Siegbert Neufeld

Siegbert Jizchak Neufeld (born June 15, 1891 in Berlin ; died November 23, 1971 in Ramat Chen , Israel ) was a German-Israeli rabbi and historian.

Life

Siegbert Jizchak Neufeld was the son of Inspector Meyer Max Neufeld and Paula Cohn. He was one of his ancestors Chacham Zwi (1658-1718). Neufeld attended the Jewish elementary school and the Sophiengymnasium and studied from 1909 to 1914 at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (HWJ) and passed the rabbinical examination in 1914. He studied history in Berlin and Strasbourg and received his doctorate in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1914/15.

Neufeld worked from 1915 to 1920 as a rabbi in Briesen , West Prussia , which became Polish in 1920. There he married Margarethe Harris. In 1917/18 he was drafted to the Eastern Front as a field rabbi . From 1920 he worked as a rabbi in Insterburg , East Prussia , from 1925 as a district rabbi and as a religion teacher at the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG) in Elbing , West Prussia. He became chairman of the "Association of Associations for Jewish History and Literature in East Prussia" in Elbing, chairman of the Northeast German Rabbis Association (around 1930), member and president of the Menora Lodge of B'nai B'rith in Elbing.

After the German November pogroms in 1938, Neufeld emigrated to Palestine in 1939 , where he worked as a freelance historian until 1971, worked on reference works and became a board member of the Society for Jewish Historical Research.

After the end of the war he also worked temporarily in Germany. Neufeld was state rabbi of Württemberg-Hohenzollern in Stuttgart from 1951 to 1953 and co-founder of the Rabbinical Conference for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1952 . He then came to Germany repeatedly as a guest rabbi and was a visiting professor for Jewish history of the Middle Ages at the universities in Frankfurt am Main and Tübingen from 1958 to 1960.

Fonts (selection)

• The Jews of Halle in the Middle Ages , Diss. Strasbourg 1914
• The Jews in the Thuringian-Saxon area during the Middle Ages . Halle ad S.: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1927
• History of the Elbing Jewish Community . Regensburg: CH-Verlag, 1992

literature

• Neufeld, Siegbert Jizchak , in: Michael Brocke , Julius Carlebach (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbis. Part 2: The rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945. Volume 2, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-24874-0 , pp. 390-392 Link
• Neufeld, Siegbert , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 280
• Neufeld, Siegbert , in: Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Volume 4. Chernivtsi, 1930, p. 518
• Klaus-Eberhard Murawski: Judaism in East Prussian homeland literature from the time after 1945 , in: Michael Brocke , Margret Heitmann , Harald Lordick (eds.): On the history and culture of the Jews in East and West Prussia . Hildesheim: Olms, 2000, p. 585

Web links

• Literature by and about Siegbert Neufeld in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Siegbert Neufeld in the bibliographic database WorldCat