Emil L. Fackenheim

1916–2003
Emil L. Fackenheim was born in Halle, Germany. Arrested in 1938, he escaped the Sachsenhausen labor camp in 1939, and fled to England. He later lived in Canada and Israel. A professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, he addressed Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and German philosophy in his scholarship. Fackenheim was also an ordained Reform rabbi.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

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The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz

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What does the Voice of Auschwitz command? Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember…

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To Mend the World

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What is a Jew? Who is a Jew? After this catastrophe, what is a Jew’s relation to the Jewish past? We resume our original question as we turn from one rupture in post-Holocaust Jewish existence—of the…