Schalom Ben-Chorin

Schalom Ben-Chorin was born in 1913 in Zweibrückenstraße 8 (München)

Ben-Chorin was born Fritz Rosenthal in Munich in 1913, to an educated family of Jewish merchants. After finishing high school in the city, he studied German language and literature and comparative religion at the University of Munich from 1931 to 1934.

In 1935 he moved to the Land of Israel with his wife Gabriella, and their son Tuvia was born. From 1937 he lived in the Romema neighborhood of Jerusalem. The couple divorced in 1943, and that year he married Erika Fackenheim, with whom he had a daughter, Ariela.

He worked as a journalist from 1935 to 1970, including at the newspaper Yedioth Hadashot. In 1958 he founded the Har-El Reform congregation in Jerusalem with Pnina Nave Levinson, and in 1961 he co-founded the Jews and Christians association with the Evangelical Church in Germany. He wrote on antisemitism and on theology after Auschwitz.

From 1970 to 1987 he lectured and was a visiting professor in Jerusalem, Tübingen and Munich. In 1975 he was among the founders of the association of German-language writers in Israel. He died in Jerusalem in 1999 and was buried there.