Julius Carlebach (sociologist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julius Carlebach (born December 28, 1922 in Hamburg ; died April 16, 2001 in Brighton , Great Britain) was a German-British rabbi and university professor.

He is the grandson of the former Lübeck rabbi Salomon Carlebach (1845–1919) and his wife Esther Carlebach , who with their twelve children and their descendants became the first parents of one of the most respected rabbinical families in Germany.

Life

Julius Carlebach, who was called Buli in his family , was the son of the chief rabbi Joseph Carlebach (1883–1942) from Hamburg. He was deported to Gut Jungfernhof near Riga with his wife Charlotte, née Preuss (* 1900), and the four youngest of the nine children . The parents and their daughters Ruth (* 1926), Noemi (* 1927) and Sara (* 1928) were shot on March 26, 1942 in the forest of Biķernieki near Riga. Julius Carlebach's younger brother Salomon (Shlomo Peter) Carlebach (born August 17, 1925), who had been abducted with his parents and sisters, survived because he had been assigned to a work detachment. He later became a rabbi in New York.

Julius had a total of eight siblings, including Eva Sulamit (1919–1966), married to Rabbi Joseph Heinemann, Esther (* 1920), married to Shimon Hackenbroch, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (* 1922), married to Moshe Gillis, and Judith ( 1924–1970), married to Geoffrey Heymann.

Julius Carlebach was the oldest son. He survived the Holocaust because, like his younger sister Judith , he came to Great Britain on the first Kindertransport in December 1938 . Miriam went to Haifa in 1938 at the age of 16, Eva accompanied a children's transport to England, Esther went there as a domestic help.

Julius Carlebach went to school in London, then served in the Royal Navy and ran an orphanage for Jewish children in Norwood for ten years. Here he met the South African teacher Myrna Landau, whom he married in 1959. In 1946 he received British citizenship. In 1959 he went to Kenya, where he worked as a rabbi in Nairobi until 1963 and also published on the Jews in Nairobi ( The Jews of Nairobi , 1962). The couple's two sons, Joseph Zwi Carlebach and Esriel Carlebach, were born in Kenya.

From 1964 he taught at Cambridge University and then at the University of Bristol . In 1968 he became Associate Professor of Sociology and Israel Studies at the University of Sussex , Brighton. There he headed the Sociology Department. In 1989 he was appointed to the University for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg , which was founded in 1979 , and was its rector until 1997. At the university he held a chair in history.

Carlebach was a member of the board of directors of the Leo-Baeck-Institut and from 1992 co-editor of the Leo-Baeck-Jahrbuch.

In an interview in the 1990s he said of the Carlebach tradition: I believe that the Carlebach tradition is above all the tradition of the Jews who have settled in in Germany without giving up their traditional Jewish customs and position. This is a Judaism that was particularly moved by Rabbi Hildesheimer, who opened a famous rabbinical seminar in Berlin under the motto “Tora-im-Derech-Eretz”. That means finding a connection between two cultures - not, as is often the case today, without touching like two parallels running side by side. (...) I don't think there is such a thing as a typical Carlebach, but I'm definitely “Carlebach-shaped”.

During his retirement, Julius Carlebach lived alternately in Heidelberg and in Brighton, where he died in 2001.

Honors

The Federal Republic of Germany recognized Carlebach's services in 1994 with the award of the Great Federal Cross of Merit . In 1997, Baden-Württemberg awarded him the state's Medal of Merit . In 2002 the exhibition The diverse life of Julius Carlebach, 1922-2001 was shown in the library foyer of the University of Sussex , which focused on his childhood in Hamburg, his experiences as an emigrant, his time in the Royal Navy, his years in Kenya and his scientific work in Cambridge, Bristol, Sussex and Heidelberg employed. The University for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg honored its former rector in 2003 with the publication of the memorandum Yagdil Tora we-Ya'adir .

Works (selection)

  • The Jews of Nairobi. Nairobi 1962.
  • Caring for Children in Trouble. London 1970.
  • Judaism in the German environment. Tuebingen 1977.
  • Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism. London 1978, ISBN 0-7100-8279-7 .
  • On the history of Jewish women in Germany. (Ed.), Berlin 1993.
  • Problems of Jewish University Life. London 1981.
  • Orthodox Jewry in Germany - the Final Stages. Tuebingen 1986.

literature

  • Sabine Niemann (editor): The Carlebachs, a rabbi family from Germany. Ephraim Carlebach Foundation (ed.). Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-926174-99-4 .
  • Michael Graetz: He wanted to pass on Jewish knowledge (on the death of Carlebach). Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, April 20, 2001.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sabine Niemann (editor): The Carlebachs, a rabbi family from Germany. Page 114.
  2. ^ Sabine Niemann (editor): The Carlebachs, a rabbi family from Germany. Page 116.
  3. ^ Bulletin - University of Sussex
personal data
SURNAME Carlebach, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British university professor, rabbi
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 2001
Place of death Brighton