Joseph Asher

His father, Jonah Ansbacher (1880–1967) was an Orthodox rabbi who had received a doctorate from the University of Erlangen, writing a thesis on a 13th-century Arab cosmologist.

His father was ordained by Rabbi Solomon Breuer and he was an ardent follower of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, founder of the Torah im Derech Eretz trend in Judaism.

Joseph Asher left the Orthodox Judaism of his ancestors and later became a Reform rabbi.

Joseph Asher (1921–1990) was an American rabbi born in Germany, known for his advocacy of reconciliation between the Jews and the Germans in the post-Holocaust era, and for his support for the civil rights movement in the United States.

He was senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco for 19 years.

Joseph Asher was born Joseph Ansbacher on January 7, 1921, in Heilbronn-am-Neckar, Germany.

After his father received a rabbinic appointment, the Ansbacher family moved to Wiesbaden in 1925, where Joseph attended the Staatliche Gymnasium.

When the Nazis took power in Germany in January 1933, he was one of only seven Jews in a student body of around 600, and the only Jew in his class.

He endured three years of harassment including an antisemitic insult carved into the top of his desk, and other students singing popular songs calling for the murder of the Jews.

Because of the severely deteriorating conditions for Jews in Germany, his family had obtained exit visas in 1933 to be used at the appropriate time.

In 1936, all Jewish students were expelled from the public schools, and his parents sent him to the Talmud Torah school in Hamburg, led by Rabbi Joseph Carlebach, where he graduated in spring, 1938.

Among the frequent guest lecturers in his senior year was Martin Buber.

His family sent Joseph to London after his graduation in 1938 to begin rabbinical college.

He attended Etz Chaim Yeshiva in London and Jews' College (now the London School of Jewish Studies).

After the war, he finished his studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

His semikhah described him as shalselet rabbanim, that is, a member of a chain of rabbis in a long family tradition.

On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the Nazis began open war against the Jews, and his father's synagogue in Wiesbaden was vandalized and shut down.

While heading to the railroad station in an attempt to escape, his father was arrested by the Gestapo, confined to Buchenwald for ten weeks, and then released when he agreed to use his visa and leave Germany forever.

His parents arrived as refugees in London in February 1939.

After the British defeat at Dunkirk on June 4, 1940, a wave of xenophobia against German refugees swept across Great Britain, and all of them were arrested, including the Jews and other anti-Nazis.

His father was interned on the Isle of Man.

Joseph was confined in an internment camp at Huyton, and shortly thereafter loaded onto the troop ship HMT Dunera, along with over 2,000 other anti-Nazi refugees.

The ship sailed for Australia on July 10, 1940.

He described conditions on the 57-day voyage as "cruel and sadistic" as British guards frequently beat prisoners with rifle butts, and plundered their belongings.

It was "the most horrendous experience of his life."

After the emaciated prisoners arrived in Sydney, they were confined to internment camps until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December 1941.

The prisoners were then allowed to enlist in the Australian Army, where Joseph served as a chaplain.

He met his wife Fae in Australia.

Upon his discharge from military service, he served at the Melbourne Liberal Synagogue as assistant to Rabbi Hermann Sanger, who helped resettle Jewish refugees in Australia.

He then went on to serve the Hobart Hebrew Congregation, where he was introduced at a centenary celebration for the synagogue.

He changed his surname as early as 1945.

He was the sixth generation of rabbis in his family.

Asher immigrated to the United States in 1947, and served at synagogues in Olean, New York; Sarasota, Florida; and then in Tuscaloosa, Alabama from 1956 to 1958.

In 1947, she recommended him to Leo Baeck, the organization's president, as an emissary to visit various German cities to investigate the status of the Jews in the immediate postwar period.

He spent six weeks assessing the needs of displaced persons, including a lengthy visit to Bergen-Belsen.

Everywhere, he found nothing but devastation and despair.

"The human eye cannot fathom such horrible sights as I had to see", he later wrote about that trip.

A 1955 trip to Germany led him to begin to consider a "re-orientation of the Jewish relationship with Germany".

He served as rabbi of Temple Emmanuel in Greensboro, North Carolina from 1958 to 1968, and at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco from 1967 until his retirement in 1986 as rabbi emeritus.

In London, Asher had established a friendship with Lily Montagu CBE of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.