Fred Rosenbaum

Fred Rosenbaum grew up in Queens, New York, in a family indelibly marked by the Holocaust. His mother, while still in her teens and left all alone, fled Poland and was able to reach the United States. His father, who had already emigrated from Poland, became a U.S. Army sergeant in the early 1940s and returned to Europe to fight in the war. Fred received his bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1968. Then he, too, returned to Europe where he spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow in West Germany. He studied the Third Reich and observed, first hand, the devastation it had caused.

Subsequently, while earning his master’s degree in European history at the University of California at Berkeley, he discovered the writings of Franz Rosenzweig. Inspired by Rosenzweig’s example, Fred chose to leave the traditional academic track for the less-traveled road of a career in adult Jewish education. In 1974 he founded Lehrhaus Judaica, naming it after the illustrious Freies Judisches Lehrhaus that Rosenzweig founded in Germany in 1920, and that was closed by the Nazis eighteen years later. This non-denominational school, which stresses dialogue between teacher and student and the primacy of classical text study, began modestly at the Berkeley Hillel Foundation. It has grown to its current enrollment of more than 3,000 adult students in Berkeley and at twenty outreach sites throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Though an institution builder, Fred Rosenbaum, like his role model Rosenzweig, never abandoned the classroom and has taught at Lehrhaus every semester during his more than two decades as Executive Director. He has also made an impact in his community as a historian, a journalist, and a university lecturer. He has written two books, Free to Choose and Architects of Reform, and numerous articles on the California Jewish experience. As a foreign correspondent he has covered the Klaus Barbie trial, the presidential election of Kurt Waldheim, and the collapse of communism. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the Graduate Theological Union, where each spring he teaches a course on the Holocaust to Christian seminarians. He has also taught and lectured abroad in St. Petersburg, Prague, and Kassel, West Germany, where he delivered a commemorative lecture on the occasion of Rosenzweig’s one-hundredth birthday.