My Student Years at Leo Baeck College

Abstract

I entered the Leo Baeck College in October 1959 and completed my studies there in June 1965. In those days the college had few students and was initially housed in the old council room of the West London Synagogue atop the main entrance in Upper Berkeley Street. In 1963 the building on the corner of Upper Berkeley Street and Seymour Place was demolished and in its place was erected a new building for the Leo Baeck College which also doubled as a venue for the West London Synagogue Religion School. In the late 50s the faculty was almost entirely made up of refugees from Nazism, many of them graduates of the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums , the great Berlin seminary founded in 1 872 by Abraham Geiger and closed in 1942 by the Nazis. An exception was Rabbi Dr Alan Miller, a young and dynamic British born graduate of Jews College and Oxford University, who taught history and Modern Hebrew literature. In 1961 two other British born scholars joined the faculty, Raphael Loewe, who also taught at University College and David Patterson, Cowley lecturer in post-Biblical Hebrew at Oxford. By this time Alan Miller had left for New York to take up the prestigious post of Rabbi at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. David Patterson took over the teaching of Modern Hebrew literature and Raphael Loewe taught us Midrash. Raphael Loewe, though an Ashkenazi, was Parnas Presidente of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Maida Vale. He was later appointed Professor of Hebrew Studies at University College. David Patterson was to later found the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. An expert on Avraham Mapu (the first Hebrew novelist) Patterson also taught us the poetry of Bialik and the prose of Agnon. He was probably the most self-effacing of our teachers. Rabbi Dr Israel Otto Lehman, former curator of Hebrew documents at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, taught us liturgy and Mediaeval Jewish philosophy. He also offered to teach Arabic but was persuaded by the college authorities not to do so. (Arabic had been a part of the Hochschule curriculum.) Dr Lehman