Leo Ansbacher

Leo Jehuda Ansbacher (born December 3, 1907 in Frankfurt am Main , † 1998 in Tel Aviv ) was a German-Israeli rabbi .

Life

Ansbacher was born as the son of Recha Ansbacher (née Rosenbaum, 1882–1956) and Josef Ansbacher (1876–1951) in Frankfurt. He first studied history, German and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt , but broke off his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin in 1932 due to the rise of National Socialist anti-Semitism. In 1933 he emigrated from Berlin to Belgium , where he subsequently passed the rabbi exam. In 1940, after Germany's invasion of Belgium, the authorities there, like many other foreigners suspected of being possible German spies, were forcibly sent to France and first detained in the internment camp of Saint-Cyprien and then in the largest French internment camp, Camp de Gurs . There he took over the task and position of the camp rabbi and made great contributions to the spiritual life and courage of the internees.

After Pnina Rosenberg, Leo Ansbacher had been with his brother Max (Mordechai), who was then also interned in Gurs, since Belgium. There is very little information available about Max Ansbacher. The fact that, as Rosenberg reports, he came to France from Belgium is documented, among other things, by the memories of Juliane Schramm, and genealogical databases also contain references to the common parents of Leo and Max Ansbacher. Again according to Rosenberg, the brothers in Gurs jointly “set up an aid committee that they had already founded in Saint-Cyprien with the aim of representing the prisoners in relation to the camp administration. The 'Comité central d'assistance' takes on the collection and distribution of Food and medicine and establishes the contact between the prisoners, the camp administration and the various aid organizations. "

During Leo Ansbacher's time as a camp rabbi, a special handwritten Haggadah was created for the Passover festival in 1941 , which is known as the Haggadah of Gurs ( Hagadah šel pesaḥ mimaḥane Giyrs ). It was written down from memory by Ansbacher with the help of the camp inmate Aryeh Ludwig Zuckerman and copied with a stencil machine. It was illustrated by the non-Jewish prisoner Fritz Sch Delivery (he was transferred to Camp de Drancy as a punishment and then deported to Auschwitz concentration camp ). The management of the Yad Vashem later reproduced this Haggadah from a saved copy and published it with photographs and background material. It ends with the wish "Next year in Jerusalem".

According to Rosenberg, the Ansbacher brothers enriched not only religious but also cultural life in the camp. This probably brought her into contact with Hans Rosenthal , who in 1942 caricatured camp life in Gurs in an ironic and sarcastic manner in three comics. Rosenthal, who was transferred from Gurs to another camp at the end of July 1942 and later murdered in Auschwitz, was able to entrust two of these booklets - Mickey au camp de Gurs and La Journée d'un hébergé - to the Ansbacher brothers. They handed them over to the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris in 1978 . The third booklet was saved by Elsbeth Kasser .

After the deportations of camp inmates to the concentration camps began, Leo Ansbacher bravely stood up for fellow inmates who were threatened. The so-called "Ansbacher Affair" is documented after he was denounced on October 20, 1942, that he had hidden a prisoner destined for deportation and helped him to escape. Ansbacher then decided to flee the Camp de Gurs camp . He managed to escape and there, at an agreed location nearby, at the end of 1942 he met his wife Betty Ansbacher, who had made her way there. Then they began to flee across the Pyrenees to Spain , from where they were finally able to emigrate to Palestine in 1944 . There he first worked as a teacher before he could work as a rabbi again. From 1957 he was rabbi of the synagogue community Ichud-Zion in Tel Aviv and finally also a member of the religious central council of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Max Ansbacher also escaped deportation and emigrated to Palestine after the war.

Works and literature

• Oskar Althausen; Jehuda L Ansbacher; Gerhard Brändle; Louis Dreyfuss; Eugen Fried; Gertrud Friedberg; Eckhardt Friedrich; Berty Friesländer-Bloch; Erhard R Wiehn: October deportation 1940. The so-called 'deportation' of Jews from Baden and the Saar-Palatinate to the French internment camp Gurs and other outposts from Auschwitz . ISBN 9783891913321
• Interview with Leo Ansbacher in: Anne Betten (Hrsg., 1995), language preservation after emigration , Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 176ff.
• Belah Guṭerman, Naomi Morgensṭern: The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition . Devora Publishing, 2003. ISBN 978-1930143333

Individual evidence

1. ^ Center for Jewish History: Portrait photo of Leo Ansbacher
2. ↑ USHMM : Professional Background of Pnina Rosenberg
3. ^ Stories and texts, from our grandma Juliane from the last century
4. ^ ^{A b c} Pnina Rosenberg: Mickey orphelin: la courte vie de Horst Rosenthal / The orphan Micky Mouse, or: the short life of Horst Rosenthal ', in: Anne Grynberg; Johanna Linsler (ed.): L 'irréparable: itinéraires d'artistes et d'amateurs d'art juifs, réfugiés du “Troisième Reich” en France / Irreparable: life paths of Jewish artists and art connoisseurs on the run from the “Third Reich “In France, publications of the Magdeburg coordination office, Magdeburg, 2013, ISBN 978-3-9811367-6-0 , p. 379
5. ↑ See: Belah Guṭerman, Naomi Morgensṭern: The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition . Devora Publishing, 2003.
6. ↑ see: Courageuse intervention de l'abbé Lopez en faveur du rabbin Ansbacher, interné à Gurs .
7. ↑ cf. on this the transcript of the interview with LA in: Anne Betten (ed., 1995), Sprachbewahrung nach der Emigration , Tübingen: Niemeyer, p. 176ff.
8. ↑ Ansbacher, Jehuda. Hessian biography. (As of September 30, 2010). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).