Ometz Lev Hero: Rabbi Leo Baeck Leo Baeck (1873–1956) was an important liberal Jewish theologian, who thought and wrote about God. He also showed ometz lev as a hero of the Holocaust.
Jews in Germany. In 1933 he was elected founding president of the Representative Council of German Jews. He fought against the Nazis, working to provide social services to the survivors of the Jewish community and often negotiating directly with the Nazis.
Student, Teacher, Rabbi Leo Baeck was born in the German town of Lissa. Samuel Baeck, his father, was a local rabbi. Leo was brought up keeping kosher and studying Talmud. His father had a friendship with the local Christian minister. This friendship taught Leo Baeck to appreciate interfaith friendship and dialogue.
Theresienstadt In 1943 Leo Baeck was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. There he was put to physical labor pushing a garbage cart. Baeck was elected honorary president of the camp’s Jewish Council of Elders. He worked hard to preserve the humanity of those around him and ministered to Jewish and Christian inmates alike. Baeck took every opportunity to continue his work as a rabbi and scholar. He would discuss philosophy with fellow prisoners while he pushed his garbage cart around camp. In the evenings hundreds of people would crowd into a small barracks to hear Baeck lecturing from memory on famous philosophers like Herodotus, Plato and Kant.
Leo Baeck enrolled in the The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, a Conservative rabbinical academy. In 1894 Baeck left JTS for Berlin’s Reformoriented Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums — the College for the Science of Judaism. There he received his rabbinic diploma in 1897. During World War I Leo Baeck was a military chaplain and serviced on both the eastern and western fronts. In addition to ministering to the troops, he saw to the spiritual needs of local Russian Jews.
After the liberation of Theresienstadt in May 1945, Baeck prevented the camp’s inmates from killing the guards. He then stayed on to counsel the sick and the dying.
Baeck’s Theology: The Essence of Judaism Leo Baeck thought of Judaism as the universal religion of reason. He was less concerned with the idea of God than with his congregants’ real-life spiritual experiences. His best-known work was The Essence of Judaism.
After the War Rabbi Baeck went to London where he eventually became the chairman of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. He also lectured from time to time at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Rabbi Baeck did not give up his belief in God or Judaism during the Holocaust. He explained that the awful things that happened there were not the failure of God, but the failure of human beings. Both during and after the Holocaust he lived a life of ometz lev. A rabbinic school in London, a synagogue in Los Angeles, and an educational complex in Haifa are some places named after him.
Baeck and the Nazis Rabbi Baeck was sought out for positions of communal leadership. He was a member of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, an organization committed to fighting German anti-Semitism. After Hitler’s rise to power Baeck refused all offers of escape, declaring that he would stay as long as there was a minyan of 51
