Zvi Sofer

From Galicia to Palestine

Zvi Sofer, also known by the first names Zwi (in German), Gersh (in Yiddish), or Grisha (in Russian), was born on 28 January 1911 in the small town of Jałtuszków – now Yaltushkiv, Ukraine. The region had been part of the Russian Empire since 1793 and was incorporated as the Podolia Governorate.

Sofer was raised by an Orthodox Jewish family of modest means. His father died when he was six in the year of the Russian Revolution. His mother had to cover the family’s living expenses and left her son in the care of his grandmother and aunt.

Sofer attended cheder, Jewish religious school, where, as he later recalled, he began studying the Pentateuch at age five, Rashi’s commentary at seven, and the Talmud at eight. From age ten until his final examination from a humanistic-type Gymnasium (high school) in 1929, he attended secondary school in Brody, Galicia. 
 

Return to Palestine

After Austria’s “Anschluss,” or annexation, by Nazi Germany in 1938, Sofer re-emigrated to Palestine, specifically Haifa, where he taught singing and drawing at a school, published writings on music education, and owned a music shop.

This stage of his life in Palestine was partly in the shadow of the war in Europe, the reports about the Shoah, and the irrevocable destruction of Jewish life in the region of Sofer’s birth. Meanwhile, Palestine was also the site of ever more frequent attacks and riots and, after the establishment of the state of Israel, the war over Palestine. 
 

Academic Career in West Germany

Between 1959 and 1963, he traveled on behalf of the archive to international conferences of the field known as folktale studies: to Kiel and Copenhagen in 1959, and in 1962 to Antwerp; Paris; Santo Tirso, Portugal; Cloppenburg, West Germany; and Budapest. On his trip to Kiel in 1959, Sofer received an offer from Professor Kurt Ranke to complete his doctorate in folkloric narratology.

Sofer seized the opportunity to resume the academic career that he had been forced to cut short in Vienna. He moved to Kiel and then after two semesters to Göttingen, where he obtained his doctorate in 1965.

After finishing his studies, Sofer received another opportunity in West Germany. In 1966, Professor Karl Heinrich Rengstorf offered him a full-time position as his research associate at the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum (IJD) in Münster, which he accepted. 
 

Zvi Sofer in Münster: An Outlier

Alongside his publishing projects, teaching at the university in Münster occupied much of Sofer’s time. He taught “Introduction to Jewish Worship and the Prayer Book,” gave seminars in “Chassidic Legends about the Book of Genesis” and “Yiddish Poetry from Bialyk and Marc Chagall,” and taught “Modern Hebrew.”

Zvi Sofer’s courses were highly popular and soon he was surrounded by a circle of enthusiastic students. Along with Rabbi Bernhard Brilling, Zvi Sofer was an outlier at the time in Catholic-dominated Münster.

Beyond his professional life, Sofer dedicated himself to re-establishing and preserving several of the shrinking Jewish communities in northwestern Germany. In the small Jewish community of Lübeck, for example, he served as a prayer leader, religious studies teacher, and eulogizer, leading the congregation every weekend from Friday to Saturday night. He also served as a chazan (cantor) in Essen and Münster. 
 

In the Service of Christian-Jewish Dialogue

Zvi Sofer was also an important member of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. Sofer responded to the growing interest in Jewish history and culture in 1960s West Germany by giving synagogue tours, teaching popular courses on Jewish culture at the public continuing education center, and performing concerts of Yiddish music. Sofer also published a Jewish cookbook and two records of synagogue music and popular Yiddish stories by Leib Peretz.

These multifaceted activities in the service of Christian-Jewish dialogue did not go unnoticed. In the autumn of 1977, Zvi Sofer was ceremoniously presented with the Federal Republic of Germany’s Order of Merit with Ribbon, particularly for his efforts to promote understanding between Jews and Christians. 
 

However, the goodwill towards him was not universal. Soon afterwards, on Christmas Eve 1977, the building of the institute where he worked was defaced with a 25-meter-long antisemitic screen and an insignia making reference to him personally. The Dean of the University immediately filed a criminal complaint and told Sofer that he was dismayed and appalled by the incident. Meanwhile, this episode spotlights the ongoing virulent and widespread antisemitism of those years in West Germany.

Sofer Assembles His Judaica Collection

Zvi Sofer would live for only two more years before he died unexpectedly on 25 January 1980. After his death, every corner of his small apartment was found to contain a disorganized jumble of Judaica that he had collected, sometimes in packaging and sometimes out in the open: silver candelabras, lamps, spice boxes, Torah crowns, drawings, books, manuscripts, large-format textiles, and much more.

Zvi Sofer presumably assembled his collection unsystematically by making spontaneous purchases from dealers of antiques and art, at flea markets, from individuals, and through gifts. He assembled the objects in West Germany and on trips to other European countries (particularly Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands) as well as Israel. The objects were not cataloged; neither had Sofer documented their acquisition.

However, the collector’s bequest includes another interesting source: a partially annotated collection of business cards that gives indications of dealers, collectors, and other people he knew.

A remarkable number of the dealers were Jewish themselves and had their own stories of persecution, such as the sisters Bettina and Carola Wolf of Amsterdam and Karol and Gustava Geller of Vienna. In light of the numerous stamps in Zvi Sofer’s passports, one can visualize the routes of his international acquisitions and identify central marketplaces for Judaica in postwar Europe, especially Amsterdam and Antwerp.

Even before the Shoah, the task of conserving physical artifacts of Jewish culture was important to Sofer; after all, he strove to build Jewish history in the spirit of the historian Simon Dubnow. Sofer’s folkloristic and scholarly interests as well as his professional career allowed him to appreciate the Judaica as objects of cultural history. The collection can therefore be considered to be causally related to the collector’s ethnological studies. Sofer also used the objects as a collection of educational materials, as a set of practical examples to display in his talks and seminars, which were primarily aimed at an interested non-Jewish audience. 
 

Sofer’s Plan for a Jewish Museum

Sofer was already thinking one step ahead. In the mid-1970s, he saw his collection as a starting point for a yet-to-be-established permanent Jewish Museum and even had concrete plans for it. In March 1975, he met with representatives of the organization for Christian-Jewish dialogue in Cologne to discuss his “Plan to Establish a Jewish Museum in West Germany.” They agreed on the establishment of a permanent Jewish Museum for West Germany, which, following the model of the Jewish Museum in Vienna, would be a federal institution funded by the budgets of all the West German states and located in Cologne, if possible. When the plan for Cologne fell through, Sofer wrote to the municipality of Essen offering to sell them his collection and explained his plans for a museum in concrete terms:

“Over several decades, I have assembled a Judaica collection. To my knowledge, it is the largest private collection in West Germany. It comprises religious objects, paintings, first editions: altogether, more than 500 artifacts of varying size. The objective of my collection: a permanent Museum Judaicum. It should be attached to an archive for the scholarship and history of Judaism, which would serve as a research center (I also have materials for this in my possession). Together with the available visual and audio records of Essen’s city history, my artifacts, which would suffice on their own for a small museum, could lay the foundation for the first museum of Judaica in Germany.”

In a way, Sofer’s plan would indeed come to pass. After all, the objects from his estate did form the original core of the collection of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This museum would not open until 2001, more than twenty years after Sofer’s death, but his collection was an important talking point in the political struggle over its establishment and format in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus Zvi Sofer played a part in the institutional history of the Jewish Museum Berlin. Hence, knowledge about the collector’s life and the acquisition of his collection forms part of our own history. In addition, it can be helpful to us today, especially as we try to resolve some open questions regarding the provenance of individual objects from his collection.