Lazarus, Paul (Pinhas)

District and city rabbi, publicist

Born: 30.10.1888 in Duisburg

Died: 01.01.1951 in Haifa

The highly educated and socially committed Lazarus was both Wiesbaden district rabbi and city rabbi in the synagogue on Michelsberg from 1918-38. He also made a name for himself far beyond Wiesbaden as a member of the executive committee of the "Association of Liberal Rabbis of Germany". Lazarus studied Jewish theology, history and philosophy in Marburg and Erlangen and received his doctorate in Erlangen in 1911. He then attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, one of the most important teaching institutions of modern Judaism.

During the First World War, Lazarus looked after Jewish soldiers at the front as a field rabbi. After the war, together with his wife Hedwig Walfisch, who came from Warsaw, he dedicated himself to the integration of the immigrant, often poor "Eastern Jews" in Wiesbaden. In addition to his commitment as president of the Nassau Lodge and as co-founder and lecturer of the Jewish Teaching House in Wiesbaden, he was involved in youth work in the non-partisan, non-Zionist "Association of Jewish Youth Clubs in Germany".

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Lazarus worked to expand social aid in the "Jewish Welfare Center", to which - at his suggestion - the "Aid Association of Jews in Germany", the "Israelite Support Association", the "Association of Jewish Women" and the "Ritual Kitchen for the Middle Class" had joined forces in Wiesbaden. When Jewish children were increasingly discriminated against in public schools, he arranged for a provisional school to be set up in Mainzer Straße in 1936.

Lazarus and his family emigrated to Palestine in 1939. In Haifa, he had to work as a "private rabbi"; it was almost impossible to be employed as a congregational rabbi - there were very few liberal congregations in Palestine. In 1949, he published "Die Jüdische Gemeinde Wiesbaden", a book of memories of a destroyed community.

Lazarus' daughter Eva became a professor of Muslim and Jewish history and, together with her sister, donated her father's important library to the Active Museum Spiegelgasse for German-Jewish History (AMS). Paul-Lazarus-Straße in Wiesbaden commemorates him.