Gerda Luft

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Gerda Luft , b. Goldberg (born April 20, 1898 in Königsberg ; † May 12, 1986 in Tel Aviv ) was a German / Israeli journalist and writer who emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1924 and became a well-known public figure in Israel.

Life before emigration

As the youngest child of five siblings, Gerda Luft spent her youth in Königsberg. There she attended elementary school and the Luisenschule , the first girls' high school in East Prussia. Her parents came from Galicia, where her father grew up in a "strictly orthodox", Yiddish-speaking household and her mother on one of the great estates that "wealthy Jews in Galicia owned". The increasing anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia was the reason for the flight to East Prussia. There the father finally worked as a self-employed businessman. After graduating from high school, she studied medicine at the Königsberg University and wanted to become a doctor. In 1919 she went to Berlin. “Without money, without knowledge of human nature, without connections and with unlimited confidence in the future” I was ready to “work, learn and enjoy”. In Berlin she met Viktor Chaim Arlosoroff , a young poet who studied economics and was a fan of Zionism . Before the Physikum, Gerda Luft also switched to the economics faculty and studied economics. She started with Werner Sombart with a doctoral thesis on the “Concept of Progress”. The work was accepted by Sombart, but she waived the doctoral examination and the doctorate because "academic titles are a bourgeois prejudice". In 1919 she married Arlosoroff. In the same year their daughter Shulamit was born. In Peine near Hanover, she completed an agricultural training on an estate in preparation for emigration to Palestine ( Hachscharah ).

Life after emigration

After 5 semesters of medicine, 6 semesters of political economy and 8 months of agricultural training, the 4½ year old daughter and Chaim Arlosoroff went to Palestine in 1924. A chance meeting with Pinchas Rosen , then still Felix Rosenblüth, at the end of 1924 started her career as a journalist. Pinchas Rosen was able to convince her to work as a Palestine correspondent for the Jüdische Rundschau . For fourteen years it had a major influence on the German Zionists' image of Palestine. The divorce from Arlosoroff and the marriage to Zwi Luft followed. In 1931 their son Eli was born. With the end of the Jewish Rundschau - 1938 banned by the Nazis - and the end of World Jewish-Rundschau 1940, their collaboration began at the young handout . Until she was 60, she worked for the Jerusalem Post and “almost a decade on” for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . She also worked for the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt and the Rheinische Merkur in Cologne. Another and important station was the work as a correspondent for the London Economist . For many years she wrote book reviews for the workers' newspaper Dawar .

Publications

  • Return to the unknown. A representation of the immigration of Jews from Germany to Palestine from the rise of Hitler to power until the outbreak of the Second World War, 1933-1939 , with a foreword by Willy Brandt, Peter Hammer-Verlag, Wuppertal 1977, ISBN 3-87294-106-2 .
  • Contributors to Israel: The Jeckes. What Israel owes to the Jews from Germany , in: MERIAN Israel, Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3-455-27812-4 .
  • Chronicle of a Life for Israel. Edition Erdmann in K. Thienemanns Verlag, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-522-65090-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Renate Heuer : Bibliographia Judaica: Directory of Jewish authors in the German language. Volume 4. Kraus, Munich 1996.
  2. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 12
  3. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 13
  4. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 15.
  5. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 45f.
  6. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 49.
  7. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 51f.
  8. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 57.
  9. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 70
  10. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 58.
  11. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 64ff.
  12. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 71f.
  13. ^ A b c Walter Gross: The doyenne of Israeli journalism. Gerda Luft on her 80th birthday ; in: MB (Mitteilungsblatt), weekly newspaper of Irgun Olej Merkas Europa, April 21, 1978, p. 15.
  14. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 104
  15. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 131
  16. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 186.
  17. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 171.
  18. ↑ Gerda Luft: Chronicle of a Life for Israel , 1983, p. 162.
personal data
SURNAME Air, Gerda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldberg, Gerda (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Israeli journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1986
Place of death Tel Aviv