Workers (Union of Jewish Youth)

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The workmen , originally workmen. Association of German-Jewish Youth , later Workers. Bund Jewish Youth , were part of the Jewish youth movement in Germany. They split off from their comrades in 1932 . According to Shlomo Erel , they were "a group of the large non-Zionist, German-focused youth movement", but after the separation they took a Zionist path and sought to emigrate to Palestine .

Founding history of the workmen

The history of the workmen is embedded in the

and especially in the

from which they split off after the last common Pentecost meeting in 1932. In addition to the Black Fähnlein , which emerged from the comrades at the same time and had a German-national orientation, and the more socialist-oriented Free German-Jewish Youth , the workers were those who walk the “path from their assimilatory past in Germany to a conscious Judaism” wanted, whereby in the initial phase the "belonging to the German living space [..] as it is given by the historical development as an indisputable fact" was not questioned. It was not until April 1933 that the term “German” was deleted from the federal name and the establishment of a separate settlement in Palestine was declared a federal goal. The association was now called workmen. Association of Jewish Youth .

The name “ Werkfolk” sounds like a handicraft and could be borrowed from the discussions about redeployment . In fact, however, it is unclear whether it was derived from the saying ascribed to Rabbi Tarfon : “It is not up to you to complete the work, but you are also not free to let go of it” or from a verse from Rilke's Book of Hours : “Workers are we: squires, disciples, masters, and build yourself, you tall nave. ”However, Zeev W. Sadmon points out that the“ workmen ”of 1932, despite all the return to Jewish spiritual roots, were a late reflex, even a filiation of the German youth movement and the idea of ​​workers, as they are, for example, in such different directions as the Deutscher Werkbund (1907), the ' Bund der Werkeople auf Haus Nyland ' in Westphalia (1905) and in the reform pedagogy of work instruction Georg Kerschensteiners had developed ”.

The workmen are like most Jewish youth organizations in the tradition of the German youth movement . Shlomo Erel quotes the spiritual leader of the workmen , "born in 1908 in Frankfurt an der Oder in an assimilated parental home impoverished by inflation" Hermann Gerson : "We were German wanderers, Wyneken and George students, lovers of German art; we had found our inner liberation in these German forests, which we therefore loved deeply. We really felt at home ... There will never be anything that made the Bach masses and the George poems unnecessary for me; I don't even want to find it. ”Gerson added a second to this one pole of his thinking, namely the“ positive attitude towards the spiritual inheritance of Judaism ”. To this end, he referred to Martin Buber , "as whose pupil Hermann Gerson saw himself". After Jacob Michaeli, however, there was already a shift in the theoretical orientation of the workmen in the early 1930s : away from Martin Buber and towards the ideas of Ber Borochov . Walter Laqueur confirmed for the workers from his own experience their affinity to the ideas of these two thinkers, but confessed for himself: "I developed no feeling for Buber, found little interest in the Bible and was not exactly convinced of the writings of Ber Borochow."

Shlomo Erel extends the tradition of workmen a little further. With regard to the mostly bourgeois origin, he speaks of a “group of refined young people who found their way through Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and AD Gordon to the Palestinian workers and the kibbutz. [..] From George and Rilke to backbreaking work and kibbutzian privation - that was a daring leap. ”From the perspective of 1982 and against the background of the development of Hasorea at that time , he thought it was a success.

Members of the workmen

When it was founded in 1932, the workmen had around 1,000 members and formed the largest successor organization to the comrades . It is difficult to find out who these people were, as their traces are rare in literature and on the Internet. The following brief overview also lists the names that are briefly outlined in the book Die Settende Kraft der Utopie . As workmen they all belonged to the founding generation of Kibbutz Hasorea. * Friedrich Altmann belonged to the management group of workmen in 1933 .

  • Josef Amir
  • Rudi Baer (born November 4, 1906 in Munich - November 18, 1998 in Hasorea) belonged together with Schaul Ginsberg (comrade, see below) and Ernst Nehab (Meir Nehab) to the "vanguard" of the workers who set out for Palestine at the end of 1933 later founded Hasorea. He had a doctorate in art history who gave up his editorial position at Propylaen Verlag to go to Aliyah .
  • Jochanan Ben-Jaacov
  • Lotte Dalberg , later Lotte Gammon, attended the Malwida von Meysenbug School in Kassel. “She started school in 1930 and left it in 1934 with a high school diploma. She emigrated to Palestine. In Germany, she belonged to the German-Jewish youth movement "Comrades", which before 1933 converted into the group of "work people" (Zionist tendency). This group founded the Kibbutz of the Workers, today "Hasorea". She lived in the kibbutz until shortly after the World War, then went to live with her parents in California (USA), studied chemistry and became a food chemist. "
  • Edith (Koenigsberger) Dietz , born in Gießen in 1921, joined the Werkleuten in 1935 , probably in Cologne.
  • Ruth Durlacher-Horn (* 1918 in Cologne) is mentioned in the Yad Vashem documentation as a member of the workers since 1928, which probably means that she was already a member of the comrades .
  • Shaw comrade
  • Ursel comrade
  • Hermann Gerson , who later called himself Menachem Gerson, was the federal leader of the workmen . His role is described as a “thought leader”, “chief theorist” and, somewhat ironically, as the “guru” of the workmen .
  • Gustav Horn was active in the Cologne group of comrades and transferred this group into the organization of the work people whose founding appeal he had signed together with Hermann Gerson . He was the secretary of Hechaluz .
  • Wilfrid Israel sympathized with the workmen . Gustav Horn attests that he has close ties: “Wilfrid, who reluctantly, if at all, entered into any organizational connection, did not shy away from joining the group of Wer people so closely that he made the suggestion of his own accord, [..] one Pay membership fee. After a public event at which the basics of our path were presented, Wilfrid wrote: 'From a listener I became a follower'. It is clear, however, that for him the act of becoming a follower could not mean identifying with all the opinions and views of this group of people. "
  • Lotte Jastrow , married Lotte Rotholz (born September 25, 1923 in Bad Bentheim - murdered in Auschwitz in 1943) was, as a tailor, a rather atypical member of the workmen . She did not emigrate, but was arrested as a member of Herbert Baum's resistance group on August 10, 1942 and sentenced to eight years in prison by the People's Court on December 10, 1942 , her husband Siegbert Rotholz to death. “Lotte Rotholz was brought from the women's prison in Berlin's Barnimstrasse to the Cottbus penitentiary to serve her sentence, from here she was transferred back to Berlin on October 12, 1943, to the deportation center in Grosse Hamburger Strasse, and finally together with two other women from Herbert's group Baum, Alice Hirsch and Edith Fraenkel, on October 14, 1943 with the so-called “44. Osttransport ”was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Your date of death there is unknown. "
  • Walter Laqueur
  • Eva Marcuse (* 1913, married Eva Neumark) later lived in Hasorea .
  • The brothers Erich Jehoshua and Ephraim (Eder) Marx were both members of the workmen . Erich Jehoshua's activities in the covenant are discussed several times in Leopold Marx 's book My Son Erich Jehoshua .
  • Ilse Meyerhof
  • Ilana Michaeli
  • Meir Nehab
  • Alfred Neumark (later Eldad Neumark; * February 20, 1921 in Frankfurt (Oder) - † May 16, 2010 in Israel)
  • Lore (Zimels) Sieskind , born in Berlin in 1920, was active in the resistance movement in the Netherlands. The Yad Vashem documentation lists her as a member of the " Hashomer Hazair (Workers - Union of Juedischer Jugend), 1932", which does not show any clear affiliation.
  • Irene Spicker , later Irene Awret
  • In 1933, Ernst Stillmann was part of the workforce management team .
  • Arnon Tamir was born in Stuttgart in 1917 as Arnold Siegried Fischmann. Even as a schoolboy he had contact with the workers and dropped out of high school in 1933 in order to start an apprenticeship as a gardener in preparation for emigrating to Palestine. He reports about this and about his later new beginning in Hasorea in his book Eine Reise zurück (see below).
  • Jacob Toury
  • Mara Vishniac , the daughter of the photographer Roman Vishniac was in 1937 when nearly eleven year old member of the group of "younger" member of the workmen become.
  • Ulla Weiler (* 1920 in Berlin) lived in Palestine under the name Ilana Michaeli . The father a doctor, the mother a kindergarten teacher and office hours assistant, lived in close contact with the grandfather on her mother's side, to whom Ulla was also very drawn. The family celebrated the Jewish festivals with this widowed grandfather, who was also a doctor. “You were well aware that you were Jewish, that is, you just kept the holidays.”
    Ulla visited the Viktoria Oberlyzeum , which was directed by Susanne Charlotte Engelmann , and in 1931 came to join the comrades . After her father noticed a year later that the group leader was trying to influence twelve-year-old Ulla with communist ideas, she had to leave the group and live without direct contact with the youth movement. In 1933 she found her way to the Werkleuten : “The group we had in the Werkleuten was afterwards a very important and determining factor in my upbringing, in my being. There were a few girls from the class, and afterwards there were eleven girls from all walks of life, mostly middle-class; but we also had a girl from a proletarian family from Wedding with us. And that was the circle of people in which I later spent my childhood and youth. ”
    Susanne Charlotte Engelmann, the Jewish director of the Viktoria Oberlyzeum, had to leave school and civil service in 1933. Most of the Jewish pupils also left school. Ulla Weiler, who remembered the changes in the school climate very well, was soon the only Jewish pupil at the school.
    How long Ulla Weiler stayed at the Victoria School is not known. She went through a hachshara at Gut Winkel in the second half of the 1930s and then worked in a dormitory for Jewish girls in Upper Silesia. In 1939 she emigrated to Palestine and found work in Hasorea . Her parents had managed to escape to Palestine a year earlier.
  • Ruth Wertheim (later Ruth Baer), like Lotte Dalberg (see above), was a pupil of the Malwida von Meysenbug School in Kassel, from the quinta in 1928 to the subprima in 1934. She left the school because she did not consider it a Jew There was more prospect of being admitted to the Abitur. She went to a household school for six months and had been attending afternoon classes in the Jewish community for “about 3 years, because I came from a very assimilated house and suddenly realized that I am Jewish without knowing what to be a Jew”. There I learned to read Hebrew and some Jewish history and prayers. From 1933 on I was a member of the 'Hechaluz' and a Jewish youth association 'Werkfolk', where I was also a very active leader in groups. [They] replaced the emptiness for me and gave me a new purpose in life. I wanted to go to Palestine, but my mother insisted that I go to England first to learn the language, and there relatives made it possible for me to train as a kindergarten teacher and Montessori teacher, which I did later has helped a lot in life. ”Ruth Wertheim was able to travel to Palestine from England in 1938 with a capitalist certificate and a year later she was able to bring her mother to meet her with a category D certificate . She studied English in Palestine and then worked as an English teacher. In 1941 she married and had two daughters. But in a letter dated March 31, 1983, she confessed: "Unfortunately we have not found a peaceful new home here, and I am very much afraid for the future of my family." She lived in Haifa.
  • Helene Westphal , later Leni Yahil (born June 27, 1912 in Düsseldorf - † 2007 in Israel), “was elected to the federal management when the 'Werkfolk' [..] was founded. She had educational and organizational tasks, often visited local groups, was often on the move and was also active as a journalist by expressing her views in the federal states. Together with Hermann Gerson (as a federal leader) and Gustav Horn (as a member of the federal government), she signed the declaration on August 4, 1932, on the federal goal of 'workers'. "

Kibbutz Hasorea

Ernst Nehab described April 1, 1933, the day of the boycott of the Jews , as the final turning point in the history of the workers . Until then, the prevailing opinion was that they could and must achieve their goals in Germany. With the boycott of the Jews, however, it suddenly became apparent that there was no longer any future for the workers in Germany. April 1, 1933 was a Saturday, and on the same weekend Nehab drove to his parents in Frankfurt (Oder) to inform them of his decision.

Then at the end of 1933 a first group of ten workers left for Palestine. How Nehab also (see above) they all came with a capitalist certificate to Palestine, and since most of them not previously Hachshara had passed, they were spread over several kibbutzim in order there to make up the practical training.

“They were the 'vanguard' of the 'workmen', destined to make initial organizational contacts and to prepare for their life as farm workers in the kibbutz. They didn't feel like Olim who emigrated to Palestine only because of an external notification or because of political pressure in Nazi Germany: They traveled as Chaluzim and knew they were up to the future demands. As Hermann Gerson said: "We will have new tasks, but there we will have all weapons in hand."
These "weapons" included above all the Jewish knowledge that the members of the "workmen" acquired at the jointly celebrated Jewish festivals , in the Bible and Hebrew courses as well as through their study of the history of the German Jews and the Jewish Enlightenment. In the Jewish community of Palestine they wanted to give the cultural values ​​recognized therein their own shape, whereby their practice should be determined by the basic values ​​of their covenant: the "will to community" and the "dialogical will".
The members of the federation were regarded as the "best of the Jewish youth in Germany."

- Irmgard Klönne : Youth Movement and Experience of Reality , pp. 137–138

In December 1935, land was allocated to the immigrants who had grown in number in the meantime in the Jezreel plain between Haifa and Megiddo , whereupon Kibbutz Hasorea was officially founded in April 1936 . In total, around 200 of the approximately 1200 members emigrated to Palestine by 1936, and another 400 had prepared for emigration in hachshara courses. Up until the outbreak of the Second World War , almost all members of the workers were able to leave Germany, the younger children to Great Britain and the Netherlands on the Kindertransport , the older youth to Palestine.

literature

  • Hermann Gerson: Workers. A Path of Jewish Youth , Kedem Commission Publishing, 1935.
  • Eliyahu Maoz: The Workers , in: The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 4, Issue 1, 1 January 1959, Pages 165–182.
  • Shlomo Erel : 50 years of immigration of German-speaking Jews in Israel , Bleicher Verlag, Gerlingen, 1983, ISBN 3-88350-601-X . In it on pages 189–193:
    • Kibbutz Hasorea of ​​the 'Workers' . Here the author gives a brief overview of the founding history and the state of development of the kibbutz at the beginning of the 1980s.
  • Walter B. Godenschweger and Fritz Vilmar : The saving power of utopia. German Jews found the Kibbutz Hasorea , Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, ISBN 3-630-86733-2 .
  • Arnon Tamir: A trip back. Of the difficulties of making amends. , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, ISBN 3-596-11466-7 .
  • Irmgard Klönne: Youth Movement and Experience of Reality. From the German-Jewish youth movement to the kibbutz society , in: Ḥotam, Yotam (ed.): German-Jewish youth in the "Age of Youth" , V & R Unipress, Göttingen, 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-557-6 , Pp. 121-144. (Partly via Google Books: Irmgard Klönne: Youth Movement and Experience of Reality )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Schlomo Er'el: Kibbutz Hasorea of ​​the 'Workers'
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Irmgard Klönne: Youth movement and experience of reality. From the German-Jewish youth movement to the kibbutz society , in: Ḥotam, Yotam (ed.): German-Jewish youth in the "Age of Youth", V & R Unipress, Göttingen, 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-557-6 , Pp. 121-144. (Partly via Google Books: Irmgard Klönne: Youth Movement and Experience of Reality)
  3. ↑ Walter Laqueur traces the term workmen back to Buber and Rilke, who would both have used it occasionally. (Walter Laqueur: Wanderer Against Will , p. 160)
  4. ↑ a b Zeev W. Sadmon: Düsseldorf Potsdam - Jerusalem. The historian Leni Yahil
  5. ↑ a b Micha Brumlik: In the people's home. How German reform pedagogy and group youth culture helped shape the kibbutz movement , Jüdische Allgemeine, April 1, 2010.
  6. ↑ Jacob Michaeli: The Kibbutz Hasorea. On the history of a community settlement founded by Jews from Germany , in: Walter B. Godenschweger, Fritz Vilmar: Die rettende Kraft der Utopie , p. 144
  7. ^ Walter Laqueur: Wanderer against Will , p. 160. He himself was more enthusiastic about Chaim Arlosoroff .
  8. ^ A b Walter B. Godenschweger, Fritz Vilmar: The rescuing power of utopia , pp. 136-139
  9. ↑ a b Jehuda Reinharz: Haschomer Hazair in Nazideutschland, 1933-1938 , in: Arnold Paucker, Peter Pulzer, Barbara Suchy: Die Juden Im Nationalozialistische Deutschland 1933-1943 , JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen, 1986, ISBN 3-16 -745103-3 , p. 330 (note 46)
  10. ↑ a b c Dietrich Heither, Wolfgang Matthäus, Bernd Pieper: Dismissed as a Jewish student. Memories and documents on the history of the Heinrich Schütz School in Kassel . }
  11. ^ Yad Vashem: Memoirs of Edith (Koenigsberger) Dietz
  12. ^ Yad Vashem: Testimony of Ruth Durlacher-Horn
  13. ↑ Suska Döpp: Jewish youth movement in Cologne 1906-1938 , LIT, Münster, 1997, ISBN 3-8258-3210-4 , p. 165 (note 650 and other scattered references).
  14. ^ Well-endowed. Wilfred Israel bequeathed his art collection to Kibbutz Hazorea, where the members slept in tents and shacks. Over 50 years later, the museum in his name is a good reason to visit the Jezreel Valley. , Haaretz , December 7, 2001
  15. ^ GUSTAV HORN: We From The Kibbutz Hazorea
  16. ^ Johannes Tuchel: Siegbert and Lotte Rotholz - members of the Baum & Stolperstein resistance group for Lotte Rotholz
  17. ↑ Walter Laqueur: Wanderer against his will. Memories 1921-1951 , edition q, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-86124-270-2 , p. 159
  18. ↑ Erich Jehoshua Marx - Fate of a Jewish Student , in: Kepler-Brief 2012, published by the Association of Friends of the Johannes-Kepler-Gymnasium Bad Cannstatt eV, pp. 23-27
  19. ^ Leopold Marx: My son Erich Jehoshua. His life from letters and diaries. Bleicher Verlag, Gerlingen, 1996, ISBN 3-88350-730-X .
  20. ↑ Biographical notes about him can be found on the page List of Stolpersteine ​​in Frankfurt (Oder)
  21. ^ Yad Vashem: Testimony of Lore (Zimels) Sieskind, born in Berlin, Germany
  22. ↑ Mara Vishniac membership card . She was later married to the Nobel Prize winner Walter Kohn, who was rescued from Austria by Kindertransport .
  23. ^ Walter B. Godenschweger, Fritz Vilmar: The saving power of utopia , p. 32
  24. ^ Walter B. Godenschweger, Fritz Vilmar: The saving power of Utopia , pp. 44–45
  25. ^ Walter B. Godenschweger, Fritz Vilmar: The saving power of utopia , pp. 56-58
  26. ↑ Walter B. Godenschweger, Fritz Vilmar: The saving power of utopia , pp. 64–65
  27. ^ Project Stolpersteine ​​Frankfurt (Oder): Family Nehab (from Ralf-Rüdiger Targiel, City Archives Frankfurt)
  28. ↑ Eliyahu Kutti Salinger: “Next year in the kibbutz”. The Jewish-Chaluzi youth movement in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Kowag, Paderborn 1998. ISBN 3-933577-01-2 . P. 120 f.

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