European Judaism

The Leo Baeck College opened on 30 September 1956 with a ceremony in the Stern Hall of the West London Synagogue under its name the Jewish Theological College of London. Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck was too ill to attend but wrote:

I have been eagerly looking forward to this afternoon. I can scarcely say how deeply sorry I am that I cannot be present on this unique occasion which to me means so very much.

Dr Ellen Littmann was one of only two full-time lecturers when the Leo Baeck College opened in 1956. Encouraged by Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck, she was the first woman to have completed the academic programme of the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, qualifying as a teacher of religion. Her cohort of students included Regina Jonas, who would become the first ordained woman rabbi. Attached is a personal letter from Dr Baeck thanking Dr Littmann for preparing his apartment in anticipation of celebrating there with his daughter the festival of Chanukah. Dated 9 December 1955, the following year would see the opening of the College, but also mark shortly afterwards the death of Dr Baeck, while planning the course of midrash he was intending to teach. This simple, unselfconscious domestic letter links these two remarkable Jewish scholars, a teacher and a former student, now colleagues and fellow refugees, engaged in teaching a new postwar generation. It is also a direct personal link in the chain of tradition.

Leo Baeck College was founded shortly before the death of the man whose name it bears. As his biographer and one who knew him during his time as a student at Hebrew Union College, Rabbi Friedlander regrets that the qualities of the man himself become lost behind the many institutions that bear his name. One of his teachings was that of ‘positive neutrality’. When he led the Jewish community in Germany, Baeck had to mediate between the many Jewish factions, watched and scrutinised in everything he did. He was not a political leader, used to making compromises, but a religious leader who based his decisions on what he considered to be right in the sight of God. Of course he made mistakes, but people knew that this was a man of faith, prepared to live by the decisions he had made. He was also a teacher of hope who recognised endemic evil in the world but nevertheless saw a clear pathway for the Jew and for humanity.

Many Jews find themselves distant from traditional Jewish beliefs and practices in our worldly society. Yet the quest for a personal spiritual dimension in life may remain. What is the nature and experience of prayer, and how does it relate to Jewish liturgy and public worship? At the heart of this analysis is the personal journey of the author encountering the paradoxes and challenges, the openness and potential traps of a love affair with God. We have cleaned up religion to such an extent that we have made it too nice for the purpose it serves: what do we do with our anger, our aggression, our ambition and our bodies? This article is an important legacy of the teaching of Rabbi Blue, who had a considerable impact on generations of students of Leo Baeck College and the communities he reached through his contributions to contemporary Jewish liturgy and his popular public voice on British radio.

This article was written in 2004 to consider how progressive rabbis might locate their authority in an age already marked by the decline of traditional structures. It argued that such authority depends on self-reflective learning, authenticity, and the willingness to speak truthfully in moments of uncertainty. Edited in late 2025 for European Judaism, in the shadow of increasing global chaos and the devastating violence and moral anguish of Israel/Gaza/Palestine, these concerns have only deepened. Coupled with the disruptive presence of artificial intelligence and the wider erosion of public trust, the demand for honest, careful, and courageous rabbinic speech (as I myself painfully recognise) has become even more pressing.

Expectations of the rabbi of today differ from those of previous generations. Formerly he was the source of rabbinic learning, and it was the responsibility of the community to support him while he studied. Today, he, or now she, is additionally expected to give nourishment, support, appreciation and care to his or her congregation. In the 1970s, Leo Baeck College recognised the need to introduce a range of counselling skills into the rabbinic programme to prepare the students for this broader role. But the rabbi, as a symbol and carrier of Jewishness, knowledge and inspiration, may also face resentment or envy in the role, leading to stress and even hurt. So the rabbi must also acquire new skills and experience for the sake of preserving his or her own long-term health.

It is difficult to write theology at all in an age of triage, where there is nothing sacred about human life. The core of the Jewish ‘identifying narrative’ is the story of the passage from Egypt, from Exodus to Sinai. Reading together the Passover Haggadah is a regenerative retelling and an imaginative reliving that same event year by year. It demonstrates how the political, social, individual and spiritual dimensions of freedom are inseparable and interdependent. But two overarching events in Jewish history, the Shoah and the existence since 1948 of the State of Israel, both still so close in time that we continue to reverberate from them, have made our situation theologically, existentially and in every other way much more complex. We need to rediscover imagination grounded in a clear sense of the holy uniqueness of each human life, imagination that understands itself as part of the work of an ongoing creation.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the College set about finding the resources to recruit and train potential candidates from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to return and serve as rabbis in their local Jewish communities. The first of several students arrived in 1991. Amongst them was Alexander Dukhovny from Ukraine. He delivered this address, describing his experience at the College, on receiving an Honorary Fellowship marking twenty-five years of rabbinic service since his ordination.

At the rear of the garden behind the Sternberg Centre's Manor House, the home of the Leo Baeck College, is a work by the artist Roman Halter z”l (1927–2012). It is called Zachor, Remember, a survivor's memorial for those who died in the Shoah.

This article explores a cross-cultural approach to the experience of destruction and exile, through the examination of two paintings, Jerome Tiger's Trail of Tears (1966, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/021961 (02/14/2017)) and Rutie Borthwick's Song of Songs and Lamentations (2012, Leo Baeck College, London), alongside the book of Lamentations. Drawing on the work of Nancy Lee, who explores oral traditions of lament in a cross-cultural context, the article examines what the visual arts can add to this conversation. The article considers the ways in which these paintings have informed the author's response to Lamentations, reflecting the author's family history of the United States serving as a place of safety for European refugees from the Shoah, while simultaneously being a source of destruction and exile for native peoples. Lamentations becomes a space to explore experiences of exile and destruction, both as a particularistic experience of Jewish history and alongside the expression of universal emotions.

This article provides a case study on the application of an innovative approach to Holocaust education that combines citizen science and provenance research at the library. It explores the implementation of the Leo Baeck Institute's Library of Lost Books at Leo Baeck College Library. The award-winning lighthouse project aspires to identify the current whereabouts of the Nazi-looted library of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin (1872–1942) with the help of a global community of ‘book detectives’. Insights into the agency and nuances in emotional responses within different clusters of participants allow first learnings about the practical implementation of the Library of Lost Book's pioneering approach that combines learning with scholarship about the theft of Jewish cultural assets by the National Socialists.

This article explores the interconnections between research and teaching in the Leo Baeck College Beit Midrash (otherwise known as the Rabbinic Literature Intensive). Two recurring issues that have consistently arisen in the teaching and learning of rabbinic texts are, firstly, a struggle with the nature of the Sages and, secondly, a reluctance to engage with what may be perceived as difficult or irrelevant texts. I propose that the challenges posed to the contemporary reader both by the Sages and by the wide range of topics they explored, might be met through a middle way between apologetics and blame, and by the engagement with, rather than avoidance of, difficult themes and difficult Sages. Through a comparative methodological approach, analysing two parallel sugyot in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds on the delicate subject of virginity claims, we will demonstrate how research of apparently non-utilitarian, antique, challenging texts can permit us to embrace and learn from the discomfort and tension in our sacred literary inheritance.

Kiddush Levanah is a currently little-known ritual of potentially rich symbolic value in progressive Jewish communities: this brief ritual over the moon in its waxing phase might be understood as a Divine endorsement of renewal (especially through the chatimah of the ritual's central blessing) that invites or even compels the evolution of Jewish practice. While it sits in the context of other moon-related Jewish rituals, which cluster around the new moon, it contrasts with them in its fluidity of time and as a ritual that still involves witnessing the moon. Ritual forms, practices and customs associated with Kiddush Levanah are outlined in this article, in addition to some midrashic connections with cycles of waxing and waning. The article begins and ends with a newly composed midrash, as one suggestion for a teaching tool to widen knowledge and appreciation of Kiddush Levanah.

The Hebrew Bible, with its strident championing of the poor, the orphan and the widow, its passionate advocacy of justice and its striking accounts of the liberation of the former slaves from Egypt, has held the Jewish people in its thrall for over two thousand years. Yet do these ideals actually extend to, or even include women, within its expressions of divine law? This article will examine two intriguing provisions (Deuteronomy 21:10–14 and 25:11–12), which reveal that such concerns were of no importance – in contrast to the synthesis of prestigious (Spartan and Assyrian) legal traditions which Deuteronomy's scribes sought to emulate.

Leo Baeck College was founded a mere two days before Charles Middleburgh was born. His association with LBC began in 1975 and ends with his retirement in July 2026. During that time, he has witnessed or been part of all the major events in the College's lifetime; this personal memoir enables him to reflect on the College itself, rabbinic training and rabbinic life.

This article proposes a Jewish ecotheological expansion of the commandment to love the stranger to include the plants and animals of the non-human biosphere. While Emmanuel Levinas did not address the problem of environmental degradation, his relational ethic is used here to suggest that Jews respond to the appeal of the anthropogenically ravaged face of the Earth, and that of the non-human environmental refugees that move across it, with a love that is at least analogous to that they already show to human resident aliens and displaced persons in need of sanctuary. In the crisis of industrial modernity's alienation from nature, a commandment not to harm but to love the planet as we would a stranger may be a more ethically and affectively immediate driver to environmental activism than the repurposing of more obviously eco-relevant biblical and rabbinic principles and precedents alone.

This review essay follows the life stories of the lesser-known (mainly Jewish) women who were instrumental in spreading psychoanalytic ideas and in the founding of the Russian, Polish, French, Hungarian and British societies as collected in: Klara Naszkowska (ed.), Early Women Psychoanalysts (London: Routledge, 2024). It analyses their theoretical innovations and social contribution, their challenges as both women and Jews, and the importance of their unique perspective, often only picked up on decades after their lives. From addressing maternal disappointment, childhood trauma and identity formation to coining terms like the talking cure and upturning what was known of narcissism, these women blazed a trail, but were somehow forgotten. The review essay also calls for contextualising the work and life of the more famous celebrated female analysts, such as Klein and Deutsch, within this group of early women psychoanalysts, pointing to how typical their experiences were, and what set many of the women in the book up for success: commitment to the good of society, immigration, mentorship and often, sadly, removing themselves from difficult home situations.