ABSTRACT
In Eastern Europe traditional learning based on the yeshivot, combined with a different social, political, and demographic structure, remained the mainstay of Jewish education, while in central and western Europe institutions of modern academic studies were established that vied with universities in the rigour of their scholarly application. While the Berlin Orthodox Rabbinerseminar and the Breslau Seminary were closed at the time of the Kristallnacht, the Hochschule was, curiously enough, allowed to continue its activities until July 1942 when Leo Baeck was ordered to cease teaching the handful of students who had survived until then. Leo Baeck was one of the ornaments of the Hochschule for close on fifty years, as student and as teacher. But his life did not revolve around the institution as did Elbogen’s. Baeck came to the Hochschule in 1894 after three years of study at the Breslau seminary.
