From Artilleriestrasse to Upper Berkeley Street: the Origins of a Rabbinical College

Abstract

The Leo Baeck College is one of the few institutions to be born out of the German refugee community in Britain, to have preserved the values of its origin, to have made the transition to a new culture and to have won for itself the respect of a new generation and built a new leadership. Its origins lie in the rabbinic seminary that was a quintessential product of pre-war German Jewry, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. For the first half of its life the College was located at the West London Synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, before its transfer to its present site at the Sternberg Centre for Judaism in East End Road, Finchley. This is a brief account of some of the stages in that first journey.