Ezriel Carlebach

• 1. A Name on a Street

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  A street in Tel Aviv bears the name of Ezriel Carlebach, and so does a large underground light rail station nearby. Both stand close to the offices of Ma'ariv, the newspaper he led. Carlebach was a journalist and editorial writer who worked through the years of Jewish settlement in Palestine and the first years of the state of Israel. He also worked through some of the most dangerous years a European Jewish reporter could face. His byline appeared in Yiddish, German and Hebrew, and sometimes under invented names. How did a yeshiva student from Germany become one of the defining newspapermen of Israel? What did he see, and what did it cost him? And why did a book about a faraway country become the last thing he wrote?

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• 2. Rabbis and Yeshivas

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  Ezriel Carlebach was born Esriel Gotthelf Carlebach in Leipzig on the 7th of November 1908, into a family of rabbis. His mother was Gertrud Jakoby. His father, Ephraim Carlebach, lived from 1879 to 1936 and founded the Höhere Israelitische Schule in Leipzig. Ezriel had three sisters, Hanna, Rachel, who was called Shemut, and Cilly, as well as two brothers, David and Joseph, who was known as Yotti.

  His own schooling took him to Lithuania. He studied first at the Slobodka yeshiva, in a suburb of Kaunas now called Kaunas-Vilijampolė. He then went to the Rabbinical College of Telshe in Telšiai, where Rabbi Joseph Leib Bloch taught. He later wrote about those years in two articles for the journal Menorah.

  In 1927 he immigrated to Palestine and learned at the Mercaz haRav yeshiva of Abraham Isaac Kook, though he afterwards turned secular. Talmud students in Jerusalem were commonly invited to a free Shabbat meal, and one family hosted him regularly. Their son, Józef Grawicki, worked in Warsaw as the Sejm correspondent of Haynt, a Yiddish daily whose name means Today.

  Carlebach once stopped in Warsaw on his way to visit Germany and called on Grawicki. Grawicki urged him to write for Haynt in Yiddish. One of his pieces examined the quarrel in Jerusalem between the Zionist Rabbi Kook and the anti-Zionist Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld.

  His surname, however, carried baggage with Haynt's readers. His uncle Emanuel Carlebach, who lived from 1874 to 1927, and his uncle by marriage Leopold Rosenak, who lived from 1868 to 1923, were Field Rabbis of the Imperial German Army. The educator Rabbi Joseph Carlebach was assigned to them in 1915. During the German occupation of 1915-1918, the three promoted German culture among Jews in Lithuania and Poland.

  Erich Ludendorff wanted this effort to win pro-German feeling among Jews, so that Polish and Lithuanian states dependent on Germany could be installed. Part of the plan was founding Jewish newspapers, organisations and modern schools. Emanuel Carlebach initiated, in Łomża, the founding of Agudas Yisroel of Poland, an umbrella group for Hassidic Jews. Joseph Carlebach founded the partly German-language Jüdisches Realgymnasium in Kaunas and directed it until 1919. The uncles mostly sided with the Hassidim and viewed Zionists critically, so the name Carlebach sounded suspicious to Haynt's audience.

  The young writer pressed on regardless. From 1929 he lived in Germany, studying at the Frederick William University of Berlin and the University of Hamburg, where he earned a doctorate in law.

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• 3. Reporter of Scattered Communities

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  A strike hit Haynt, and the paper asked for help. Carlebach, then in Germany, sent articles without being paid. Haynt repaid the loyalty by financing his expeditions to Jewish communities across Europe and the Mediterranean.

  The list of places was unusually wide. He wrote about the Karaites of Lithuania and the Sephardi Jews of Thessaloniki, who were later almost completely wiped out under Nazi occupation. He reported on Mizrahi Jews of the Maghreb and the Teimanim of Yemen. He covered the Dönmeh, also called Sabbateans, a crypto-Jewish group in Turkey. On Mallorca he met Conversos, and he picked out some of them himself while travelling. His regular reports to Haynt later formed the basis of a book.

  He also wrote a series about travelling through Germany. It described an encounter with an anti-Semitic gang that left him severely beaten.

  In June 1931 the Leipzig publisher Deutsche Buchwerkstätten gave him its novelist prize of the year, which he shared with Alexander von Keller. His novel is set in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

  He freelanced for papers such as the Hebrew Haaretz. Starting in 1931 he also held a permanent post at the Hamburg-based Israelitisches Familienblatt. Its cultural insert presented music, performance and visual art by Jewish artists. On four or five evenings a week Carlebach went to the theatre. Afterwards he dictated his review, phrasing it freely, to his assistant Ruth Heinsohn, who typed it right away.

  Haynt, which had paid for so many of his journeys, was about to send him somewhere far less welcoming.

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• 4. Soviet Judea

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  Crimea and Birobidzhan were stops on Carlebach's journey in the summer of 1932, again financed by Haynt. His assignment was to report on Jewish life under communist rule. His series, called Sowjetjudäa, ran in the Israelitisches Familienblatt and in Haynt. Its conclusion was blunt. In his view the Soviet Union offered neither the possibilities nor a suitable setting for a genuine Jewish life.

  Albert Einstein occasionally raised the series in discussions, so it drew a far wider response than most newspaper pieces. Opponents of Hitler who relied on the Soviet Union, and who naively or willfully played down its crimes, were pushed to question their position. Some were simply angry with Carlebach. He judged the broad controversy a journalistic success.

  It also brought a flurry of anonymous threatening letters. A vicious pamphlet attack arrived from a Hamburg body calling itself the Jewish Workers' Study Group. The name was camouflage. The harassment of Carlebach, an avowed Jew, came from the Communist Youth Federation, Hamburg section.

  On the night of the 3rd of January 1933, the harassment reached an assassination attempt. A gunshot passed through his hat and narrowly missed him. He fell, suffered a concussion and lost consciousness, and the police later found him senseless. The Israelitisches Familienblatt offered a reward of 2,000 reichsmarks for the capture of whoever fired. By February he had recovered enough to resume work, and soon afterwards he moved to Berlin.

  The man who had enraged the Communists was about to be hunted by the Nazis.

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• 5. Hiding in Berlin

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  Joseph Goebbels spoke with fury about Jews and their supposed harmful influence, yet Carlebach had found out that Goebbels himself had studied with Jewish professors. Despite the shot through his hat, Carlebach kept attacking Nazism.

  Right after the Nazis seized power, he was arrested. He blamed Goebbels, who resented him for exposing those Jewish connections. No judicial warrant existed, so he was released, but he had to go into hiding. Helpers gave him a hideout and forged papers. To move through the streets of Berlin, he dyed his hair and put on an SA uniform.

  Wearing that disguise, Carlebach watched from the inside as Nazism tightened its grip. He wrote daily articles for Haynt in Warsaw under the pseudonym Levi Gotthelf.

  On the 10th of May 1933, he attended the central book burning on Opernplatz in Berlin, incognito and as an observer. His own books were among those thrown into the fires.

  Haynt worked to get him out of the country. Carrying counterfeit papers that made him an Upper Silesian coal miner, he was smuggled over the border near the city of Katowice, into the Polish part of Upper Silesia.

  His articles formed the first inside account of the Nazi takeover. They appeared in Haynt and were republished in Forwerts in New York.

  In Poland he joined the Zionist Jehoszua Gottlieb, the folkist journalist Saul Stupnicki, who was chief editor of Lubliner Tugblat, and others. Together they organised a countrywide lecture series called Literary Judgments on Germany. The German ambassador to Poland, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, sat in the front row at the opening lecture in Warsaw.

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• 6. Voice in Exile

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  On the 29th of March 1934, Carlebach appeared on the second list of Germans who were arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship under a new law. The measure also led to the seizure of all his property in Germany.

  Haynt gave him a permanent post at a modest salary. His pieces, such as one on the anti-Semitic International at Nuremberg, were reprinted by Nowy Dziennik in Kraków, Chwila in Lwów, Di Yidishe Shtime in Kaunas and Frimorgn in Riga.

  In 1933 and 1934 he travelled for Haynt to report on the Zionist Congress and the International Congress of National Minorities. He also went to Geneva on the 29th of September 1933 to hear Goebbels speak at the League of Nations as Germany's chief delegate. The speech, An Appeal to the Nations, caused a stir, and the press conference afterwards was well attended. On the sidelines, Carlebach and Goebbels had a sharp argument about co-operatives, with the Haynt newspaper company as the example.

  He also reported on Franz Bernheim of Upper Silesia, whose petition pushed the League of Nations to make Germany honour the German-Polish Accord on East Silesia. That treaty guaranteed equal civil rights to all inhabitants in each party's part of Upper Silesia. In September 1933, the Nazi government suspended anti-Semitic discrimination there and exempted the province from new measures until the accord expired in May 1937.

  In 1935 Carlebach became chief editor of the daily Yidishe Post in London. He kept travelling through the rest of Europe, with the exception of Germany. In Selbstwehr of Prague he published a regular column, Tagebuch der Woche, meaning diary of the week. In April 1935 he interviewed Federal Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and drew attention to anti-Semitic policy in Austria.

  His tone grew sharper toward non-Zionists, whose plans to remain in Europe he thought negligent given the course of events. From 1936 onward, British policy on Palestine, in the form of the Peel Commission, stood at the centre of his editing.

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• 7. A Newspaper of His Own

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  In 1937 Carlebach immigrated to Palestine as foreign correspondent of Yidishe Post. The same year he became a journalist at Yedioth Ahronoth and was later made its editor. In early 1939 he travelled to Warsaw once more to meet friends, not knowing that he would never see many of them again.

  In 1948 Carlebach was chief editor of Yedioth Ahronoth when a disagreement broke out with Yehuda Mozes, the owner. Carlebach and several senior journalists left. They founded a new paper, Yedioth Ma'ariv, which first appeared on the 15th of February 1948 with Carlebach as chief editor. After several months it was renamed Ma'ariv, to avoid confusion with the paper they had left.

  He edited Ma'ariv from its founding until his death. Under him it became the most widely read newspaper in the country.

  His paper stood against the Zionist Socialist party government and its head, David Ben-Gurion. Carlebach also led opposition to direct negotiations between Israel and Germany after the war, and to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany.

  In 1952, after the death of President Chaim Weizmann, he sent Albert Einstein a telegram suggesting that Einstein become Israel's president. Einstein felt honoured but declined, as he explained in a letter written in German and dated the 21st of November 1952.

  Carlebach also objected to musical censorship. During Jascha Heifetz's tour of Israel, the education minister, Professor Dinur, asked that no Strauss be played. The justice minister, Dr. Rosen, backed the request, which went by special messenger to Heifetz in Haifa shortly before the concert. Heifetz pocketed it and played Strauss in Haifa, and then in Tel Aviv. Carlebach told the story with evident approval.

  He criticised the government for appealing the Rudolf Kastner verdict almost overnight, which left it unable to properly examine the court's reasoning.

  He was sympathetic to reconciliation between Jewish and Arab Israelis. Under the pseudonym Rav Ipkha Mistabra, he published essays and editorials in Yedioth Ahronoth, in Ma'ariv and in Ner, the journal of the Brit Shalom movement, whose name means Covenant of Peace. Still, he remained skeptical that an understanding was possible with avowed representatives of Islam.

  It is above all the Ipkha Mistabra writings that earned him a reputation as one of the most talented and influential editorial writers in Hebrew journalism.

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• 8. India and the Last Book

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  For three weeks in 1954, Carlebach travelled through India, where he met Nehru and other leaders of the state and the Congress Party. The trip produced a book, India: Account of a Voyage, published in 1956. It became an instant best-seller and appeared in several editions in the following years. It was long the only Hebrew book on India.

  Tommy Lapid, then Carlebach's very young secretary, remembered how it was written. Carlebach shut himself up in the Dan Hotel and sent over typewritten pages that were ready for the printing press. Lapid watched the book take shape with thirst and surprise. In his memory, Carlebach was driven by a powerful inner force, and the writing was almost compulsive.

  Carlebach died of a heart attack on the 12th of February 1956, at the age of 47. Thousands attended his funeral. He left a widow, a daughter and a newspaper that Lapid described as orphaned.

  Lapid called the India book a creative outburst of the greatest journalist who wrote in Hebrew.

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