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ELIEZER BERKOVITS, son of a Zionist rabbinic court judge, was born in 1908 near the border between Hungary and Romania. He studied in Pressburg at the yeshiva of the grandson of the celebrated Hungarian rabbi Moses Sofer (also known as Hatam Sofer), and then continued rabbinical studies in Germany with Rabbi David Zvi Hoffman and Rabbi Yehiel Weinberg. After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berlin, in 1933 he was appointed rabbi of a Berlin synagogue. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1939, he managed to emigrate to Leeds in England, where he served as a congregational rabbi during the war.
Following the war, he held rabbinical positions in Australia and in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1969 he helped found a new Orthodox synagogue in Skokie, Illinois, and later became chairman of the philosophy department at the Hebrew Theological College of Chicago. He emigrated to Israel in 1975, and spent the rest of his life in that country, teaching and writing. At his death in 1992 he was considered one of the most important Jewish theologians of the second half of the twentieth century.
Berkovits's thought regarding the Second World War and the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis is generally associated with such books as Faith after the Holocaust (1973) and With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps (1979). Unlike such works, the product of leisurely if anguished contemplation of the significance of events after the fact, the sermons published in Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1945), like those of Berkovits's colleagues, bring us back to the actual historical moments when the future course of the war was agonizingly unclear. At an intercession sermon delivered on 23 March 1941, Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz found ‘heartening encouragement in our fight against godlessness and tyranny … The Greeks refused to follow the example of feeble surrender set by other Balkan lands.’ A few weeks later, the picture had drastically changed for the worse.
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