Leo-Baeck-Haus: The College That Taught Judaism as a Science

Why is it significant?

Find the plain stone building at Tucholskystraße 9, with its tall windows and heavy doorway. No dome, no towers, nothing that begs for a photograph... and yet some of the sharpest minds of German Jewry walked through that door every morning.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Find the plain stone building at Tucholskystraße 9, with its tall windows and heavy doorway. No dome, no towers, nothing that begs for a photograph... and yet some of the sharpest minds of German Jewry walked through that door every morning.

This was the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the College for the Science of Judaism, founded in 1872 and housed in this building from 1907. It was a liberal seminary, open to students whether they were Jewish or not, men or women, and it studied Jewish history and sacred texts with the tools of modern scholarship rather than with faith alone. The street was called Artilleriestraße back then; today it carries the name of the writer Kurt Tucholsky.

Among its teachers was Rabbi Leo Baeck, the most respected liberal rabbi in Germany, who from 1933 led the national body representing German Jews under the Nazi regime. And among its students was a young Berliner named Regina Jonas. She wrote her final thesis on whether a woman could serve as a rabbi, argued that she could, and in December 1935 she was ordained, the first woman rabbi of modern times... decades before that became normal anywhere in the world.

The Nazis closed the college in 1942. Regina Jonas was deported to Theresienstadt, where she went on preaching and caring for the other prisoners, and in 1944 she was murdered in Auschwitz. Leo Baeck was deported to Theresienstadt too, and survived; he died in London in 1956. For decades Jonas was almost forgotten, until her papers turned up in an East Berlin archive in the early 1990s and her story was finally told.

Today the house bears Leo Baeck's name and is the seat of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. So the building the dictatorship emptied now speaks for Jewish life across the whole country. That is a quiet kind of victory. Walk back up to Oranienburger Straße and head east, until the trees of Monbijoupark open up on your right, down towards the river.