Plaut, Walter H. (1919-1964)

I. Family and Background in Germany 
Walter Horst Plaut was born in Berlin, Germany on August 28, 1919. His parents were Jonas Plaut ¹ and Selma (née Gumprich) Plaut.² Walter had an older brother, Wolfgang Gunther³, born in Münster November 1, 1912.⁴ Walter’s father, Jonas, and his older brother Raphael had left their birthplace, Willinghausen, and moved to Marburg to study to become teachers. Once they had earned their teacher certificates, Jonas married Selma on December 25, 1911, and assumed first a position as teacher and then advanced to become the Principal and Director of the Marks-Haindorf-Stiftung, a Jewish teacher’s seminary, in Muenster (Westphalia). Beginning in 1915, he became the headmaster of the Jüdische Mädchenschule Berlin (a Jewish girls’ secondary school in Kaiserstraße in Berlin). In 1922, Jonas assumed the directorship of the well- known Baruch Auerbach’sche Waisenhaus in Berlin (Baruch Auerbach Orphanage and Education Facility for Jewish Boys and Girls in Berlin)⁵. Together with his wife Selma he directed that institution together from 1922 until 1939.

Walter lived there with his parents and older brother Gunther, who was seven years older than his younger brother. The two brothers were not close at any point in their lives. Later in life, Selma often commented about the two Plaut brothers, that while Gunther was respected, Walter was beloved. As Walter was growing up in Berlin, German day-to-day life was dictated by Nazi racial laws and ideology. Walter Frankenstein, a child at Auerbach orphanage during this difficult period, remembered those years the orphanage in those years as “an island in the sea of brown.”⁶

Walter, whose childhood nickname was “Manny”, found several friends among the children of the orphanage. Among them was Alex Turney, who after having endeared himself to the family, was often labelled by Selma as her “third son.”⁷ Also Walter’s later colleague Ernst Conrad had already been a childhood friend living at the Auerbach.

Walter attended the elementary school on Schönhauser Allee and continued Königstädtische Oberrealschule which was a modern Gymnasium emphasizing English, French, math and sciences. With the evolution of the Nazi racial laws, on April 25, 1933, the so-called Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities was promulgated by the German government, resulting in the dramatic limitation of the number of Jewish students attending public schools. Following the implementation of this racial law, Walter was prohibited from attending the local municipal school (the Gymnasium) and attended a Jewish school instead. Alex and Walter had been assaulted several times by the Hitler Youth. Alex, being physically larger and stronger, remembered acting as Walter’s “bodyguard.” Recognizing the life-threatening dangers that lay ahead, Selma and Jonas started to plan for him to leave Nazi Germany as a teenager.⁸

II. Education and Early Academic Career in Berlin During the Nazi Years
Walter’s older brother, Gunther, had earned a law degree and a doctorate in law from the University of Berlin in 1934. However, because of the Nazi-promulgated racial laws, Gunther was unable to practice law and enrolled in the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, the rabbinical seminary of which Rabbi Leo Baeck was the president, instead. In 1935, Gunther was selected by Rabbi Baeck as the recipient of a scholarship invitation from Rabbi Julian Morgenstern, of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in the United States, and together with four other German-Jewish refugees–Wolli Kaelter, Herman Schaalman, Alfred Wolf and Leo Lichtenberg. This group of students boarded a boat in Le Harve, arriving in New York on September 15, 1935. The four young men immediately traveled to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati where they continued their rabbinical training, which, in Gunther’s case, culminated in his ordination at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1939.⁹

While Gunther was on winter vacation from his studies at Hebrew Union College in December 1936, he visited his classmate Zelig Miller and Miller’s family in Philadelphia during his winter break in 1936. On the occasion of his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, on December 25, 1936, he made his first transatlantic telephone call to his parents in Berlin. The conversation was brief and to the point when his parents urged him to find a place for Walter in America right away, since he is graduating from high school and his parents felt he had to leave Germany as soon as possible.¹⁰

During that winter vacation, Zelig and Gunther travelled to Amish country in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, there, they stopped to visit the local rabbi, Dan Davis, who served at Congregation Shaarai Shomayim. Gunther informed Rabbi Davis about the urgency of bringing his brother Walter to the United States. During this chance meeting, Rabbi Davis offered to help Walter gain admission to Franklin and Marshall College (F&M) in Lancaster. David then worked with the F&M Jewish fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau (ZBT), to sponsor Walter at its local chapter (known as Alpha Tau).¹¹ Alpha Tau arranged the for Walter’s emigration and admission to the United States.

A few months later Rabbi Davis came through with all the arrangements for Walter to come to the United States and enter F&M—and Walter was able to receive a non-quota student visa. Soon after, during the spring of 1937, Selma Plaut travelled to the United States to visit Lancaster and to thank Rabbi Davis in person. She traveled to see Gunther in Cincinnati. At that time, Selma asked him to come back to Germany to bring Walter (who was too young to travel alone) to the United States. Gunther wondered if it would be safe to take such a trip. In fact, Dr. Jacob Marcus, of Hebrew Union College, was skeptical about Gunther’s plans, worrying that Gunther might not subsequently be allowed out of Germany. With doubts and hesitation, Gunther nonetheless returned that summer to Berlin to bring Walter to the United States. During the summer of 1937, Gunther and Walter, equipped with their student visas, obtained a one-way ship passage on the Arnold Bernstein Line, leaving Berlin by train and departing from Antwerp to New York by boat.¹²

III. Arrival in the United States and Student Years at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati
Walter arrived in the United States as a German-speaking college student during the summer of 1937 at the age of 17. He was the second refugee to be assisted by the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau, and was part of Alpha Tau, the local chapter at F&M. Having received room and board in exchange for waiting on tables, Walter lived in the ZBT fraternity house. However, he never formally joined the fraternity¹³. Walter Plaut was an exceptional student and talented orator, without any accent and was popular among students and townspeople, however he felt the isolation of being different. Mocked for being German and for his European manner and starched shirts, Walter was greeted by non-Jewish students with a Nazi salute and “Heil Hitler” which was a painful experience for a refugee from Nazi Germany.¹⁴

After he graduated from university in 1940, Walter began rabbinical studies in the fall of that year at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a student there, he was exposed to segregation in this gateway city.¹⁵ Walter, at the age of 20, simply could not ignore the struggle of another minority in his new homeland. Walter was surprised to encounter a different kind of racial discrimination in America. At this time, he began to publish opinions about the tenement landlords in Harlem. He was further taken aback by the lack of compatriotism between Jews and African Americans, both discriminated-against communities. Writing for Hebrew Union College Monthly, Walter responded to a “Question of the Month,” posed by Irving A. Mandel, its editor, centered upon the lack of racial amity between Blacks and Jews.¹⁶ Mandel specifically directed the question to Walter, who “has been a leader in racial amity groups”. In considering the lack of harmony between Blacks and Jews, Walter wrote: “A tragic-comic spectacle is unfolding itself before our eyes. While the Jew is massacred in the Ghetto in Poland, the Negro is lynched on the plains of the Mississippi, and yet both insist on facing their doom separately, while together they could stand up and fight.” Walter postulated about reasons for this racial divide, including what he characterizes as anti-Semitism of African Americans against Jews. Walter identifies several factors for this anti-Jewish sentiment in the Black community: the tensions in Harlem emanating from the overcharging by Jewish landlords and Jewish merchants targeting Black tenants and customers, respectively; the “Bronx Slave Market,” in which Negro maids are hired by Jewish Hausfrauen at “preposterous wages;” the segregation of African-American doctors at Jewish hospitals; and the overarching Nazi propaganda against Jews, what he termed Greuelpropaganda. Walter also asserted that there is significant Jewish support in the South for segregation based, among other things, upon a bulletin from the Jewish Welfare Board, which advised its Southern workers not to raise the race question with Jewish families. This clearly resonated with Walter. Rejecting the possibility that gentiles will take offense at a united effort between Blacks and Jews, and it will therefore earn their wrath, he argued that Jew and Negro [must] identify their struggles as one. and noted that such unity, between Jew and Black, would “further the cause for freedom for all the oppressed in the world.”¹⁷ In 1940 Walter, as the head of the Cincinnati Greater Racial Amity Committee, successfully led the effort to desegregate the local cinemas in Cincinnati. Protesting and fighting for racial justice was clearly a central concern for Walter.¹⁸

While at HUC, Walter met Hadassah Yanich from Detroit. On June 25, 1944, they married in Detroit, at the Lee Plaza Hotel. Hadassah’s parents, Herschel and Nechama, were born in Belarus (then called Belorussia).¹⁹

In 1945, while still a rabbinical student, Walter and Hadassah went to Duluth, Minnesota, where Walter served for a year as acting rabbi of Temple Emanuel. Walter assumed this position in the absence of the congregation’s Rabbi (Rabbi Burton Levinson), who was serving as a Navy Chaplain during the war. Ahead of his time and underscoring his continuing efforts for racial amity, as a student rabbi in Duluth, Minnesota in 1945, Walter invited Black author Richard Wright to address the congregation about “The American Negro Discovers Himself.”²⁰

A year later, as a senior student at HUC, Walter was selected to be the assistant to Rabbi Harry Margolis, of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rabbi Margolis was ill and, while Walter was his assistant, passed away. Since Walter was not yet ordained, he could not be appointed the congregation’s rabbi.

Hadassah grew up in the Labor Zionist movement (Hashomer Hatzair) in Detroit. As such, Hadassah, as a teenager, along with her friends, dreamed of emigrating to Palestine to establish a kibbutz. Hashomer Hatzair prohibited its members from enrolling in university, which would waylay them from the overarching goal of moving to Palestine. Hence, Hadassah quit the movement to attend Wayne State University where she studied music. After transferring to the School of Music at the University of Michigan, Hadassah later graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree on May 30, 1942. Hadassah’s Zionist activism and aspirations for a Jewish state was to become a strong shared driving force in their married life. Walter and Hadassah’s shared vision also included the pursuit of social justice and civil rights for all peoples.

IV. Rabbinical Career and Political Activism
During the summer of 1946 while serving as the rabbi of Mt. Zion Temple in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter and Hadassah were invited by several Twin Cities’ Jews to be become the first directors of the newly established Herzl Camp²¹, a Jewish youth camp. For the summers from 1946 through 1953 (excepting 1951 and 1952), Walter and Hadassah acted as the founding directors of this independent camp, the first Zionist camp in the United States. During its first year, the camp was in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. In 1947, the camp moved to its permanent location in Webster, Wisconsin. Until this very day, the camp ascribes its unique and enduring camp spirit (ruach) to Walter and Hadassah.

Because of the Second World War, Walter’s ordination was delayed and took place in May 1947. Shortly after he assumed his first pulpit at the reform Temple Beth El in Fargo, North Dakota. He served there for three years until 1950, before the Plauts moved to Jerusalem for two years, where Walter attended the Hebrew University in pursuit of a doctoral degree, which he never completed²². Walter served as rabbi of this congregation for three years until 1956.²³ In 1956, Walter and his family moved to Great Neck, New York, to become the rabbi of the new congregation Temple Emanuel.²⁴ For the reasons discussed below, this pulpit marked the culmination of Walter’s rabbinic career. It also was Walter’s final pulpit, as Walter passed away from cancer on January 4,1964 at the age of 44. It had been five years earlier that Walter was first diagnosed with advanced cancer of the caecum.

It was also during this time that Walter utilized every available moment to grow this new and thriving congregation. It was here that Walter reached the zenith of his career. In addition to his rabbinic duties, Walter oversaw all of the details and the overall design for the construction of a new building for Temple Emanuel, with artwork for the structure, pulpit and ark created by the acclaimed German born, Israeli American artist Ludwig Yehuda Wolpert. Walter was also a founding member of the Great Neck Committee for Human Rights along with Dr. Robert Breakstone, a member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Commission on Jewish Education, and an important member of the Conference of Christians and Jews. Walter also found time to take advanced classes at the Willaim Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, becoming the first rabbi to attain a certificate of pastoral psychology (in 1963).²⁵

Despite his illness and medical prognosis, Walter joined the Interfaith Clergy Freedom Ride in June 1961. Jewish activism in the 1960s civil rights movement gained momentum when Walter, one of four Reform rabbis, participated in the first Interfaith Freedom Ride on a Greyhound bus traveling from Washington, DC, through South Carolina, to Tallahassee from June 13-16, 1961. Freedom rides tested interstate public transportation hubs for racial segregation. The rabbis, Israel Dresner, Martin Freedman, Allan Levine and Walter H. Plaut, were joined by eight white Protestant ministers, including prominent theologian and Presbyterian minister Robert McAfee Brown, and six African Methodist Episcopal (AME) black ministers and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activists.

Walter’s participation divided his congregation. Its president, Burton Bernard, wrote to Walter in a telegram: “your action is ill-advised, and I urge you not to go…”²⁶ Walter a refugee from Nazi Germany, remained true to his own moral compass. Opposing the congregation’s president, he joined the Freedom Ride. A prominent minority of the congregation objected to Walter’s direct social action, both before and after he participated. The majority supported him. Ultimately, the community-divide erupted into a nasty congregational fight.

In an interview published after the ride, Walter articulated three irrefutable reasons for his participation:

Friday after Friday and Saturday after Saturday I stand in front of my congregation. I have an over-sized prayerbook in front of me, and as I read certain words…I very often get the feeling that these are merely words; where are the deeds that live up to these words? When it comes to our daily life, our practice is exactly the opposite or at least is a passive way of doing nothing about what we say in the synagogue…. Second, as a leader I had a special obligation, not merely to stand in the pulpit and read the prayers…but also to be a leader…. Third, the most important reason came to me about the time that I got back to Great Neck. I was born in Germany, and I know that all of my family except my most immediate dear ones were killed because the world slept while Hitler advanced. So that was my final reason and by the time I had arrived home it was a most personal motivation, my own way of bringing back to life the six million of my brethren.”²⁷

After his return to Great Neck, a supporter of Walter’s, a respected doctor in the community, visited Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in Manhattan to solicit his opinion about the rancor in the community concerning my father’s participation in the Freedom Ride²⁸. Walter’s supporter met with Heschel for 45 minutes and was stunned by Heschel’s reticence about the Freedom Ride, about Walter, and the congregation’s divided reaction. He later remarked “to my amazement, Heschel remained completely silent, made no commitment, and I never understood why.”²⁹

The divide in the congregation never healed. After Walter died, Hadassah made Aliyah to Jerusalem in August 1967 just as many Jewish residents of Great Neck, including Hadassah’s closest friends, became enamored with Stokely Carmichael, Black Power, and the Black Panthers movement. Meanwhile, Temple Emanuel split, with followers of Rabbi Walter Plaut founding Temple Isaiah of Great Neck.

V. Legacy and Memory of Rabbi Walter Plaut
Walter’s motivations for participating in the interfaith clergy Freedom Ride of June 1961 derived from life-long convictions about the pursuit of justice. Indeed, it is both ironic and fitting that this Jewish core value was both central to his Bar Mitzvah Torah portion on September 3, 1932: “Justice, Justice thou shalt pursue” (Parashat Shoftim, Deuteronomy 16:20) and is carved into his gravestone in Jerusalem, Israel. A first-hand awareness of racial injustice, which had roots in his childhood experiences in Nazi Germany, was a driving factor for this lifetime pursuit of justice. As such, he channeled his own experiences into an empathy for any minority facing repression in society at large. Walter directed his passionate pursuit of justice, deriving from Jewish core values, to foment meaningful change. Direct social action, for Walter, should take precedence over words—particularly words spoken by a rabbi from the pulpit. The Freedom Rides represented a watershed moment for society at large. Additionally, Walter’s Freedom Ride sparked a turning point for the creation of a Jewish social justice movement on both the rabbinic, communal, and individual levels throughout the nation. Walter’s efforts toward racial amity, beginning in Cincinnati in 1940, came full circle. For Rabbi Walter H. Plaut, true prayer was activism. And perhaps, his efforts are the living embodiment of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. that “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”³⁰

“Best Seller Author to Speak.” Duluth News-Tribune, Sunday, November 11, 1945.
“Herzl Camp 70 Years Strong.” YouTube Video October 9, 2015, 9:14 min., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybd8ltONoQQ.
“Parashat Shoftim”. Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9
Fruh, Aaron David. “I Felt My Legs Were Praying: Jeish Advocacy in Civil Rights is Urgent Still.” The Times of Israel, Sept. 15, 2023. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-felt-my-legs-were-praying-jewish-advocacy-in-civil-rights-is-urgent-still/
Herzl Camp. “History.“ https://herzlcamp.org/history/
King, Martin Luther Jr. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968. See Me Online, https://www.seemeonline.com/history/mlk-jr-awake.htm
Leo Baeck Institute. Alexander Turney Collection AR 25475, Transcript of Recorded Interview of Joshua Plaut by Frank Mecklenburg, February 17, 201.1 “Memories from the Life of Walter Frankenstein”. https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/archival_objects/
Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to The Holocaust. Jonas and Selma Plaut “A Family Portrait. Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. September 30, 2021”. https://mjhnyc.org/blog/jonas-and-selma-plaut-a-family-portrait/
Plaut, Elizabeth. The Gumprichs of Münster/Westphalia: A Tale of Four Continents. Abbeyfield Publishers. Toronto Ontario. 2000.
Plaut, W. Gunther. Unfinished Business: An Autobiography. Lester & Orpen Dennys Publishers. Toronto, Canada. 1981, 5, 12.
Plaut, Walter H. “Seminary: The Question of the Month,” The Hebrew Union College Monthly Hebrew Union College Monthly, April 1943.
The Voice of Cincinnati. “The History of African Americans in Cincinnati.” https://thevoiceofblackcincinnati.com/history-of-african-americans-in-cincinnati/

Joshua Plaut Private Archive.
“B’nai Jeshurun Lecture Series Begins October 16, 1961.” American Examiner, October 12, 1961.
“Best Seller Author to Speak.” Duluth News-Tribune. Sunday, November 11, 1945.
“Freedom Rider Feels Venture into South A Success.” Pottsville (PA) Republican, November 21, 1961.
“Persecution by Nazis One of the Elements.” Boston Evening Globe, June 15, 1961. https://www.newspapers.com/article/detroit-free-press-piano-recital/94521096/
Birth Certificate for Walter H. Plaut, August 28, 1919.
Detroit Jewish Chronicle, February 16, 1934, p. 7. https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djc.1934.02.16.001/7
Oral History Interview of Hadassah Plaut by Joshua Plaut, June 11, 1999.
Plaut, Walter H. “Seminary: The Question of the Month,” The Hebrew Union College Monthly, April 1943.
Telegram, Burton Bernard to Walter H. Plaut. Western Union Telegram No. SYA265 SSG 255, June 10, 1961, 9:33 p.m.

Leo Baeck Institute. Rabbi Walter Plaut Memorial Collection AR 11880 (MF1126). https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/resources/13528
Leo Baeck Institute. Joshua Eli Plaut Family Collection AR 25384 (MF 1036). https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/resources/13820
The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. Joshua Plaut’s Oral History, https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0001163/joshua-plaut-2019
Plaut. Walter. A Study on the Dietary Laws, based on Wiener’s Die jüdischen Speisegesetze, Master of Hebrew Letters and Rabbinic Thesis, 1947, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. https://huc.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1117000