It was in the afterglow of Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War that Fred Rosenbaum traveled to Germany as a Fulbright Scholar.
Then 21, like many of his generation, Rosenbaum recalls experiencing “a great deal of Jewish pride.”
But a year at the prestigious university in the town of Goettingen also left him feeling “tremendous loneliness as a Jew.”
At a university that lost many leading Jewish academics to the Holocaust, in a town where the Jewish cemetery had been desecrated, “the marks of the Holocaust were very clear to me,” he remembers.
There was “a haunting absence” of Jews there, and Germans seemed indifferent about it.
In retrospect, he says, “that year in Germany was really crucial to the rest of my life.”
Rosenbaum was recently honored for the work he has done since 1968 as founder and executive director of Berkeley’s Lehrhaus Judaica, being named co-recipient of the Covenant Award — selected from 350 nominees across North America.
“Even more than an institution builder, I regard myself as a teacher, both inside Lehrhaus and in other settings,” he says.
Rosenbaum’s life as a Jewish teacher was born when he began studying the writings of German Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, who founded the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt in 1920 and was at the heart of a movement to reverse growing assimilation among Weimar Republic Jews.
At U.C. Berkeley in the early 1970s to pursue a master’s degree in German and Jewish history, Rosenbaum found it difficult to find enough Jewish courses.
Yet there was a renaissance in ethnic studies at the time, and “there was a kind of spirit in the air, a sense of starting new institutions, of `doing your own thing,'” he says.
With the help of fellow graduate student David Biale (now director of the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies), Rosenbaum published a three-part series in the underground newspaper The Jewish Radical about Rosenzweig and the German Lehrhaus.
“I knew I wanted to make a career in Jewish education,” he says.
“I saw a need for adult Jewish education that wouldn’t be part of the university, but would be part of a much broader base…learning for its own sake.”
At the age of 25, Rosenbaum proposed a Bay Area version of the Lehrhaus that would offer the community Jewish studies.
The founder and director of Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum, Seymour Fromer, and then-director of U.C. Berkeley’s Hillel, Rabbi Stephen Robbins, supported the plan.
Berkeley’s Lehrhaus Judaica began on a small scale in 1974. It offered a smattering of non-credit courses in rooms throughout the U.C. Berkeley Hillel, as Rosenbaum recruited U.C. colleagues and students to fill them.
Incorporated in 1985, Lehrhaus got its greatest boost in the late ’80s with an unsolicited gift from two of Rosenbaum’s students, Jacques and Esther Reutlinger. With a total of $750,000, the Reutlingers helped transform the Lehrhaus-Hillel building, adding classrooms, offices, a library and a garden.
At the Reutlinger Center on Bancroft Way, Lehrhaus offers everything from beginning Hebrew and Judaism to philosophy, theology and arts courses.
With the help of associate director Jehon Grist, Lehrhaus also offers guided tours of Jewish places from Israel to the streets of New York.
And Lehrhaus remains true to the German original, which emphasized study of classical Jewish texts in Hebrew, with dialogue, rather than lecture.
Rosenbaum calls it “give and take” between teacher and student. “Learning is a joint venture. Teaching has to do with listening, to ferret out the real interests of students.”
The approach worked. Though Lehrhaus still sits across the street from U.C. Berkeley, it is also part of the wider Jewish community, offering courses to more than 3,000 students at 28 sites around the Bay Area, including at JCCs and synagogues.
Lehrhaus was always meant to be “in the community” of the university, “but not of the community,” Rosenbaum says.
In September, the Lehrhaus executive director, along with Canadian teacher Ellie Gellman and New York singer-songwriter Debbie Friedman, will be honored by the New York City-based Covenant Foundation in a Chicago ceremony. He’ll receive a $20,000 prize that will help him continue recent research he began in Italy on the deportation of Roman Jews to Auschwitz.
“When you’re young,” he says, “you don’t realize how things can affect you.”