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Family & Education

Rabbi Wolf Gottlieb: His courage saved so many

Freema Gottlieb's father saved hundreds, maybe thousands of children from the Nazis. But he never spoke about it.

September 14, 2017 15:51
5aWGBetty37MazalTov

By

Freema Gottlieb ,

Freema Gottlieb

5 min read

While cleaning my father’s apartment in Jerusalem recently, I came upon a copy of a German-language deposition he had given to Yad Vashem in March–April 1977, soon after making aliyah, to Herbert Rosenkrantz, head of the department for the investigation of Nazi war crimes.

While I have some grasp of German, I was unable to appreciate the details. I had the transcript professionally translated, unravelling a story that he had never told me.

In the days following the Anschluss in 1938, when the Germans marched into Vienna (to general acclaim) , my father, Wolf Gottlieb, a rabbi in his twenties, sought permission from the Nazi authorities, under Adolf Eichmann, for the community to open a special “school for emigration.”

For Eichmann, whose sole mission in Vienna at the time was the “forced emigration” of Jewry, the idea was welcome. This proposal was worked out through channels of the Vienna Jewish Community with approval from my father’s immediate superior, Josef Lowenherz, and Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein (whose story was later told in Claude Lanzmann’s 2015 film The Last of the Unjust). My father was confirmed as principal of this school, which was a rededicated version of the Achwa Wereuth [Brotherhood and Friendship] Talmud Torah.