Joseph Breuer

Joseph Breuer, also known as Yosef Breuer (March 20, 1882 – April 19, 1980) was a rabbi and community leader in Germany and the United States. He was rabbi of one of the large Jewish synagogues founded by German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression that had settled in Washington Heights, New York.

Life and career

Joseph Breuer was born in 1882 in Pápa, Hungary, to the local rabbi Solomon Breuer and Sophie Breuer née Hirsch, who was the youngest daughter of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. After the passing of Hirsch in 1888, Solomon Breuer was elected his successor as rabbi of the Austrittsgemeinde (seceded community) of Orthodox Jews known as Khal Adath Jeshurun. Here, Breuer Sr. founded a yeshiva called the Torah Lehranstalt and became its first Rosh Yeshiva.

Breuer can be considered the main post-war representative of the Torah im Derech Eretz movement in the United States. Apart from the above-mentioned books, he limited his written work to contributions to the community organ (Mitteilungen); some appeared in book form after his death. His influence was mainly due to his public speeches and his indefatigable work on the community's services. A number of important ideas can be distinguished: Independent Orthodoxy: Breuer drew on his grandfather's work of Austritt - the principle that Jewish communities can only truly claim to be Jewish if they are ideologically and otherwise independent from organizations that represent ideals contrary to halakha. In America, where the community organization was not enforced by local law, this became in Breuer's mind an even stronger issue than in Europe. This stance also led to his involvement with Agudath Israel of America. He was stridently opposed to a Zionist state, and refrained from visiting Israel. Torah im Derech Eretz: Breuer saw the risk of misinterpretation of his grandfather's ideas on how Judaism could be harmonised within limits with general culture of the outside world. He repeatedly stated that compromising on Jewishness and halakha was at variance with Torah im Derech Eretz. With the rise of the yeshiva movement, he also remarked that Torah im Derech Eretz was by no means a unique temporary measure - as was often claimed by protagonists of the "Torah only" view. Kosher ve-Yosher: Although one of the phenomena of post-World War II Orthodoxy has become the (re)introduction of stringencies in halakha, Breuer held that these should not be limited to the ceremonial sphere but also to the many financial and social laws of Judaism. He would, for example, refuse a hechsher to companies with bad financial records.