Wilhelm Lewy

Wilhelm Ephraim (Seev / Wolf) Lewy (born November 28, 1876 in Breslau , Lower Silesia ; † February 14, 1949 in California , USA ) was a German rabbi and Zionist who, as a student, co-founded and spiritual father of the first Jewish gymnastics and sports club Germany was.

family

He was the youngest of five sons of the Jewish Orthodox businessman David Lewy († 1913) and his wife Hulda from Breslau.

Wilhelm Lewy married Betty Samuel († 1918) in Neustettin around 1906 , where their daughters Mirjam (* 1907) and Hanna (* 1909) were born. In March 1913 the third daughter Dorothea was born in Berlin and in 1915 the youngest daughter Ruth. After the death of his first wife, who died of the Spanish flu , he was advised to remarry soon. A friend introduced him to Frieda Winter, whom he soon married.

He was the uncle of Ernest Lenart .

Life

In 1878 his parents moved with him to Kempen in the province of Posen , where he later started school and received his first religious instruction. In 1887 the family moved to Berlin, probably for economic reasons. Here Lewy attended elementary school for a year before he switched to the grammar school in the gray monastery in Berlin-Mitte and later to the Sophiengymnasium in Weinmeisterstraße 15, Berlin-Mitte .

In 1897 he followed Theodor Herzl's call to call the first Zionist congress in Basel . He also took part in the second congress the following year, when in Max Nordau's speech he was impressed by the term Muscle Judaism coined on that occasion .

After he had corresponded with Max Bodenheimer from 1897 onwards about the establishment of a Jewish gymnastics and sports club and in 1898 he graduated from the Sophiengymnasium, he founded the first Jewish gymnastics and sports club in Germany "Bar Kochba" on October 22, 1898 with some classmates and later fellow students “, Named after Bar Kochba , the Jewish rebel of the same name. The club became the forerunner of the later Makkabi World Federation .

Lewy implemented his interest in Jewish theology in his studies, which he began in 1898 at the Yeshiva in Krakow and continued in 1899 at the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin with Esriel Hildesheimer , the first rabbi of the Orthodox exit congregation Adass Jisroel , and at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin . As part of his three-year course in economics , he attended the University of Erlangen for one semester , where he finished his studies in 1901 with the dissertation “ Tendencies in the international strike movement ”. In the same year he also received his rabbi diploma from the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminar.

When " Misrachi " was founded as an orthodox movement in the Zionist movement in 1902 , he joined it, but was not noticeably active. In 1905 he was first employed as a rabbi in Neustettin .

At the end of 1909 the young Lewy family returned to Berlin, where he worked in various synagogues , above all the synagogue in Kaiserstrasse (Berlin-Mitte). Towards the end of the First World War , Lewy was called up as a field assistant rabbi and, together with Hermann Struck, was deployed as a mediator between the German state and the Jewish population, especially near Wilna .

In 1925 Lewy was given a permanent position as a religion teacher in the Jewish community in Berlin and at the same time the management of the private synagogue and school "Talmud Tora Knesset Jisroel" in Linienstraße 19, which belonged to the Orthodox community of Adass Jisroel. Soon after the seizure of power of the NSDAP end of January 1933 left Lewy's daughter Miriam Germany and emigrated to Palestine . The second oldest daughter Hanna had previously moved to the USA with a German family as a nanny.

In 1934 Lewy left school and his position as teacher and head of the Knesset Yisroel and emigrated to Palestine with his daughter Ruth. Dorothea followed shortly afterwards , who then moved on to the USA. His second wife, Frieda , stayed in Berlin. According to bureaucratic information from National Socialist Germany, Lewy did not emigrate until 1936, which indicates that he was back in Germany after 1933, possibly to catch up with his wife.

In Palestine Lewy began in 1936 as a teacher and preacher in the immigrant community Ichud in Tel Aviv , where he lived with his daughter Ruth until his death. The enthusiastic Zionist Lewy witnessed the founding of the State of Israel . Lewy died of a heart attack while his daughters Hanna and Dorothea were visiting California, and his body was transferred to Tel Aviv and buried there.

literature

• Adass Jisroel: The Jewish community in Berlin (1829–1942), destroyed and forgotten . Museum Education Service, Berlin, 1986.
• Mordechai Eliav, Esriel Hildesheimer: The Rabbi Seminary in Berlin 1873-1938. Background to its inception and its students over the years . Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem 1996. German version, Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin - Centrum Judaicum, Berlin, edited 2006, pp. 179–180
• Eric Friedler: Makkabi Chai, Makkabi is alive. The Jewish Sports Movement in Germany 1898–1998 . Christian Brandstätter Publishing House, Vienna - Munich, 1998.
• Museum Pedagogical Service Berlin (Ed.): Synagogues in Berlin . Special issue for the exhibition Synagogues in Berlin in the Berlin Museum, Lindenstr. 14, Berlin. MD, Berlin, 1983.
• Julius H. Schoeps : Berlin, history of a city . Be.bra Verlag GmbH, Berlin-Brandenburg, 2001.
• Kurt Schilde : With the Star of David on his chest, traces of the Jewish sports youth in Berlin between 1898 and 1938 . Sportjugend Berlin (Ed.), Berlin, 1988.
• Act of reparation to Wilhelm Ephraim Seev Lewy.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Lewy in the catalog of the German National Library