Qualla: Jawne

Jawne: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 3.0. In 1933, the year Hitler took power, the director of a Cologne Jewish school named Erich Klibansky stopped pretending. "To which school do I send my child?" he wrote. "This question is today decided. One cannot answer that we should not take ourselves back into the ghetto, because the process of exclusion by the German people towards us Jews is in full swing." He had been director of the Jawne for only four years. He would have nine more to prepare his students for whatever was coming. He used them to teach English and modern Hebrew - to prepare children, with brutal clarity, for a life that would not be lived in Germany.

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Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 3.0

Jawne: A School Named for Exile

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mordechai Eliav, Public domain. The Jawne took its name from Yavne, the town near Tel Aviv where, after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE, the rabbis of the Sanhedrin tried to keep Jewish learning alive when the temple was gone. The name was a kind of promise. Rabbi Emanuel Carlebach founded the school in...

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Image: Mordechai Eliav | Public domain

Jawne: Klibansky's Calculation

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 3.0. In the 1930-31 school year, the Jawne had 103 boys and 75 girls. By 1936-37, total enrollment had reached 410 - swollen because Jewish students had been pushed out of other schools all over Cologne. Klibansky watched this happen and made a decision few other educators dared make:...

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Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 3.0

Jawne: The Kindertransport

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 3.0. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Klibansky did not write more letters. He organized. He planned to evacuate the entire school to the United Kingdom and turned to the Kindertransport network, which moved Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain by train and ship. ...

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Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 3.0

Jawne: The Train East

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 3.0. When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the routes to England closed. The children left behind in the Jawne had no more escape lanes. In 1942 the Nazis deported Klibansky, his wife, his sons, and the students who remained, along with more than a thousand other Colo...

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Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 3.0

Jawne: The Fountain with the Names

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 3.0. It took until 1990 for the square where the Jawne stood to be officially renamed Erich Klibansky Platz. The push came from Cologne citizens who refused to let the school vanish into the city's grid. In the small square is the Löwenbrunnen, the Lions' Fountain, designed by Hermann...

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Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 3.0