Landsberg, Alfred Abraham

Lawyer

Born: 23.04.1887 in Wiesbaden

Died: 02.08.1964 in Kfar Schmajahu (near Tel Aviv, Israel)

Landsberg studied law at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin and Marburg, obtaining his doctorate in 1909. He worked as a lawyer in Wiesbaden from 1913. In 1914, he volunteered for the First World War. Severely wounded by a lung shot, he had to return to Wiesbaden. In 1917, he joined forces with the lawyers Moritz Marxheimer and Dr. Karl Weber to form a partnership. Landsberg felt that his honor and love of his country had been so badly damaged by the so-called Jewish census in the Reichswehr in 1917 that he turned to Zionism. In 1921, he married Leonie Frank; the couple had two daughters. Elected to the board of the Jewish community, Landsberg worked with Rabbi Dr. Paul Lazarus for the recognition of the so-called Eastern Jews. In 1923, Landsberg was elected president of the Zionist Association for Germany (ZVfD) - at a time when the split in the Zionist World Organization (ZWO) was looming. In 1924, Landsberg organized a congress of Zionists in Wiesbaden to support Chaim Weizmann, the opponent of the split, who became Israel's first president in 1948, but this was unable to prevent the revisionist wing from splitting. Now a notary, Landsberg worked for the Jewish community in Wiesbaden. In his private home, he hosted guests from Palestine as well as his friend, the poet Ernst Toller. Toller wrote large parts of his drama "Hoppla wir leben" here.

Landsberg and his family finally moved to Palestine in 1932. Supported by Chaim Weizmann, Landsberg was appointed co-founder and chairman of a settlement company. The "Rural and Suburban Settlement Company" (Rassco) supported the German immigrants who did not want to live in the kibbutz. The company's most spectacular success was the resettlement of all the Jewish inhabitants of the village of Rexingen in Swabia to Palestine. A large number of villages for persecuted people from Germany were established under the motto "solidarity agriculture on private land". In 1950, the company went public as a settlement and construction company that promoted the settlement of the middle class. Landsberg died in 1964 as an important pioneer in the development of Israel.