The Idea Remains

The German Reform rabbi Leo Baeck was trained at the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary and the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, as well as at the universities of Breslau and Berlin. He served as a rabbi in Germany, as a chaplain in the German army during World War I, and, from 1933, as president of the Reich Representation of German Jews under the Nazis. Despite entreaties to leave, he remained in the country, believing it was his duty to offer spiritual support in the face of Nazi persecution. He was deported to the There­sienstadt concentration camp in 1943. He survived and after the war moved to London, where he was appointed chair of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, ef­fectively the most important Reform rabbinical position outside of the United States. His seminal 1905 work The Essence of Judaism, was written in response to The Es­sence of Christianity by Christian theologian Adolf von Harnack.