level of the courses and Torah studies. But Rosenzweig had proven that Judaism had nothing to do with obscurantism and backwardness. The success of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus in the 1920s led to the establishment of other Lehrhauses in Germany: in Berlin, Breslau, Cologne, Dresden, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Wiesbaden.

In 1938 the Free Jewish Teaching House was closed by the Nazi regime .

literature

  • Evelyn Adunka and Albert Brandstätter (eds.), The Jewish schoolhouse as a model of lifelong learning. Passagen Verlag, ISBN 3-85165-391-2 .
  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch : Intellektuellendämmerung: On the situation of the Frankfurt intelligentsia in the twenties . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1982. Paperback: Suhrkamp-TB 1121, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-37621-7 , therein: In search of lost Judaism. The Free Jewish Teaching House , pp. 35–51.
  • Paul Mendes-Flohr : Free Jewish Lehrhaus. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 376–378.
  • Martin Jay : 1920 The Free Jewish School is founded in Frankfurt am Main under the leadership of Franz Rosenzweig. In: Sander L. Gilman , Jack Zipes (ed.): Yale companion to Jewish writing and thought in German culture 1096-1996. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 395-400

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