Coming to America: Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1940-1941

Abstract

I grew up in an awareness that Jews are running away from Judaism and religion. This was true in Poland, where I was born; in Germany, where I studied; and in America, where I found refuge in 1940. In those years spiritual problems were considered irrelevant, but during the last seven or eight years I have been surprised by an extraordinary change. (Heschel, ‘‘Teaching Religion to American Jews,’’ 1956) Abraham Joshua Heschel arrived in the United States eight months after war was declared in Europe. He was one of a group of eight refugee professors known as the College in Exile who were brought to Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati by Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College (HUC), as part of an initiative to rescue European Jewish scholars. Hebrew Union was a Reform institution dedicated to modernizing Judaism; as proclaimed in the school’s catalog of 1940–1941, ‘‘a real and positive American Judaism’’ had to ‘‘adapt itself to the life which its children must live as loyal citizens of this American nation and participants in and eager contributors to evolving American culture.’’ Heschel would have preferred to work at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS, in those days called simply the Seminary), a Conservative rabbinical school in New York City; but at the time the school refused or