In this colloquium doctoral candidate Gabriel Wolfson will try to reconstruct the war experience of the 45 Jewish military chaplains employed by the German army during the First World War.

The activity of the Jewish chaplains not only reflects the presence of Jewish soldiers in the German army (approximately 100,000), but also provides information about the situation of German Jewry during the war and in the pre- and post-war period, since many of the chaplains were community rabbis in peacetime. An essential research goal is thus the visualisation and analysis of the constitutive connection between war, everyday life, religion and culture.

The chaplains cared for Jews and non-Jews alike, met with Jewish POWs from various foreign armies, and confronted the so-called “Ostjuden” (Eastern European Jews) with a combination of fascination, reverence, pity and sometimes revulsion.
This colloquium based on G. Wolfson doctoral project Jewish military chaplains in the German Army in the First World War: Experience and Interpretation/ Deutsche Feldrabbiner im Ersten Weltkrieg: Erlebnis – Erfahrung – Deutung.