The Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German Jewish History and Culture is a landmark academic institution in German Jewish history.
With multiple branches around the world, it is one of the preeminent centers for the research and preservation of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. And at its helm here in Jerusalem is none other than Dr. Irene Aue-Ben-David.
With a career spanning multiple decades in scholarship, Aue-Ben-David’s tenure as director of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem is more than fitting. Whether it is taking part in the Library of Lost Books project to find and track down the thousands of books that once belonged to the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, or the creation of a digital archive on a new website, it is clear that she is bringing the institute to new heights.
In honor of the Leo Baeck Institute’s 70th anniversary, In Jerusalem sat down with Aue-Ben-David to talk about her work and what makes the institute so special.
How did you end up at the Leo Baeck Institute?
I’m a historian specializing in German Jewish history and historiography. I did my PhD at Gottingen University in Germany.
I came to Israel in 2004. I had a scholarship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I was invited to submit my CV for this position. And since 2015, I have been the director.
Tell me about the Leo Baeck Institute.
The center was simultaneously founded with two further centers founded in New York and London, as that was where most of the surviving German Jews ended up after the Holocaust. It was founded with the understanding of the value of German Jewish history, with those initial members of the Institute wanting to document and research this field.
Among the founding members were people like Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hugo Bergman, Ernst Simon, and others here in Jerusalem.
Three centers were set up and worked very closely on documenting in London.
In 1956, the first volume of the Leo Baeck yearbook came out – an academic journal that still exists today. We also had a monograph series in German and English – and here in Jerusalem, we have one in Hebrew.
Over 70 years, each center very much developed its own local circles. And here in Jerusalem, that meant that nowadays, I would say 80% of our programming is in Hebrew.
This includes public events, book lectures and discussions, workshops, and conferences. We publish books and monographs in Hebrew, and we have a journal called Chidushim. And our public mandate is not only to make this field accessible for the broader audience, but also to preserve the liberal values of the German-speaking Jewish tradition.
There are a lot of documents or sources from the German language that never made it into Hebrew.
And so many people here cannot relate to these topics. That’s why translation is very important for our work.
Do you only focus on the German language?
It’s mostly German, and Yiddish has a smaller place. We sometimes offered our reading room for pre-Yiddish classes, but that was for another organization that took place here.
But obviously, also Yiddish and Juden-Deutsch, which is just another Jewish language, play into our field of research. For example, the Rothschilds wrote correspondence in Juden-Deutsch, which means German in Hebrew letters, not Yiddish.
What’s something in your experience about German Jewish history that most people don’t realize or most people misunderstand?
It’s a good question. I think most people, if they think about German Jewish history, probably think about the Holocaust and Nazism. But for our work, actually, 19th-century history is very important, which means the whole development of German Jews aiming for and receiving citizenship; relations between this minority and the state; relations between religion and state, and with modernity.
And within this, you have the 19th-century phenomenon of looking at Judaism as a culture, and researching it as culture – not necessarily as a religion. This is a more secular approach to Judaism.
How does this relate to the modern-day community in Germany?
The modern-day Jewish community in Germany is obviously completely different. After the Holocaust, there were only very few people left from these communities. A lot of the new communities were built with many Jews from Eastern Europe, who were maybe in displaced persons camps in Germany. And then you had a huge wave of immigration after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
What are you working on now?
We are currently working on a project together with our colleagues from abroad. We are building a digital archive of interviews that we have conducted with the leading scholars of German Jewish history and culture. And it’s the interviews they have done with younger scholars. And that’s going to be on air in early January. We are really in the first stages of putting things together, and it will be an ongoing platform.
We will probably add new interviews every month. The idea was to get to 70 interviews, like 70 spaces of the Torah for the 70th anniversary.
What did the institute do for its 70th anniversary?
For the 70th anniversary, we just had a very big conference that took place at the Van Leer Institute, which we called Baeck Home. As part of this, we brought together some of the things that we had been working on in recent years.
One thing we spoke about was our location.
The institute is located at Bustenai (Katamon) in a building from the early 1960s, built for elderly people, specifically German Jews. Where we are sitting is part of German Jewish heritage here in Israel.
The whole meaning of “home” has obviously become very damaged after Oct. 7, and that was also something that we wanted to relate to. And so it was very much about the foundations of German Jewry, building communities, and then having to move on or destroy the house.
This interdisciplinary conference covered these themes from a lot of different perspectives, such as art, philosophy, literature, and history, and it was very successful.