From Elias Auerbach to Hulda Zlocisti – Paths of migration and professionalization of German-speaking Zionists in Palestine before 1933

Researcher: Dr. Ines Sonder
Duration: DFG-Grant (2026–2029)

Around 2,000–3,000 German-speaking Jews lived in Palestine before 1933. Unlike the approximately 60,000 Jewish emigrants from German-speaking countries who came to the country as refugees after the Nazis came to power until the beginning of World War II with the Fifth Aliyah, they had immigrated out of Zionist conviction. A small number had already come to what was then Ottoman Palestine before World War I, while the majority arrived in the early 1920s, with the Third Aliyah, to what was now the British Mandate of Palestine. They were forerunners and trailblazers in a wide variety of fields in the development of the Jewish homeland – as architects, engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers, artists, philosophers, and scientists at the Hebrew University. “Among them were many whose activities left a lasting mark on the economic and intellectual life of the country” (Richard Lichtheim). This also applies to the contribution of the first Zionist women from Germany, who came to the country not only as wives of their husbands, but with their own professional aspirations.

Their lives as Zionist pioneers from Germany and the German-speaking region, as well as their contribution to the establishment of viable structures for a Jewish community in Palestine have so far been documented only in a few published testimonies and monographs, but academic studies are lacking – again in marked contrast to the research on the exile German-Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1930s. Above all, their active assistance through the creation of Hitachduth Olej Germania (HOG), the self-help organization of immigrants from Germany founded in 1932, through which they, the long-established residents, supported the integration of their former compatriots, was unprecedented as a collective achievement (also internationally) – yet it has received little attention in research, even though it laid the foundation for the successful integration of thousands of refugees.

The aim of this research project is to document the lives of German-speaking Zionists who came to Palestine before 1933 by creating an online bio-bibliographical database, which has been under construction for some time, and a monograph containing a biographical group portrait of ten German-speaking Zionist women in Palestine: Lotte Cohn, Käte Dan, Gerda Luft, Gurit Kadman, Grete Obernik, Escha Scholem, Helene Hanna Thon, Anna Ticho, Lydia Treidel, and Hulda Zlocisti. In the field of Israel Studies, the research project is seen as an important contribution to German-language Zionism, including its gender history, German-Jewish immigration and migration research to Palestine, and the cultural history of Israel in the 20th century.