Pinchas Kohn

Rb Dr Pinchas Kohn was the last rabbi of Ansbach, Germany. He was also the executive director of the World Agudath Israel organisation.

Rb Dr Kohn was born in Kleinerdlingen, Germany, on the 27th of February 1867. His father was Rb Mordechai Michael Kohn (1826 - 1888), who was the last rabbi of the Wallerstein District Rabbinate.

He studied under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, Rabbi David Weisskopf at a young age. By the time Dr Kohn was five years old he was fluent in the five books of the chumash. Rabbi Wiesskopf ordained him as a rabbi when he became bar-mitzva. Later he studied in the Yeshiva of Rabbi Selig Auerbach.

He became the rabbi of Mannheim, and later in 1893 was appointed rabbi of Ansbach by the prince regent.

Dr Kohn stemmed from the Kohn-Rappoport rabbinical family that had been established for hundreds of years in southern Germany.

He was a student and an admirer of Hildesheimer and S.R. Hirsch, nevertheless he remained throughout his life an "old" German Jew. He judged neo-orthodoxy critically, with all due respect for Hirsch. His primary contention was that whereas Hirsch based Judaism on an ideology, old German Jewry was based simply on living life as a Jew. Dr Kohn felt that the traditional Jewish world outlook is formed by the inner experience of observing the Torah and through the external world experiences that are encountered as Jews.

In 1916 Rabbi Dr Kohn became the rabbinical advisor to the German occupying forces of Poland together with Rabbi Dr Binyamin Carlebach. He was also the editor of the Judische Monatshefte which he published together with Rb Dr. Salomon Breuer.

At this time, Zionists and Jewish socialists, who were still a small minority of Polish Jewry, had hoped that the Hasidic masses would continue to behave as in the past, to be politically passive and to play no role in public life. Even when the Hasidic community sought to enter politics, Jabotinsky, the future leader of the Zionist Revisionist Party, claimed that the Orthodox in Poland should be denied the right to vote because they lacked any civil experience (Morgenstern 65).

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