Baeck, Leo, 1873-1956

בק, ליאו, 1873־1956

found: Jewish Virtual Library, 3 January 2018(Rabbi Leo Baeck presented his major philosophical ideas in a book called The Essence of Judaism. It was titled as a response to Adolph von Harnack's book The Essence of Christianity, which Baeck critiqued when it was published in 1901. Baeck's personal life deserves some mention because he lived by the values described in his writings. As president of the representative body of Jews in Germany after 1933, he was given many opportunities to escape. He refused, insisting that he would stay so long as there was a minyan in Germany. In 1943 he was sent to the Terezin (Terezienstadt) concentration camp. He survived the horrors by helping others, teaching, and refusing to lose his sense of self or dignity. His philosophical beliefs were not swayed by the Holocaust. He always maintained that evil was the result of humans using their free will to not do the ethical. The enormity of the Nazi atrocities did not shake that belief.) - http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/leo-baeck

found: Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2006:page 119 (Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief Rabbi of Berlin; We know the physiognomies of the Jewish leaders during the Nazi period very well: ... Leo Baeck, scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated, who believed Jewish policemen would be "more gentle and helpful" and would "make the ordeal easier" (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them).

found: Wikipedia, viewed April 10, 2025(Leo Baeck; born May 23, 1873 in Lissa, Province of Posen, German Empire; died November 2, 1956 in London, England; 20th-century German rabbi, scholar and theologian; leader of Liberal Judaism in native country and internationally, and later represented all German Jews during Nazi era; after Second World War settled in London, U.K., where chairman of the World Union for Progressive Judaism; in 1955 the Leo Baeck Institute for the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry was established, and Baeck was the first international president of this institute) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Baeck