Jewish people's home

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The Jüdisches Volksheim on Dragonerstrasse (today's Max-Beer-Strasse ) in Berlin's Scheunenviertel was a socio-political initiative of young Jewish intellectuals under the leadership of the medical student Siegfried Lehmann , which, with a synthesis of Jewish social ethics in the tradition of Martin Buber and borrowings from the Settlement movement shaped by Arnold Toynbee wanted to build a bridge between their own origins from Western Jewry and the members of the Eastern Jewish proletariat. In the Jewish people's home , Lehmann tested his educational and Zionist ideas in practice for the first time, which made it the forerunner of the Jewish children's home in Kovno and then of the Ben Shemen children's and youth village in Palestine.

Forerunners and role models

Settlements in the sense of Toybees were rather rare in Germany in the early 20th century.

  • There was the Social Working Group Berlin-Ost (SAG for short) founded by Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze in 1911 , a neighborhood aid and settlement project for "predominantly male residents from Berlin's Christian student body".
  • The Volksheim Hamburg , initiated by the theologian, educator and former resident in Toynbee Hall , Walther Classen , existed in Hamburg from 1901 to 1922 .
  • The Charlottenburg housing estate founded by Ernst Joel was built in 1915 .
  • The Volksheim Leipzig existed in Leipzig from 1909 to 1928 , and the former SAG employee Wenzel Holek played a key role in its work .
  • The Jewish Toynbee Hall for public education and entertainment on Nollendorfplatz, founded by the Berlin lodge Bnai Brith in 1904, does not include Sabine Haustein and Anja Waller among the settlements in the narrower sense: it is said that during the First World War it turned more and more into an emergency shelter for all emergency leaders, so that its Jewish specificity was lost and the work was stopped soon afterwards. "

In the literature, the prevailing assessment is that the Charlottenburg housing estate founded by Ernst Joel was a model for Siegfried Lehmann when he launched his first call for the establishment of a Jewish people's home in 1915.

The Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel

The Jewish people's home , founded by young students and business people of both sexes by Lehmann and his helpers , opened on May 18, 1916 with a speech by Gustav Landauer on Judaism and socialism .

“The helpers established contact with the Eastern Jewish population of the Scheunenviertel by trying to get into conversation with children in a public soup kitchen, who received a hot meal there every day. At first, those addressed reacted hesitantly and mockingly. They would not accept the invitation to play. Only after several visits did they thaw. After just a few weeks, around 60 young people belonged to the circle around Lehmann and his supporters. The program included games, singing and gymnastics. "

Sabine Haustein and Anja Waller report that after just six months, over 200 children per day had taken advantage of the offers of the Jewish people's home, “so that they soon had to be expanded. However, the number of children in need of care far exceeded the possibilities of the people's home, so that in 1918 the Ahawah children's home was founded, in which some of the children could be permanently housed and to which there was a special connection until the end of the people's home. ”This is true only to a limited extent, because the former hospital of the Jewish community on Auguststrasse was used as accommodation for Jewish refugee children from Eastern Europe after the First World War, but it was not until 1922 that it became the Ahawah children's home initiated by Beate Berger . It is true, however, that Siegfried Lehmann was later still in contact with the Ahawah , as Hanni Ullmann recalled: “When he wanted to transfer the children from Kovno to Palestine, he and the children were quartered on the floor of the Ahawa for four weeks he didn't have any certificates yet. "

Memorial plaque in Berlin's Max-Beer-Strasse 5 in memory of Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home

Gershom Scholem , who had been asked by Martin Buber to work in the Volksheim, but who was very critical of him, mentions Gertrude Welkanoz (later Weil) as an early assistant who, after Lehmann's departure and interim management by Erich Gutkind (1877-1965), headed the Volksheim was. According to Dieter Oelschläger, she was “one of Lehmann's volunteers from the start. In 1918 she was also a delegate of the XV. Delegates' day of the Zionist Association in Germany in Berlin. Later, Getrude Welkanoz married the Jewish archivist Dr. Ernst Weil and moved with him to Munich. As Gertrude Weil she wrote a committed report on the work of the Volksheim (Weil 1930). ”Scholem, who was 19 at the time, described Gertrude Welkanoz as the“ undisputed central figure ”in the Volksheim and described her as“ a bit older , the most impressive person approaching thirty, [..] a girl of an entirely natural dignity and authority who was unique. She seemed to me to be the only trained social worker, but I was wrong about that, because by profession she was an employee of a large bank and in fact there was not a single professional employee among the volunteers. Her great knowledge, however, was nothing compared to the enormous influence, yes magic, that she humanly exercised on all these girls. "

Another early helper in the Volksheim that Scholem mentioned was Felice Bauer , who, according to Scholem, had been energetically encouraged by Franz Kafka to work in the Volksheim. For them, as for many employees in the early years, “the Jewish people's home became a first stop for them in the educational or welfare care sector. Many of the women and men who got involved in the Volksheim were able to look back on special experiences: As former members of the Wandervogels or Jewish associations such as the 'Herzl-Bund' or 'Blau-Weiß' they were youth movements. This background was reflected in the work, in holiday camps, hiking camps, day hikes - but also in the cooperation of the helpers and in the self-administration of the youth groups. "In the Volksheim, which was frequented by women not only because of the war, there was a kindergarten, Mother and legal advice as well as offers of help for prostitutes. In addition, there were workshops for carpenters, metal workers and bookbinders, through which a vocational training was sought. Similar to the Zionist concepts for redeployment , the manual training was “meaningful and worth striving for, as it should later open up an alternative to a life as a small trader for the children and thus bring about a new generation of Jewish cities”.

While the helpers were learning Yiddish in order to get in better contact with their clientele, the girls and boys learned Hebrew together with the helpers . One of the Hebrew teachers was Salman Shazar , who later became the third President of Israel. Siegfried Lehmann and his friend and helper in the Volksheim, David Werner Senator , also acquired their first knowledge of Hebrew here.

The Volksheim soon expanded its spectrum to include lecture evenings organized by leading Jewish personalities, and it expanded its range of occasional excursions to include longer leisure time activities aimed at strengthening a sense of community. It started with stays in a former hunting lodge in the Berlin area, followed by stays on the Hohen Meißner in 1921 , before the Volksheim acquired its own holiday colony in Müritz in 1923 , where up to 125 children could spend three to four weeks.

Siegfried Lehmann was only able to take an active part in the work of the Volksheim he initiated for a short time. “After he had passed the preliminary medical examination, he was drafted into army service in October 1916 and promoted to junior physician in December. In March 1917 he was transferred to a medical company, which he belonged to until his return from World War I in 1918. Lehmann passed the medical state examination in November 1919 at the University of Frankfurt am Main. "The Volksheim continued to exist without its initiator, but as" the well-networked Lehmann, whose work was financially supported by a number of sponsors ", after his doctorate finally left the Volksheim to take on a new task, this step brought with it some serious cuts. “From then on, a number of supporters financed the work in Kovno , the starting conditions of which were even worse than they had been in the Scheunenviertel four years earlier. [..] But not only the financial situation changed. There were also innovations with regard to the employees and the content of the work. Some helpers left the people's home and went to Palestine. Others followed Lehmann to Kovno and worked in the local orphanage. [..] In addition, some helpers from the early years died in the war. "

In 1923, the Volksheim merged with the Young Jewish Wanderers' Association (JJWB). In 1930 Franz Lichtenstein, who had long been a member of the federal management of the JJWB, wrote about this merger that it was "extremely fruitful, because the socialist and Zionist program of the JJWB was in line with the ideas of the Volksheim and its employees found the merger as an enrichment, because they were now able to carry the people's home idea out to a much larger part of the Jewish youth ”.

Looking back, Beate Lehmann assesses the merging of these two organizations less positively than Lichtenstein. “After many struggles, the merger was accompanied by a change that many experienced as very painful: the helpers became leaders and the helpers' meeting became leaders. The Volksheim work largely took on the character of a union of the Jewish youth movement . ”And Sabine Haustein and Anja Waller do not see any driving force in the union:

“Despite the merger with the JJWB, the people's home only existed for a few years. The process of dissolution or closure is contradictory documented in the sources. An exact reconstruction of this last phase of the people's home in the Scheunenviertel is correspondingly difficult. While the date of the dissolution seems most likely to be between 1927 and 1929, other sources speak of earlier disputes between the employees and the resulting partial separation and the assumption of the tasks of the people's home by various organizations of the Jewish welfare since 1923. A former employee, in turn, testifies to the existence of the people's home as late as 1933. The sources also give various other reasons for the end of the Jewish people's home, Lubinski writes that the people's home lost the broad layer of helpers and, with the exception of the kindergarten, became a pure youth movement . Leon Sklarz also explains that because of the strong emigration of Eastern Jews, work was restricted. "

Beate Lehmann refers to a lecture by Siegfried Lehmann, in which the latter had pointed out in 1950 that the majority of the former pupils of the Volkshaus would now live in Israel, especially in Givat Brenner , Ramatayim and En Charod . “Fifty years after the Jewish People's Home was founded on Dragonerstraße, former people from the People's Home met in Tel Aviv. Many of them had come to social work through voluntary work in the Volksheim and after the closure had worked in various organizations in the field of social work. ”For many of them, the Ben Shemen Children's and Youth Village had become a new place of work.

People from the environment of the Volkshaus

  • Käte Baer, ​​former Volksheimerin , later in Ben Shemen
  • Felice Bauer
  • Mosche Calvary (1876–1944), head of the Blue-White Jewish Youth Association . Lehmann met him on his first visit to Palestine in 1914 and remained closely connected to him from then on. Moshe Calvary later worked as a teacher in the children's and youth village Ben Shemen .
  • Erich Gutkind
  • Wilfrid Israel , former Volksheimer , later in Ben Shemen
  • Ruth Lewy, former Volksheimerin , later in Ben Shemen
  • Eva Michaelis-Stern , who had already worked as a gymnastics teacher in the Jewish people's home, came to the children's and youth village in 1928 to teach gymnastics here too. After a short stay there, she fell ill and had to return to Germany. Eva Michaelis Stern was co-founder and director of the Working Group for Child and Youth Aliyah in the 1930s and director of the Youth Aliyah office in London during World War II. Eva Michaelis-Stern is the daughter of William Stern ; her siblings are Hilde Marchwitza and Günther Anders .
  • Gerda Philipsborn was already an employee in the Volksheim and later supported the work in Ben Shemen.
  • Erich Roth, former Volksheimer , later in Ben Shemen
  • Elisabeth Rotten knew the people's home from her own experience and oriented her later work primarily to the Ben Shemen children's and youth village .
  • Salman Shazar
  • David Werner Senator , former Volksheimer , later in Ben Shemen
  • Ludwig Strauss , former Volksheimer , later in Ben Shemen
  • Gertrude Welkanoz (later married Weil)
  • Siddy Wronsky was possibly only in closer contact with the Volkshaus in 1915 , but remained connected to Lehmann's ideas during the Weimar Republic and during her work in Palestine.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 4
  2. ^ Robert Götze: Volksheim (Hamburg). The first settlement attempt on German soil - a checkered history , 2005
  3. ^ "Ernst Joel (1893–1929) was an important German pacifist. He was a medical doctor and was best known for his studies of the pharmacology of cocaine and morphine. In 1926 he founded the welfare office for alcoholics and other poison addicts in the Berlin district of Tiergarten, of which he also became director. He then moved to the Kreuzberg district and was the first manager of the health center on Urban until his untimely death. Ernst Joel was active in the academic youth movement and founded the magazine 'Der Aufbruch' in 1915 ”(Dieter Oelschlägel: Integration through education , p. 118). See also: Friedrich Bauermeister
  4. ↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 259
  5. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 110
  6. ↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 10
  7. ↑ Memorial plaques in Berlin: Jewish children's home 'Ahawah'
  8. ↑ Hanni Ullmann, quoted from Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 265
  9. ↑ a b Dieter Oelschlägel: Integration through education , p. 123. The Weils report mentioned by Oelschlägel is in the holdings of the German National Library: Vom Jewish Volksheim in Berlin , in: Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 1, No. 7-8 , July – August 1930
  10. ^ Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem , p. 85
  11. ^ Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem , p. 85
  12. ↑ Active Museum Berlin: Siegfried Lehmann and his life's work (Weblink)
  13. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 113
  14. ↑ SENATOR, DAVID WERNER (1896–1953) in the Jewish Virtual Library
  15. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , pp. 113–114
  16. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 115
  17. ↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ​​›productive work‹ , p. 262
  18. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 116
  19. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 117
  20. ↑ Franz Lichtenstein, quoted from Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , pp. 11–12. The person Franz Lichtenstein cannot be clearly identified. There is both a Franz Lichtenstein murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, for whom a stumbling block was laid in Berlin ( stumbling stone for Franz Lichtenstein ), and an "author Franz Lichtenstein, who was born around 1900 and who [was] an employee of SIMPLIZISSIMUS. During the Nazi era, he emigrated to Israel. He died in Tel Aviv in 1997 and never lived to see the publication of his book. ”( Franz Lichtenstein - biography & résumé ). His volume of poetry, published in 1997, is entitled The time that slipped away from us
  21. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 118
  22. ↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 12. With Lubinski Georg Lubinski is meant. He was one of the managing directors of the Reich Committee of Jewish Youth Associations , which acted as the youth advisory board of the Central Welfare Office for German Jews . ( Salomon Adler-Rudel : Jewish self-help under the Nazi regime 1933–1939. In the mirror of the reports of the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany , JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen, 1974, ISBN 3-16-835232-2 , pp. 9– 10). Leon Sklarz was an employee of the Jewish Workers Welfare Office, which was founded in 1918, and the author of a 1927 study on the history and organization of aid to Jews in Germany since d. Year 1914
  23. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 119
  24. ↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 12
  25. ↑ a b c d e f g Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 120
  26. ↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 108. You also: Avner Falk: Agnon's Story. A Psychanalytik Biography of SY Agnon , Brill-Rodopi, 2018, ISBN 978-90-04-36778-4 , p. 162 (quoted from Google Books)
  27. ↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , pp. 4–5
  28. ^ Jewish Women's Archive: Eva Michaelis Stern 1904–1992
  29. ^ Gene Dannen: A Physicist's Lost Love: Leo Szilard and Gerda Philipsborn
  30. ↑ Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine. Documents and interpretations of attempts at a 'new' education in the Jewish community of Palestine (1918–1948) , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, ISBN 3-7638-0809-4 , pp. 229–230