Ignaz Maybaum

Ignaz Maybaum ( March 2, 1897 in Vienna – June 12, 1976 in London ) was a German-British rabbi .

Life

Ignaz Maybaum was the third of four children of Scheider Meyer (Max) Moritz Maybaum and his wife Josefine, née Kohn. He was a nephew of Rabbi Siegmund Maybaum . In October 1915 he made his Abitur early. After that he was a lieutenant in the infantry regiment of the Austrian army until 1918 . From 1918 to 1919 he was a listener at the Israelitische Theologische Lehranstalt Vienna. From 1919 he studied philosophy and art history at the Berlin University , from 1920 he also studied at the University for the Science of Judaism . and studied in Berlin at the University for the Science of Judaism. In 1924 he received his doctorate with The Two Forms of Moral Action and Their Relationship to Religion in Schleiermacher's System . In 1926 he became the rabbi ordained . He was rabbi in Bingen from 1925 to 1928, then in Frankfurt (Oder) until 1936 and in Berlin-Wilmersdorf until his escape in 1939. From 1935 he taught at the College for the Science of Judaism and at the Jewish Teacher Training Institute in Berlin (here Bible Exegesis, Biblical History and Philosophy of Religion) in Berlin.

In 1935 he was denounced and arrested by the Gestapo for making private statements about Hitler and was imprisoned in Columbia concentration camp from December 18, 1935 to January 21, 1936 . In March 1939 he emigrated to London with his wife Franziska (born Schor) and their two children Michael (born 1929) and Alisa (born 1935). Here he remained without rabbinical employment for ten years until he became rabbi of the Edgware and District Reform Synagogue in 1949 . In the period before that he worked from 1941 to 1945 in the aid program for refugee youth.

From 1956 until the beginning of his retirement in 1963 he lectured in homiletics and the Jewish religion at Leo Baeck College . In 1957 he was visiting professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main .

He was active in interreligious dialogue, and Nicholas de Lange was one of his students.

Although Maybaum wrote many different reflections on the Holocaust, he is best known for his claim that the Holocaust only occurred because the Jews were punished by God for the sins of the rest of the world. He brought the Jews as a whole in connection with the figure of the “suffering servant of God ” in the book of Isaiah , chapters 52 and 53. This attitude was discussed controversially.

Ignaz Maybaum's mother was murdered in Minsk in 1942, his sister Babette was murdered in Sobibor on June 14, 1942, and sister Hermine was murdered in 1940.

Commemoration

Stumbling block for Ignaz Maybaum in Frankfurt (Oder)

On March 21, 2011, a stumbling block for Rabbi Ignaz Maybaum was laid in Frankfurt (Oder) . The inscription reads:

HERE WAS THE IMPACT Ignaz Maybaum RABBI JG. 1897 ESCAPED 1939 ENGLAND SURVIVED

Works (selection)

• Creation and guilt . Vallentine, Mitchell, London 1969.
• The Face of God after Auschwitz . Polak & van Gennep, Amsterdam 1965.
• The Jewish mission . Clarke, London 1949.
• The Jewish Home , together with LV Snowman. Clarke, London 1945.
• Synagogue and Society . Clarke, London 1944.
• Man and catastrophe . Allenson, London 1941.
• New youth and old belief . Philo-Verl., Berlin 1936.
• Liberal Judaism . Philo Verlag, Berlin 1935.
• The two forms of moral action and their relationship to religion in Schleiermacher's system (dissertation)

literature

• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 475.
• Rabbi Ignaz Maybaum - Life and Teaching: The Basics of Jewish Diaspora Existence , author Friedrich Lotter, Verlag Frank & Timme; Edition: 1 (January 2010), ISBN 3865962769

Web links

• Literature by and about Ignaz Maybaum in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Brocke, Herbert Jochum (ed.): Cloud column and firelight. Jewish theology after the Holocaust , Munich: Chr. Kaiser 1993, pp. 14–16 ( excerpt online at pkgodzik.de ; PDF; 77 kB)