Dr. Wilhelm (William) Weinberg, Rabbi (1901 -- 1976) | Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">       About Rabbi Dr. Wilhelm (William) Weinberg

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">                   By his son, Rabbi Norbert Weinberg

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">       Dr. Weinberg was born on April 3, 1901, in Dolina, Galicia, at that time under the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later Poland, now Ukraine). During the outbreak of the First World War, he with his parents, Samuel and Bina Weinberg, and his only sibling, Benjamin, fled to Vienna, where they settled

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">       He completed Gymnasia there and later attended the University of Vienna, where he completed his doctorate in Political Science in 1928. His thesis was "Parliamentarism: System and Crisis", describing the collapse of parliamentary democracy in Europe and his diploma was signed by the University’s Rector, later on to become Cardinal, Theodore Innitzer. During those years, he was active in Zionist politics ( Hashomer Hatzair and Chairman of Zionist Students in Austria  organization) with  such  figures as Meir Yaari ( founder of the Israeli MAPAM party) and Martin Buber. His involvement in Jewish communal life led him to go to Berlin in 1932, to study for ordination under Rabbi Leo Baeck at the Hochschule (or Lehranstalt) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. He was employed by the Jewish Community in Berlin as a preacher, and was chairman of the Union of Jewish Students Organization in Germany and of the Students’ Organization at the Hochschule. One of his accomplishments was to arrange for the last lecture by Albert Einstein. In 1935,,he was imprisoned by the Nazi regime for two years. He was awarded his ordination in absentia by the faculty in August 1938. His Rabbinic Thesis was " A Study of the  Psychology of  Jewish Heretics.” Upon his release from prison, he fled to Austria.

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">       Dr. Weinberg was concerned by the possibility of an impending German invasion of Austria and by December 1937, he and his brother, Benjamin, fled to Brno, Czechoslovakia; the Germans marched into Vienna that March. His parents fled to Switzerland and lost the family home and possessions. Once there, he obtained a Czech passport through the help of a consular official in the Czech government.

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">       On  March 15, 1939, the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia and he was arrested and held in Spilberk Prison. With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939,  he was transported to the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland. In Lwow (Lviv), now former Poland and the presently annexed by the USSR territories , he met up  with his brother and  they headed east, on foot and freight train, just in advance of the German onslaught in 1941. They later stopped in Stalingrad and moved on to Frunze then the USSR (now Bishkek) in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. They supported themselves through this time by work as chemical engineers. To prepare themselves in advance for exile, they had taught themselves chemistry while in Czechoslovakia and Poland and they hid any documents which would have shown political connections or academic training in religion, law or political science, backgrounds that would have had them sent to Siberia. Because they had Czechoslovakian passports, they were assisted by Czech refugees there and the factory in Frunze had been founded by Czechs (the most prominent of whom was the father of Alexander Dubcek, postwar Czechoslovak politician).

<p style="margin-left:.25in;">       Towards the end of the war, they were helped by General Heliodor Pika, head of the Czechoslovakian Military Mission in Moscow, who enabled them to join up with Czech forces under General Svoboda on the Soviet-German Front. By war’s end they made their way to Vienna where they rebuilt their lives from scratch.

<p style="margin-left:.25in;"> Dr. Weinberg was appointed to establish a Jewish People’s University for the refugees in the DP camps in Hallein, near Salzburg, Austria, in 1947 and then served as a lecturer for the refugees under Jewish Central Committee, in the US Zone of occupation, Austria; he began research  on “Life and Struggle of Jewish DPs in Austria”.

<p style="margin-left:.25in;"> He married a family relative, Irene Gottdenker, herself a survivor of Nazi persecution in Lwow and Warsaw, Poland. In 1948, he was called to serve as the first Landesrabbiner (State Rabbi) of Hesse in Germany and as Chairman of the Union of Rabbis of Germany. His chief task was to unite the German and East European survivor communities and coordinate efforts between the American occupation officials and the new German government.

<p style="margin-left:.25in;"> He came to the United States of America in 1951, where he served as a Rabbi to several congregations in New York City, East Liverpool, Ohio, Washington, D.C., Clarksburg, West VA, and Carteret, N.J. He was a member of the Rabbinical Assembly of America. He passed away March 16, 1976.

<p style="margin-left:.25in;"> Documents from his activities and writings both before and after the Second World WAr are in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.      His life story from family origins through liberation at the end of the Second World WAr has been written and published by Rabbi Norbert Weinberg, titled Courage of the Spirit.