Leo Herrmann: The Untold Story of a Man Who Rescued Max Brod

THE JEWISH MUSEUM IN PRAGUE ANNUAL LECTURE

Leo Herrmann: The Untold Story of a Man Who Rescued Max Brod and 2,500 Other Czechoslovak Jews from the Nazi Occupation

Talk by: Zbyněk Tarant

Introduction by Rabbi Norman Patz, President Emeritus of the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, and Pavla Niklova, Director of the Jewish Museum in Prague

This lecture will introduce the rescue plan for 2,500 Czech Jews by means of a ha‘avara scheme in 1939-1940, negotiated by the Bar Kochba alumnus, Leo Herrmann. Born in Landskron in 1888, Herrmann was truly a renaissance personality – lawyer, diplomat, Zionist but also peace activist, journalist, editor in-chief in several newspapers, film producer and longtime secretary general of the Keren Ha-Yesod.

Seeing the rapidly deterioriating situation of the Czechoslovak Jewry after the Munich agreement, Herrmann mobilized all efforts to design a rescue plan akin to the German ha‘avara. Using his unique skills in fundraising and crisis management as well as his excellent contacts within the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, Herrmann designed a scheme that allowed the rescue of thousands of Czechoslovak Jews, including notable Zionists such as Max Brod, Felix Weltsch or David Paul Meretz, often in the last possible moments. Without Herrmann, the Franz Kafka’s archive smuggled by Brod from Czechoslovakia would have likely been lost forever.

Zbyněk Tarant, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. His research focuses primarily on Holocaust memory, Czech-Israeli relations, and contemporary antisemitism.

Suggested donation: $15

The event will be filmed and accessibe later on the SHCSJ YouTube channel.

The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews in partnerhsip with the Jewish Museum in Prague and Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York with support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.