Rabbi Wolf Gottlieb, who was the Rabbi of Queens Park Synagogue, Glasgow, Scotland and later Head of the Beth Din (Rabbinical Court) of Glasgow was the author of this very fine and useful textbook, written in 1948, when Jewish education in the United Kingdom was being reorganized after the Second World War.
Details about him come from an article that I noticed in the London Jewish Chronicle, written by his daughter, the writer, editor and lecturer Freema Gottlieb.
Wolf Gottlieb was born in Plauci Mala, a shtetl in eastern Galicia. He and his family lived in Vienna from when he was aged 11. He was educated at the University of Vienna, simultaneously attending the famed Israelitisch-Theologische-Lehranstalt.
In 1937, he became the spiritual leader of the Zionist religious movement HaShomer Hadati, later called Bnei Akiva. He married Bracha, the sister of the future Chief Rabbi of Romania, Rabbi Moshe Rosen.
In the days following the Anschluss in 1938, when the Germans marched into Vienna (to general acclaim), Rabbi Wolf Gottlieb, then a rabbi in his twenties, sought permission from the Nazi authorities, under Adolf Eichmann, for the community to open a special “school for emigration.”
His first formal contact with Youth Aliyah came in July 1938. On the Shabbat of the intermediate days of Succot, the Vienna Youth Aliyah School’s first graduation ceremony was held in form of a minchah service at the beautiful Polnische Schul, to formally bid farewell to the hundreds of pupils due to leave on aliyah for Eretz Yisrael. It would be the last service held in the Polish shul before Kristallnacht, when it was destroyed.
Hardly a week later, he was arrested and held by the Gestapo over Shabbat at the Rossenauer Barracks as part of a “Polish action,” and was released only because he held a visa from the United Kingdom. Shortly after Kristallnacht, in late November/early December 1938, the first group of “his” children left, courtesy of Youth Aliyah and, latterly, Kindertransport. In his deposition to Yad Vashem, he succinctly stated that all the children with whom he personally was in contact — 640— got out, mostly for Palestine.
When Rabbi Gottlieb realised that Youth Aliyah was unable to take in his youngest pupils, he switched their destination to the United Kingdom. He entered the United Kingdom himself as a refugee in March 1939, under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council, a variant on Kindertransport for rabbis and religious educators.
Soon after the outbreak of war, Rabbi Gottlieb and his wife looked after Rosehill, a Bnei Akiva hostel in north Wales near Abergele. The children in their care included some of the original Kindertransport group.
He went on to minister to Glasgow’s Queens Park Hebrew Congregation from 1950 to 1976, and served as head of the Scottish Rabbinical Court. Before that he served as superintendent of Jewish education for the United Kingdom, publishing this volume containing stories of the early rabbis whose personalities display the dignity and heroism of the resistance fighters against Roman tyranny.
Jewish Miscellanies 