Word: rabbies
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With Hitler's coming, Providence presented Rabbi Baeck with his most staggering task. In March 1933, the leaders of German Jewry elected him president of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland to represent the Jews and protect them from the Nazis...
...bearded old man spoke precisely, with a German accent, carefully emphasizing his words. "Providence never sends what is finished," he said. "Providence sends only possibilities and a task." Silver-haired Rabbi Leo Baeck was 80 years old last week, and Providence still keeps him busy with tasks and possibilities. Six months of the year he teaches religion at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati; six months he labors in England as president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. And all the time he carries with him the possibilities and tasks of one who is venerated as a hero, a scholar...
...Place Is Here." Leo Baeck never tried to be anything but a scholar like his father and a good rabbi. Born at Lissa, Posen, which was then part of Germany, he studied at Breslau and Berlin and in 1905 wrote a book, The Essence of Judaism, which is still being studied and translated into the world's languages. He served as a chaplain in the German army in World War I, then settled down in Berlin to write and tend his flock...
After most of the synagogues in Germany had been burned in the great purge of 1938, Rabbi Baeck went on conducting clandestine services. Once police found his meeting, raided it, and sent everyone under 60 off to forced labor in factories. But the next Saturday more people came to worship. Four times Rabbi Baeck was arrested and four times he was released. Meanwhile, from outside Germany came tempting offers. To one of them, Cincinnati's Rockdale Temple, Baeck sent a characteristic cable: "As long as there is a single, humble Jew left alive in Germany, my place is here...
...women and children. When the camp was liberated 2½ years later, only a few hundred were left alive, and 72 -year-old Leo Baeck was one of them. When the Russians rounded up some petty officials and turned them over to the camp's survivors for vengeance, Rabbi Baeck persuaded his fellow sufferers to leave them unharmed...