ABSTRACT
After Napoleon’s defeat Jacobson moved to Berlin where he sought to put these principles into practice by founding the Berlin Temple. In Hamburg in 1818 a Reform Temple was opened in which a number of innovations were made to the liturgy including prayers and sermons in German as well as choral singing and organ music. The central aim of these early reformers was to adapt Jewish worship to contemporary aesthetic standards. For these innovators, the informality of the traditional worship service seemed foreign and undignified, and they therefore insisted on greater
1768-1828 Israel Jacobson
1794-1886 Leopold Zunz
1801 Israel Jacobson establishes a boarding school for boys in Seesen, Westphalia
1801-1875 Zacharias Frankel
1818 Hamburg Temple established
1819-1900 Isaac Mayer Wise
1823 Publication of Leopold Zunz’s Sermons of the Jews
1830s German-Jewish immigration to the United States
1836 Samson Raphael Hirsch publishes The Nineteen Letters on Judaism
1838 Abraham Geiger appointed rabbi of Breslau
1842 Society of the Friends of Reform established
1844-1846 Reform synods in Germany
1853 Publication of Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews
1854 Breslau Seminary opened
1872 Reform rabbinic seminary founded in Berlin
1873 Union of American Hebrew Congregations for Reform synagogues founded
1875 Hebrew Union College for Reform rabbis opened in Cincinnati, Ohio
1885 Pittsburgh Platform
1887 Jewish Theological Seminary established in New York
decorum, more unison in prayer, a choir, hymns and music responses as well as alterations in prayers and the length of the service. Yet for some Jews influenced by the Romantic movement these modifications were insufficient. Two of Moses Mendelssohn’s daughters, for example, became Christian converts as did Henriette Herz (1764-1847) and Rahel Varnhagen (17711883) whose literary salons in Berlin were attended by leading German intellectuals. These women longed for a faith which would provide sublime devotion and mystical bliss.
