“Dogs and Jews are forbidden”
Recha Schweitzer was born on 29 October 1892 in Norden, a small town in East Frisia on Germany’s North Sea coast, into an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father, Menashe Schweitzer, taught at a Jewish primary school; her mother, Bertha (née Levy), taught French and English. It was a music-loving household, and Recha learned the piano as a child, music would remain one of the passions of her life.
She met antisemitism early and never forgot it. In Norden’s municipal park, a notice declared that dogs and Jews were forbidden. After the family moved to Silesia in 1897 she attended the girls’ lycée in Glogau, where classmates mocked her because, as an observant Jew, she would not write on the Sabbath. Her response to that humiliation, by her own account, turned her into a wholehearted Zionist: the conviction that Jews needed a home of their own was planted in childhood and never left her.
Scholar, teacher, rabbi’s wife
Recha completed her secondary education in Breslau, passed the examinations to teach religion, and went on to graduate study in philology at the universities of Breslau and Munich, an unusual path for a young woman of her generation. In 1919 she married Rabbi Dr Moritz (Moshe) Freier. His posts took the couple to Eschwege in Germany and then to Sofia in Bulgaria, where she taught at a German secondary school and worked as a writer and collector of folklore, before they settled in Berlin in 1925, where her husband served as a rabbi.
The Freiers had four children: Shalhevet, born in 1920, Ammud in 1923, Zerem in 1926 and a daughter, Ma’ayan, in 1929. By the early 1930s Recha Freier was a busy mother in a comfortable Berlin Jewish milieu, with literary interests and strong Zionist convictions, and no obvious reason to become one of the great rescuers of the Holocaust era.
Five boys and an idea
The turning point came in 1932, a year before the Nazis took power. Her husband asked her to help five Jewish teenage boys who had been refused apprenticeships and jobs because they were Jewish. Freier went first to the Jewish employment office, which could only counsel patience. As she later told the story, the senselessness of Jewish life in the Diaspora suddenly stood before her eyes, and with it a solution: if Germany had no future for these young people, they should go to Palestine and be trained as farmers and workers in the Jewish agricultural settlements there.
It was a radical proposal. Jewish organisations were sceptical and many parents were horrified at the thought of sending their children alone to a distant, poor and dangerous land. Freier pressed on regardless, raising money herself; with funds from the Anglo-German philanthropist Wilfrid Israel, a first small group of young people left Berlin for Palestine at the end of 1932.
The day Hitler came to power
Freier then gave the effort an organisational form. In Berlin in January 1933, on the 30th, according to the most widely cited accounts, the very day Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, she founded the Hilfskomitee für jüdische Jugend, the Committee for the Assistance of Jewish Youth. This was the seed of Youth Aliyah, the “immigration of youth”. The World Zionist movement endorsed the idea in 1933, though at first it offered no money.
Freier knew the scheme could not work without a partner on the ground in Palestine, and she turned to the American-born Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah, who ran social services for the Jewish community there and could call on the resources of American Jewry. Szold initially thought the plan unworkable, but she came round and became director of Youth Aliyah’s office in Jerusalem, arranging for the young immigrants to be received and educated in kibbutzim and youth villages. The division of labour, Freier selecting and dispatching children in Germany, Szold receiving them in Palestine, was the engine of the rescue, and Szold’s prominence later caused her to be widely, and wrongly, credited as the founder.
Rescue against the rules
As persecution intensified, Youth Aliyah became a lifeline. Teenagers were trained in preparatory camps, given scarce British immigration certificates, and sent to live, study and work on collective settlements. By 1939, some 7,000 young people had reached Palestine through the scheme. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Freier also worked alongside colleagues such as Aaron Menschel, director of the Youth Aliyah office in Vienna, to extend the rescue to Austrian Jewish youth.
She was not a woman to be stopped by procedure. In 1938, when Jews of Polish nationality in Germany were rounded up and many sent to concentration camps, the Nazi authorities issued a limited number of permits allowing release for prisoners who could leave Germany within two weeks; these were distributed through the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. Freier took about a hundred of the permits without authorisation and filled in the names of Jewish prisoners, who were freed and eventually reached Palestine. When her action was discovered, the Jewish leadership barred her from taking more permits and removed her from her Zionist posts in Berlin, including the direction of the Youth Aliyah office she had founded.
Escape and a cold welcome
Freier stayed in Nazi Germany until the middle of 1940, long after many leaders had left, and then crossed illegally into Yugoslavia with the help of professional smugglers. Even there she continued to work, helping to save some 150 young people whose parents had perished in the camps. After several months in Yugoslavia she reached Palestine in 1941. Her mother, Bertha, did not escape; she died in the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1945.
In Jerusalem, Freier found no place waiting for her. Szold told her there was no room for her in the running of Youth Aliyah, and Freier withdrew from the organisation she had created. She did not withdraw from public life. In 1943 she founded the Agricultural Training Centre for Israeli Children, which placed children from poor and troubled homes in kibbutzim, workers’ settlements and family-style units, giving them the kind of education and community that Youth Aliyah had given refugees.
Music, memory and the arts
Freier’s second great passion was the arts. In 1958 she established the Israel Composers’ Fund, and in 1966, together with the composer Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, she founded Testimonium, a series that commissioned music on the central events of Jewish history. She persuaded composers from Israel and abroad, Jewish and non-Jewish, to take part, among them Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Mauricio Kagel, Lukas Foss and Ben-Zion Orgad, and compiled the texts for its programmes, from Jerusalem to the Spanish Inquisition. She also wrote libretti for Israeli composers, including Josef Tal’s Amnon and Tamar and Mark Kopytman’s chamber opera on the medieval poet Süsskind von Trimberg.
She published poetry and prose throughout her life, from Arbeiterinnen erzählen (Stories Told by Women Workers), which appeared in Berlin in 1935, to the collections Auf der Treppe (1976) and Fensterläden (1979), published in Hamburg when she was in her eighties. In 1961 she told her own story of the movement’s origins in Let the Children Come: The Early History of Youth Aliyah, published in London. Her personal papers are held at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.
A fight for recognition
For years the official history of Youth Aliyah barely mentioned her. Only after Szold’s death in 1945 did Freier’s role begin to be acknowledged, and even then only after she brought a lawsuit against the organisation’s leadership, alleging that her part in founding the movement and saving thousands of young people was being deliberately ignored. Recognition, when it came, came late: in 1975, at the age of eighty-three, she received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the idea of the organised transfer of youth to the kibbutzim, and in 1981 she was awarded the Israel Prize for her life’s work.
Recha Freier died in Jerusalem on 2 April 1984, at the age of ninety-one. Later that year the Berlin district of Charlottenburg placed a memorial plaque at the city’s Jewish community centre honouring her as the founder of Youth Aliyah.
Legacy
Youth Aliyah outlived its founder’s quarrels. Thousands of children reached Palestine through it before the Second World War, and after the war it took in some 15,000 more young people, most of them Holocaust survivors. In later decades, as a department of the Jewish Agency, it absorbed young immigrants from North Africa, Europe, the Soviet Union, Latin America and Ethiopia, and in 1958 it became the first organisation to receive the Israel Prize. Many of the youth villages and kibbutz schools that grew from it still educate children today.
Freier’s legacy is also a lesson in how history is written. The woman who had the idea, raised the first money and risked her own safety to bend the rules was for decades eclipsed by a more famous partner. Today a square in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighbourhood bears her name, an educational centre at Kibbutz Yakum honours her, and in 2018 Israel issued a postage stamp in her memory. She is remembered, at last, as what she always insisted she was: the founder of Youth Aliyah, who saw in the plight of five rejected boys a way to save a generation.
Sources & further reading
Recha Freier, Wikipedia · Recha Freier, Jewish Virtual Library · Youth Aliyah, Wikipedia · Recha Freier, EHRI Portal (Central Zionist Archives record) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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