From Germany to Palestine

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the support of many people, to whom the author is indebted.

The first version of this book, which was published in German in 1993, was written in consultation with Ludwig Liegle and Ulrich Herrmann, both Professors of Educational Science at the University of Tübingen (Germany) at that time. Even after many years, the author is grateful for the patience with which they accompanied his research decades ago and for the advice they gave him.

The revised and updated version now newly published in English would never have become reality without the support of Christina Schlereth (translation), Elisabeth Mossburger (technical support) and Lorena Harfold (research assistance) of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Germany), where the author has been teaching since 1998. Thanks also to the staff of the Eichstätt-Ingolstadt University Library, who carried out all of the research and inter-library loan orders very quickly and reliably, and to the Archives, the author has repeatedly visited since the late 1980s to prepare this book. Special thanks also to John Gal for his valuable comments on the revised manuscript and to Hermann Ühlein (Senior Commissioning Editor; Peter Lang) for his kind support of the project. Finally, the author thanks his wife Elisabeth Konrad-Huck, who patiently advised and supported him on all computer problems.

An Israeli-German research group led by John Gal (Hebrew University Jerusalem) and Stefan Köngeter (University of Trier and University of St. Gallen/Switzerland), who have conducted research on the subject of this book in recent years, provided the impetus to publish this book. More about this in the following chapter – „Introduction“.

Introduction

This book focuses on the historical, systematic and in some areas comparative description of important stages in the establishment of a modern system of social support and social work in Germany and the Jewish communities of Germany and Palestine, the latter being known as the “Yishuv”. The development in Germany covers the period from the end of the 19th century to the seizure of power by the National Socialist Party in 1933. The development in the Yishuv will be analysed from the end of the Ottoman rule (1917/18) up to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. The focus, however, will be on the 1920‘s and the first half of the 1930‘s, “the formative period of Israel’s journey to statehood.”¹

The first chapter describes a phased approach to the process of modernisation of traditional poor relief in Germany. It is not possible to give a detailed account of all of the key development steps, and certainly not of the complex socio-historical circumstances that led to the implementation of a modern welfare system. To this effect, it is not intended to give a complete account, nor would this even be possible. The aim is much more to summarise the main reasons for the restructuring of traditional poor relief and the move towards modern social work-paradigms, to combine them using newly-defined, validated guiding concepts and to exemplify and refine them by means of an institutional example: the Archive for Public Welfare [Archiv für Wohlfahrspflege] in the German Empires’ capital Berlin. The Archive for Public Welfare was a creation of the German Society for Ethical Culture [Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur] and was founded in 1893 as the Information Centre of the Association for Private Poor Relief [Auskunftsstelle der Zentrale für Private Fürsorge]. The German Society for Ethical Culture, founded in 1892, was one of the numerous bourgeois initiatives to help solve the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution. In 1906 the Information Centre of the Association for Private Poor Relief was renamed in the Archive for Public Welfare.

If private donors wanted to support an institution or organisation of poor relief, then they could contact the Archive for Public Welfare, in order to combat mismanagement and unorganised, uncontrolled action. With regard to the care providers, the Archive for Public Welfare promoted itself through detailed knowledge of the field, rationality and professionalism in assessment and consultation. ←11 | 12→Finally the Archive for Public Welfare also offered advice on public poor relief, for example to municipal administrations, and the relevant authorities, to improve the welfare system.2 So the Archive for Public Welfare was important as a focal point for those interested in reform (see chapter one of this book). Through contact with the Archive for Public Welfare and their involvement in its activities, the reformers developed an idea of how reform and development processes could be implemented, which – and this is the subject of the second and third chapter of this book – they were then able to transfer to other contexts, in order to adapt the contextual social reality to the reform model conveyed by the Archive for Public Welfare. This was true, not least of all, for the first and long-standing general manager of the Archive for Public Welfare, Siddy Wronsky, who also played a leading role in Jewish welfare work in Germany in the 1920’s, and in the same way became a significant key figure in the development of a modern system of social work in the Jewish community in Palestine after her emigration in 1933.

The third chapter of this book describes the development of a modern system of social work in the Jewish community in Palestine. Here it will be demonstrated that, to a great extent, the German-Jewish social workers and welfare experts were able to seamlessly apply the experiences and viewpoints they had gathered whilst in Germany. Most of those who were in influential positions and involved in setting up a system of social work in the Yishuv after 1933, had already helped to initiate reform in Germany in the 1920’s, at least in the context of Jewish welfare work, and had designed corresponding processes. The institutional and content-related solutions developed in Germany became the “blue print” for the development work within the Jewish community in Palestine, particularly with regard to the chronological phases of the development of the ←13 | 14→fundamental structure. Therefore, the study presented here is concerned with an historically unique transfer process of professional knowledge and guiding operative models and a contribution to transfer research.

A Latin author once wrote: “Habent sua fata libelli” or “books have their fate”. Certain topics of research also have their “fate”. Before the author published the first version of this book (in German)4 in 1993, the situation with reference to the topic discussed here was simple and manageable. There were some autobiographical contributions, namely valuable memoirs of social workers and welfare experts who emigrated to Palestine in the 1920‘s and 1930‘s and had received their training in Weimar Germany before their immigration to Palestine.⁵ However, there was no systematic examination of the professional ideas these immigrants brought with them from Germany and no systematic research on the transfer of ideas in the field of social work to the Jewish community in Palestine, except some remarks in an unpublished doctoral dissertation in Hebrew.⁶ Frank Loewenberg mentioned “German social work theories”, but did not examine these theories in more detail⁷ Jona Rosenfeld and Aliya Kedem spoke of “the tradition of social work in Germany” and “trained professionals who immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s”⁸, without giving any further explanation.

On the contrary, the influence of American Jewish women’s organisations on the emerging system of health care, modern welfare, social work and social pedagogy in the Yishuv was already well-researched and is still well-researched today. This had and has to do with the fact that the key person in this process of establishing a modern system of welfare, Henrietta Szold, was American. The very important (and in some concern much more important) German influence, however, remained completely unexplored, and the scholarly interest in the 1993 book was modest, at least in Israel.⁹ In 2004 an international conference ←14 | 15→of German and Israeli historians was held in Jerusalem devoted to the role of German Jews in the Yishuv and in Israel without, however, addressing the many German-Jewish social workers with even one word.10 2019, in Margalit Shilo’s essay on “Professional women in the Yishuv”, only Szold is mentioned under the keyword “social work” – no one else.¹¹ Finally: As the book published in 1993 was also intended as a contribution to the study of the history of women in the Yishuv, Hannah Safran’s statement made with reference to the Yishuv in 2008 (!) remained valid: “The role of women in the creation of Jewish society and in public endeavour was forgotten.”¹² This is a shortcoming because we believe that we can demonstrate that the foundations of the Yishuv social system, as well as those of the Israeli welfare state, were laid by women, women‘s organisations, and other institutions inspired by women.

In the last two decades this has changed. In general, interest in the history of social work in the Yishuv in Israel itself appears to have been awakened.¹³ Recently an Israeli-German research group was set up in this broader context to investigate the transfer of reform-ideas in the field of social work from Germany to the Jewish community of Palestine. A number of publications¹⁴ have emerged from this research project (“The transnational history of social work and social welfare between Germany and Palestine in the 1930‘s and 1940‘s”) that have contributed new insights. While the study presented here is limited to a hand full of protagonists – especially to Siddy Wronsky – due to the aforementioned research project we now know more relevant names.¹⁵

The book presented here deals with networks that first gathered in the 1920s around the Central Welfare Agency of the German Jews [Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle ←15 | 16→der deutschen Juden] and related institutions and then reunited in Palestine.16 What we are dealing with here are less “border-crossing processes”¹⁷, but rather border-crossing professionals, a network of border-crossing professionals, so to speak, who have enabled the transfer of ideas. While the ideas transferred to Palestine initiated the establishment of a modern system of social welfare there, all the reforms had been reversed in Germany, where the reform ideas were no longer being implemented and got lost under the pressure of the National Socialists. The Yishuv became a refuge for modern social work!

In order to be able to participate in this discussion and convey the results of his research to an interested scientific public better than before, the author of this book has decided to present a revised and, in part, rewritten English version of his book published in 1993, supplemented of course by the secondary studies that have since been published. The author is grateful for the discussions he was able to have with members of the Israeli-German research group, which gave him the feeling that his own research can provide an interesting complement to his colleagues’ findings. In this respect, the new book is understood as a supplement, not as a competitor.

Finally, the book is important to its author in a very personal way. He started his academic career with the German version, his doctoral thesis. With this revised and enlarged version in English, he finishes his academic career and changes his status to professor emeritus.

1 On the Way to Modern Social Work: Some Aspects of the Reform of Poor Relief in Germany from the End of the 19th century up to 1933

The creation of modern social work and social pedagogy in Germany in the first third of the 20th century was largely expedited, amongst a variety of other factors, by the three following interdependent triggers:

- The beginnings are to be seen within the debate advocating “social policy” to counteract the effects of industrialisation. Advocates of social policy believed that traditional poor relief should be complemented by social policy and both had become essential to a modern system of social welfare. Within this context the uneconomical, disorganised out-of-date system of poor relief also became the subject of criticism and a new paradigm was applied, which was bound by the demand for state intervention, economisation and centralisation (1.1).

- Based on the fight for economic rationalism and supported by the bourgeois women’s movement, the demand soon arose for a formal qualification for the “caring trade”. This struggle was successful, as can be seen in the creation of a dedicated educational infrastructure and the content-related organisation of the qualification for a new profession: the social worker. This process was concluded in the 1920’s with decrees defining guidelines for schools for social work first in Prussia, and then in the other German federal states (1.2).

- The professionalisation of social work is demonstrated by the aforementioned guidelines, but much more by the development of science based methods specific to the profession, whose content-related focus can be described with the key word “educationalisation”, or rather, the introduction of pedagogy, psychology and psychotherapy into the carer-client-relationship within the framework of the “case work approach”, which has been developed in the United States and was successfully taken up in the German professional debates in the 1920’s (1.3).