Jonathan Magonet
Biographic Data
| ID | 2272916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Magonet |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Magonet |
| SIGNATURE | MAGONET J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leo Baeck College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Liebe Fräulein Dr. Littmann … Ihr, L. Baeck
Dr Ellen Littmann was one of only two full-time lecturers when the Leo Baeck College opened in 1956. Encouraged by Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck, she was the first woman to have completed the academic programme of the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums , qualifying as a teacher of religion. Her cohort of students included Regina Jonas, who would become the first ordained woman rabbi. Attached is a personal letter from Dr Baeck thanking Dr …
Rabbi Rodney John Mariner z'l: Yaakov ben Yitzchak Yosef v’ Simcha Shoshanah 29 May 1941–16 August 2024
How do you write an appreciation for somebody who was the king of eulogies? Rodney just had that knack to capture the essence of people he knew, and for those he didn't he would interview friends and family so that he didn't speak in generalities and could draw a picture in words which would encapsulate the person he was honouring. He was always honest in his portrayals, he never made people better than they were and wasn't frightened of speaking…
Introductions
This issue contains papers presented on the Book of Job, delivered over two sessions of the annual International Jewish-Christian Bible Week held at Haus Ohrbeck, in Osnabrück, Germany. Each year during the opening evening the Editor usually delivers a ten-minute introduction to the Book we are about to study. Because of Covid, the 2021 conference was held on Zoom, studying Job 1–27, while for the 2022 session we were back at Haus Ohrbeck. I incl…
The Making of a Reform Jewish Prayer Book: Forms of Prayer 2008 – The Siddur Diary
In 1977 the UK Movement for Reform Judaism published the first postwar edition of ‘Forms of Prayer’, its Sabbath and daily prayer book, edited by Rabbis Lionel Blue and Jonathan Magonet, graduates of the newly founded Leo Baeck College. It was highly successful, strengthening the identity of the movement within the Anglo-Jewish scene. Some thirty years on, in response to changes in Jewish society, including the ordination of women rabbis, the nee…
Epilogues
This issue contains papers presented on the Book of Job, delivered over two sessions of the annual International Jewish-Christian Bible Week held at Haus Ohrbeck, in Osnabrück, Germany. Each year during the opening evening the Editor has delivered a ten-minute introduction to the Book we are about to study. Because of Covid, the 2021 conference was held on Zoom, studying Job 1–27, while for the 2022 session we were back at Haus Ohrbeck. Earlier i…
Peter von der Osten-Sacken (1940–2022)
Prof. Dr Peter von der Osten-Sacken is one of the important post-Shoah German theologians who gave many impulses for new paradigms of Christian-Jewish relations in Germany. With his theological work he laid the foundation of a fundamental critique and the redefinition of a Protestant theology in the face of Judaism
Rabbi Dr Tovia Ben-Chorin z'l: (15 September 1936–23 March 2022)
Rabbi Tovia Ben-Chorin was born on 15 September 1936 in Jerusalem, the son of journalist and religious scholar Schalom Ben-Chorin (formerly Fritz Rosenthal) and artist Gabriella Rosenthal, the couple having moved from Germany to Palestine in 1935. He graduated with a BA in Bible and Jewish studies from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati in 1964. He served…
Rabbi Henry G. Brandt: (25 September 1927–7 February 2022)
Born Heinz Georg Brandt in Munich, at the age of eleven his family escaped from Germany in 1939 to England and later settled in Tel Aviv. He served as an officer in the Palmach during the War of Independence and became an officer in the navy. From 1951 he studied economics at Queens University in Belfast, then worked as a market analyst for the Ford Motor company in the UK, while doing volunteer work in the Ilford Jewish community. In 1957 he beg…
Introductions
This issue contains papers delivered over a period of five years at the annual International Jewish-Christian Bible Week held at Haus Ohrbeck, Osnabrück, Germany. Each year during the opening evening I offered a ten-minute introduction to the texts that we would be studying. This article includes the introductions to each of the five sets of texts that were studied: Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), 2015; Psalms 107–118, 2016; Mishlei (Proverbs), 2017; sel…
Epilogues
The annual International Jewish-Christian Bible Week runs from a Sunday to a Sunday, allowing for the celebration of the Jewish Shabbat and the Christian Sunday by attending one another’s religious services. During the five years covered in this issue, it has been the author’s privilege to offer the sermon on the Saturday morning during the Jewish service. This enables him to explore new perceptions of the texts we have been studying that have ar…
Rabbi Andre Ungar z’l: (21 July 1929–5 May 2020)
Rabbi Ungar was born in Budapest to Bela and Frederika Ungar. The family lived in hiding with false identity papers from 1944 under the German occupation. After the war, a scholarship brought him to the UK where he studied at Jews’ College, then part of University College, and subsequently studied philosophy. Feeling uncomfortable within Orthodoxy, he met with Rabbi Harold Reinhart and Rabbi Leo Baeck and eventually became an assistant rabbi at W…
Evelyn Friedlander, Aviva bat Miriam v’David, 22 June 1940–2 October 2019
Rabbis Jeremy Collick, David Goldberg, Harry Jacobi, Ernst Stein and Charles Wallach
Founded in 1956, Leo Baeck College is a relatively young institution in the world of rabbinic seminaries, yet it has been in existence long enough to witness the passing of a number of distinguished rabbis who have graduated from its programme. Sadly this ‘in memoriam’ commemorates the death of five such rabbis within the period of a year, each of whom has served the Jewish community and beyond, each of whom leaves a significant legacy and whose …
Interview with Lionel Blue, 1965
This interview was conducted in 1965 by Jonathan Magonet at the time when Lionel Blue was newly appointed European Director of the Youth Section and of the World Union for Progressive Judaism itself. It addresses his concern about rebuilding European Diaspora Jewish communities after the war, through helping them find meaning and purpose in their existence beyond survival as an end in itself. Progressive Judaism is well placed to take on such a t…
Memoirs
Memoirs
Interview with Lionel Blue, 1965
This interview was conducted in 1965 by Jonathan Magonet at the time when Lionel Blue was newly appointed European Director of the Youth Section and of the World Union for Progressive Judaism itself. It addresses his concern about rebuilding European Diaspora Jewish communities after the war, through helping them find meaning and purpose in their existence beyond survival as an end in itself. Progressive Judaism is well placed to take on such a t…
Nathan Peter Levinson z’l
and after his Abitur began, in 1940, to study for the rabbinate at the Lehranstalt fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums, then under the leadership of Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck.In his autobiography, he describes the experience of studying there
Jewish-Catholic Relations Today
The radical changes in attitudes of the Catholic Church to the Jewish people brought about by Nostra Aetate can only be welcomed. This latest document, ‘The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable’, continues the process but raises questions as to how far Jews can recognize themselves in these attempts at a new theological interpretation of Judaism. For example, the document argues that for Christians the ‘New Covenant’ ‘can only be understo…
Post-War Progressive Judaism in Europe
Already in 1946 Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck advocated that alongside the rebuilding of congregations in post-war Europe, what he termed ‘little Judaism’, there was a need for a ‘greater Judaism’ – Jewish engagement with the wider issues of society: ‘We are Jews also for the sake of humanity’. In 1949 he also expressed the need for a dialogue with Islam. A variety of events and activities represent early attempts to meet these dual concerns. In 1997 at the…
Wupjys in the 1960s
The Return of Liberal Judaism to Germany
The German Jewish community established after World War Two was shaped by refugees from Eastern Europe, so the congregations they established were Orthodox. However, in 1995 independent Liberal Jewish initiatives started in half a dozen German cities. The story of Beth Shalom in Munich illustrates the stages of such a development beginning with the need for a Sunday school for Jewish families and experiments with monthly Shabbat services. The est…
Wupjys in the 1960s
Forty Years of the JCM – A Memoir
This article is based on a public lecture, given on the occasion of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the International Jewish–Christian–Muslim Student Conference (JCM), and is a personal reflection on its prehistory and early development. Certain key experiences of the author and other rabbinic graduates of Leo Baeck College helped shape the principles and unique emphasis of this early attempt to address the changing…
The Growth of Interfaith Dialogue
This article describes some of the formative years of the Standing Conference of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe (JCM) and gives an overview of some landmarks in the growth and expansion of interfaith dialogue in the intervening forty years since its creation. What was originally seen as a peripheral religious activity for a few people on the margins of their respective religious communities has become a major area of religious commitment,…
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I. a Jewish view
"Nielsen, "There Is Hope for a Tree
Guests and Hosts
Jeremiah's Last Confession
When I began to study at the Leo Baeck College I was very much influenced by our lecturer in Bible Dr Ellen Littmann. In fact I owe to her my own interest in the Hebrew Bible. At her urging I went on to do doctoral studies so that I could eventually succeed her at the College. Bible was not her first field of study. Instead it was history and she belonged to that circle around Ismar Elbogen and Leo Baeck who were such significant figures at the H…
From Bible to Berlin (Irving): The Message of Jewish Popular Song
In this paper I would like to explore, in a somewhat whimsical way, certain aspects of popular songs written by Jewish composers and lyricists. In some cases simply eliciting the title evokes memories of a particular singer or context. In all cases they have about them a quality that has stamped them on the popular mind, often to become ‘classics’ of the repertory. The whimsical aspect of this paper lies in the attempt to relate them to themes to…
New Year Rabbinic Responses
A Survey of New Year Sermons Facing Fundamentalism Meditation for Friday, September 15 Israel between Ethics and Politics ‘Truly the Times I Live in Are Dark’ We Must Not Give Up Some Words for Erev Rosh Hashanah Reflections After Judgement: Freedom
Award of the Hermann Maas Medal to the Standing Conference of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe (Gengenbach, 26 January 2003)
At present, the air is vibrating with negative religious energies, which the shocking events of September 11 released. Whether it is Djerba (Tunisia), Bali (Indonesia) or Moscow, criminal terrorists abused and abuse a religion such as Islam to legitimize mass murder and to glorify suicide. Week after week, Israelis and Palestinians add new victims to the horrifying list of murder and counter murder. Muslims all over the world experience attacks a…
European Jewry Cannot Be Effective As a Force in Europe Unless It Becomes a Pluralist Community
There are two aspects of this proposition. The first one depends on our understanding of the pluralist nature of European Jewry. The Jewish community of Europe is de facto pluralist, as any attempt to define the basis of our identity makes clear. Jews consider themselves as Jewish on religious, cultural, intellectual, ethnic or political grounds, and any combination of the above. That very diversity seems to be the only uniting factor that can ho…
'To Give You a Future and a Hope' Jeremiah 29: 11: Leo Baeck College - Centre for Jewish Education Through the Retrospectoscope. David Goldstein Memorial Lecture, 16 June 2005
It is a great privilege to have been invited to give this lecture in memory of David Goldstein, zikhrono livrakha. He was one of the great scholars and teachers of our movement and he died tragically young. I recall in particular a series of lectures he gave at the College on the Golden Age of Spain. In one of the earlier ones he noted that while at school he had been taught about the so-called 'dark ages' in Europe when there was little in the w…
The Future of Rabbinic Training
When thinking through this session we found ourselves in something of a dilemma. It should allow for a summing up of the experience of the conference itself, but at the same time we wanted to prepare in advance some thoughts on the theme of the future of rabbinic training. I have written a couple of drafts, and have been satisfied with neither and am still in the process of formulating my thoughts. So let me start with the conference itself
From Artilleriestrasse to Upper Berkeley Street: The Origins of a Rabbinical College
The Leo Baeck College is one of the few institutions to be born out of the German refugee community in Britain, to have preserved the values of its origin, to have made the transition to a new culture and to have won for itself the respect of a new generation and built a new leadership. Its origins lie in the rabbinic seminary that was a quintessential product of pre-war German Jewry, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. For the fir…
Rabbinic Readings of Ruth
Boaz Remembers
Bible Week 2008 Leviticus Introduction
One of the keys to understanding the Book of Leviticus is Genesis 1, the account of the creation of the world. The world that God creates comes into being through a series of separations: between light and darkness, between the waters above and below the firmament, between the sea and the dry land. In the end there are three major divisions, the heavens, the earth and the waters beneath the earth, each with its own distinctive features and inhabi…
Colette Kessler
It is with great sadness that we record the death after a long illness, on 3 May 2009, of Mme Colette Kessler, one of the leading figures of liberal Judaism in France. She was above all a teacher and educator, responsible for developing the educational programmes at the Union Libéral Israélite (ULI) and subsequently the Mouvement Juif Libéral de France (MJLF) in Paris. But she was also dedicated to developing Jewish-Christian dialogue, participat…
Ernst Stein: Laudation and Response
Regrettably there is no complete listing of the Honorary Doctorates given by this university during the past two hundred years. Because of this I can give no precise answer to the question, how many rabbis have been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in its two-hundred year history. During the 1990s at least the German-born Rabbi Gunther Plaut was considered for this distinction. It is safe to say, without needing any documentation, that I cannot imag…
Rabbi Dr Werner Van Der Zyl and the Creation of Leo Baeck College. The German Rabbinate Abroad: Transferring German-jewish Modernity Into the World
The two 'progressive' Jewish movements in the UK, the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain (now the Movement for Reform Judaism) and the Union of Liberal and Progressive Judaism (now Liberal Judaism) grew considerably in the interwar years helped by the influx of refugee rabbis from Germany. Already in the 1940s unsuccessful plans were considered for transferring the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums to the UK. It was not until 1956 th…
Papers from the Ninth Trialogue Conference, 8–10 March 2013
The Trialogue Conference is an interdisciplinary conference aiming to bring together the perspectives of literature, psychotherapy and religion. It was established in 1997 and has been held biennially since then. A novel is chosen as the basis for each conference and a theme drawn from it is suggested as a focus for discussion. Three speakers are invited, from a literary, a psychotherapeutic and a religious background. Each speaker gives a paper …
Leon Yudkin (8 September 1939–8 June 2013)
Leon Yudkin was born into a well-known Anglo-Jewish family and began his Jewish education at Carmel College where he was noted for his involvement in drama, debate and editing the school magazine.1 He studied at University College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He obtained his Doctor of Literature degree from the University of London in 1995 for research that went into his first book on the Israeli po…
Ruth Weyl (1 October 1924–17 May 2013)
Writing on the website of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), Eva Schulz-Jander and Michael Korn record an outline of her life: She was born in 1924 as Ruth Grünfeld, the youngest daughter of Fritz and Hilde Grünfeld, the owners of the well-known Grünfeld department store in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm. Raised as a Liberal Jew with a very strong Jewish identity, she was encouraged from early on, especially by her father, who…
The God Who Hides: Some Jewish Responses to the Book of Esther
Little controversy appears to surround the canonization of the Book of Esther and it fits in comfortably as one of the Five Megillot. Read at Purim and enjoyed because of the opportunities if offers for 'carnival', nevertheless it raises both classical and modern issues. The former relate to the absence of God in the book, hence the additions in the Targumim and Septuagint to 'correct' this. Modern sensitivities are concerned at the violence it d…
Bible Week: The Author's Esther – A Sermon
If Esther is a secular work of fiction, what can we say about the author’s attitude to his characters? A whimsical sermon
Introduction to the Book of Esther (Bible Week, Osnabrück, 28 July–3 August 2013)
The Book of Esther hardly needs an introduction. However, at first glance it is easy to dismiss it as belonging to the kind of extravagant storytelling we associate with the oriental world, something out of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to project our western prejudices onto this kind of literature, which, in its own way, seeks to instruct as well as entertain. Within the Hebrew Bible the Book of Esther might…
Forty Years of the JCM – A Memoir
This article is based on a public lecture, given on the occasion of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the International Jewish–Christian–Muslim Student Conference (JCM), and is a personal reflection on its prehistory and early development. Certain key experiences of the author and other rabbinic graduates of Leo Baeck College helped shape the principles and unique emphasis of this early attempt to address the changing…
The Growth of Interfaith Dialogue
This article describes some of the formative years of the Standing Conference of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe (JCM) and gives an overview of some landmarks in the growth and expansion of interfaith dialogue in the intervening forty years since its creation. What was originally seen as a peripheral religious activity for a few people on the margins of their respective religious communities has become a major area of religious commitment,…
Philosophy (37 works) · History (33 works) · Judaism (25 works) · Religious studies (24 works) · Theology (22 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Art (17 works) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation (16 works)