Draft:Abraham Israel Jacobson

Rabbi Abraham Israel Jacobson אַבְרָהָם יִשְׂרָאֵל יַעֲקוֹבְסוֹן
Personal life
Born	(1888-05-26)26 May 1888 Tiberias, Ottoman Empire Palestine
Died	3 February 1955(1955-02-03) (aged 66) Stockholm
Buried	Södra judiska begravningsplatsen, Stockholm
Spouse	Batseba (Bat Sheva) Pavlovsky ​ ​ (m. 1911)​
Children	4
Education	Yeshivot in Jerusalem and Eastern Europe
Religious life
Religion	Judaism
Denomination	Religious Zionism
Jewish leader
Position	Rabbi
Synagogue	Adat Jeschurun, Stockholm
Began	1940
Ended	1955

Abraham Israel Jacobson (Hebrew: אַבְרָהָם יִשְׂרָאֵל יַעֲקוֹבְסוֹן; 26 May 1888 – 3 February 1955), born Avraham Israel Mostkovi, was a Scandinavian Religious Zionist rabbi. He served four Scandinavian Jewish communities during the years 1911–1955, and became a central figure in serving refugees and the thousands of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Sweden in 1945.

Early life

A.I. Jacobson was born in Tiberias, in the historic Erets Israel, then under Ottoman rule. In 1905, at age 17, he left for Europe and eventually settled in the Lithuanian town of Lazdei, where he studied and taught religious studies. There he met his future wife, Batseba (née Pavlovsky); after a few years, his Ottoman citizenship forced him to leave the Russian Empire, and the couple married in Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad), then in East Prussia, before traveling via Copenhagen to southern Sweden.

Career

Between 1911 and 1916, Jacobson served as a religious teacher in the southern Swedish town of Landskrona, which did not yet have a formal Jewish community. During World War I, he helped relay correspondence between Sweden and the Old Yishuv in Ottoman Palestine via neutral channels. The couple's first two children, daughters, were born there before the family moved to Sundsvall in 1917. There, in Sweden's northernmost Jewish community — where the couple's two sons were born — Jacobson served as teacher, shochet, mohel, and spiritual leader until 1927. That year he became the formal spiritual leader (forsamlingsforstander) of what was then the world's northernmost Jewish community, in Trondheim, Norway, a post he held until 1940. In this role he helped broaden the community's cultural and religious life and established its first Mikveh, while also serving as the community's shochet and mohel, and de facto rabbi, conducting marriages, delivering sermons, and lectures to various audiences.

The German invasion of Norway found Jacobson on a community errand in Sweden; threatened with arrest by the Germans, he did not return to Trondheim and instead settled in Stockholm, where two of his children had already moved. His wife and youngest son joined him there soon after.

In Stockholm, which had a much larger Jewish population, a group of Orthodox German Jews were in the process of establishing a small new prayer house, based on a synagogue that had narrowly escaped destruction during Kristallnacht in 1938; its furniture and Torah scrolls had been transported to Sweden and, in October 1940, it was reinaugurated as the Adat Jeschurun Synagogue. Jacobson was ordained a rabbi by two Orthodox rabbis then temporarily resident in Stockholm. He was installed as the synagogue's rabbi, a position he held until his death.

Wartime rescue efforts

As a newly appointed rabbi, Jacobson soon became involved in a series of efforts to rescue Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied and Nazi-allied Europe, working through diplomatic contacts, sympathetic church leaders, and Jewish relief organizations including Vaad Hahazalah and the World Jewish Congress. Not all of these efforts succeeded.

The Ecuadorian passport scheme

By early 1942, members of the Jeschurun congregation — many of them refugees from Germany — had grown alarmed about relatives in occupied Holland, where deportations now loomed. They discussed ways to help their relatives, including whether a foreign diplomat might be persuaded to issue protective papers. This reportedly led Jacobson to seek out a Latin American diplomat willing to do so. Later that year, he began a cooperation with Manuel Antonio Muñoz Borrero, Ecuador's Consul General in Stockholm, who agreed to issue Ecuadorian passports and citizenship papers to Jews in occupied Europe; recipients were thereby exempted from wearing the yellow star and, in many cases, saw their deportation delayed or prevented. Jacobson's own account credits the scheme with saving at least 100 German Jews in Holland; Independent accounts put the wider total at roughly 250 passports issued over two to three years, with at least 80 recipients confirmed to have survived the war. Jacobson worked closely on the scheme with the Lithuanian-German lawyer Moritz Pineas and cooperated with Vaad Hahazalah and the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress. Borrero came under mounting pressure from both Nazi Germany and his own government. He was repeatedly interrogated by Swedish authorities and was ultimately removed from his post; he never returned to Ecuador.

The Klein family

Mille and Wulf Klein, close friends of Jacobson and his wife from their years in Trondheim, were arrested with their teenage children, Abraham and Cissi, during the mass arrests of Norwegian Jews in late 1942; the father and his children were deported and murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp. Hospitalized in Oslo after her arrest, the wife, Mille, was rescued from the hospital by the Norwegian resistance and smuggled to Sweden in April 1943, settling in Stockholm. Not yet knowing her husband and children's fate, Mille, together with the Jacobsons, pursued a plan to adopt Abraham and Cissi in order to secure them Swedish citizenship. The hope was that this would allow their transfer from Auschwitz to a sub-camp reserved for citizens of neutral countries. The adoption was approved by a Stockholm court in May 1943, and Swedish citizenship for both children was confirmed by the Ministry of Justice that August; Jacobson wrote to Abraham days later to share the news, unaware that both children had already been murdered on arrival at Auschwitz the previous March.

Slovakia

In 1944, Jacobson took part in an effort led by the British Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld to save the Jews remaining in Slovakia, by attempting to persuade Slovak President Jozef Tiso to intervene on their behalf. Drawing on his relationship with Sweden's Archbishop Erling Eidem, Jacobson helped draft an appeal to Tiso, delivered via Slovakia's Consul General in Sweden, Bohumil Pissko, in late November 1944; Tiso's reply, received in January 1945, stated that the appeal had arrived too late for anything to be done. A related, separately documented request by Jacobson on behalf of Rabbi Samuel David Ungar of Nitra also failed. The episode has been examined independently in an academic study of Sweden's wartime interventions in Slovakia.

Yeshivat Mir

Between 1940 and 1941, the staff and students of the Mir Yeshiva escaped Lithuania on transit visas issued by Japanese vice-consul Chiune Sugihara, traveling first to Kobe, Japan, before being relocated to Shanghai, where conditions grew difficult by 1943. In November 1944, the yeshiva's head, Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, formally appointed Jacobson to "act in all matters regarding the Mirer Rabbinical College now temporarily in Shanghai". Efforts by the Swedish section of Vaad Hahazalah to secure a Swedish group visa for the roughly 475-strong group went unanswered. Rabbi Jacobson then applied and was granted a special audience with Sweden's Crown Prince, later King Gustaf VI Adolf, on 6 February 1945, which he attended with Rabbi Benjamin Zeev Jakobsohn. The following morning, Sweden's Foreign Ministry issued the requested group visa. Ultimately, the plan did not materialize as the Soviet Union refused transit visas across its territory. The yeshiva remained in Shanghai until the end of 1946.

Refugee and survivor support

Rabbi Jacobson arrived in Stockholm in 1940, just as World War II was triggering a refugee crisis among Europe's Jews. Over the following years, growing numbers who escaped German control found their way to Sweden, including nearly all of Denmark's Jews and hundreds from Norway. As a result, Jacobson became involved in social and religious support for these refugees. After liberation in 1945, some 10,000 Jewish survivors arrived in Sweden, their status defined as repatriandi. Jacobson frequently visited the many rehabilitation camps set up in Sweden, in close cooperation with some of his rabbinic colleagues, such as the Rabbis Shlomo Wolbe, Jacob Israel Zuber, and Benjamin Zeev Jakobsohn, all based in Stockholm, as well as Rabbi Elieser Berlinger in Malmö. All these rabbis cooperated closely with Va'ad Hahazalah, the Joint, World Jewish Congress, RELICO (The Committee for Relief of War-Stricken Jewish Population in Europe), and Mosaiska församlingen, the local Jewish community.

The Agunot Crisis

Main article: The Swedish Agunot Crisis

Among the roughly 10,000 Holocaust survivors who reached Sweden in 1945, an estimated 2,500 women were left unable to remarry without proof that their husbands had died — a status known in Jewish law as agunah. Jacobson personally collected survivors' testimony toward resolving these cases, compiling an 86-page handwritten compendium now held at Yad Vashem, as part of a wider effort by Sweden's rabbis under the auspices of Vaad Hahazalah's Scandinavian Section. After Rabbi Zuber emigrated to the United States in 1947, Jacobson took over full responsibility for coordinating Agunot cases with the Chief Rabbinate of Jerusalem, work he continued into the early 1950s. Where Swedish pastors refused to certify a woman's status as widow, he lobbied parish offices to accept marriage certificates from Vaad Hahazalah's rabbinical board. When not successful, he personally performed an unknown number of religious wedding ceremonies without civil recognition, known as stille chuppes ("quiet weddings").

Holocaust Survivors in Sweden

In the summer of 1945, Jacobson was asked to visit the Swedish Transit Hospital at Cambrai Barracks in Lübeck, a facility set up for concentration camp survivors, especially former inmates of Bergen-Belsen. The assignment came from a joint request by the World Jewish Congress, Vaad Hahazalah, the Jewish congregation of Stockholm, and Sweden's Aliens Commission (Statens utlänningskommission), who wanted Jacobson to help mediate tensions between camp staff and survivors and prepare internees for what to expect in Sweden. He was considered well suited to the task, being able to communicate with survivors in German and Yiddish and with the Swedish, British, and German authorities in their own languages. He left Stockholm on 19 July 1945 and reached the camp the following day. Jacobson's visit produced a detailed report for the World Jewish Congress, documenting the conditions in the camp, including high mortality from tuberculosis and typhus among young survivors. It also described tensions between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish inmates, e.g., concerning the distribution of rations. Jacobson reported that most of the Polish and German Jewish survivors he spoke with refused repatriation to their home countries, preferring emigration overseas or to Palestine. From the late 1940s into the early 1950s, Jacobson traveled extensively across Sweden to visit rehabilitation camps, sanatoriums, and isolated survivors. A single week at the end of June 1948 illustrates the pace of this work: he covered roughly 2,200 kilometres (1,400 miles) by train and bus, giving a lecture at a regional conference, performing two circumcisions, and preaching at Stockholm's Jeschurun synagogue. He continued organizing Passover relief for survivors in smaller Swedish towns as late as 1953. Beyond the stille chuppe ceremonies described above, Jacobson regularly officiated at weddings for refugee couples in cooperation with the Liberal Chief Rabbi Kurt Wilhelm, who held official accreditation to register marriages, as opposed to Jacobson; a similar arrangement with Gothenburg's Liberal rabbi proved more contentious.

Honor Court

Main article: The Herbert Schultz Honor Court

In 1948, Jacobson chaired an ad hoc Jewish "honor court" convened in Stockholm to hear accusations against Herbert Schultz, a fellow survivor of the Riga ghetto accused by other survivors of having collaborated with German authorities while serving as head of the ghetto's Nazi-run employment office. Such extralegal community tribunals started in the DP camps soon after liberation, formed to address allegations of Jewish collaboration outside state courts, and continued in a number of postwar Jewish communities. They have since been studied by historians. After hearing testimony from several survivors, the court in Stockholm — with Jacobson presiding alongside two associate judges — ruled in November 1948 that Schultz's actions had been "brutal and unworthy of a Jew". It nevertheless declined to refer the case for legal prosecution, citing the loss of his two young sons in the Holocaust, along with testimony about his conduct that reflected favorably on his wife, which led the court to judge him less harshly.

The Sh'chita Prohibition

Main article: The 1952 Swedish Sh'chita Heterim

Sh'chita had been practiced in Norway until it was banned outright in 1929. Working for Trondheim's community from 1927 to 1940, Jacobson subsequently had to arrange for his community's kosher meat to be slaughtered in Sweden and brought across the border. When Sweden itself required stunning from 1937, he continued this cross-border slaughtering from 1938 under the permission for gas stunning granted that year. By late 1951, Sweden's Ministry of Justice threatened to ban sh'chita altogether unless the Jewish community switched from gas to electric stunning. To secure the necessary halachic authorization, Jacobson traveled to Jerusalem together with Chief Rabbi Wilhelm in early 1952, meeting personally with three prominent rabbinical authorities — Rabbi Tsvi Pesach Frank, Rabbi Shlomo David Kahane, and Rabbi Gershon Lapidos — each of whom issued a heter (permission) specifically for Sweden, permitting sh'chita preceded by electric stunning. At a community meeting on 21 February 1952, Jacobson presented the new permissions to representatives of Stockholm's Jewish community, securing the continuation of kosher slaughter in Sweden.

External links

• Scandinavian Jewry 1911–1955: In the Footsteps of Rabbi A.I. Jacobson Through Turbulent Times at De Gruyter Brill (DOI: 10.1515/9783111625027)