Jacob Rosenheim

Jacob Rosenheim was born in 1870 in Frankfurt

Rosenheim was born in Frankfurt in 1870, the only son of Elias Rosenheim and Charlotte Kaufmann. His father was a bookseller, and the family followed the neo-Orthodox movement of Samson Raphael Hirsch. He studied in the separate institutions of the Hirsch community and finished school in 1886.

After school he worked as a bank clerk and later as an assistant at a publishing house. In the evenings he studied Torah with Rabbi Solomon Breuer. He married Gertrude Straus, daughter of the Karlsruhe banker Samuel Straus.

In 1905 he was chosen to head an Orthodox association founded by Hirsch. He acquired the weekly Der Israelit and edited it from 1906 to 1935, using it to spread his views. He also chaired the Israelite Religious Society in Frankfurt.

Together with Rabbi Isaac Halevy he prepared a world organization of Orthodox Jewry, founded in Katowice in 1912. He was elected its president and organized branches around the world. After World War I he prepared its first world congress, held in 1923.

After the Nazi rise to power he moved to England, and from 1941 to 1950 he lived in the United States. In 1950 he immigrated to Israel and lived in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. He died in 1965.