14 Facts About Shimon Schwab

Shimon Schwab was an Orthodox rabbi and communal leader in Germany and the United States.

Shimon Schwab was an ideologue of Agudath Israel of America, specifically defending the Torah im Derech Eretz approach to Jewish life.

Shimon Schwab's family had been longstanding members of the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft, the Orthodox Jewish community that had established its own independence from the Reform Judaism-dominated general community.

In 1926, at age 17, Shimon Schwab enrolled in the Telshe yeshiva located in Telsiai, Lithuania, where he studied Talmud intensively for three years, and afterwards spent one year and a half in the Mir yeshiva.

In Ichenhausen, Rabbi Shimon Schwab was involved in general rabbinic duties, but he worked hard to establish a traditional yeshiva that would teach Mishnah and Talmud.

Shimon Schwab published a booklet titled Heimkehr ins Judentum exhorting his Jewish contemporaries to devote more time to in-depth Torah study and abandon their fascination with modern culture and social progress.

Shimon Schwab travelled to the United States, and after a trial period the community elected him as a rabbi.

Shimon Schwab was involved in the first Jewish day school for girls, Beis Yaakov, and traveled to San Francisco in the late 1940s to act as a lobbyist during the early activities of the United Nations.

In 1958, Shimon Schwab was invited to join Rabbi Joseph Breuer in the leadership of the German-Jewish community in Washington Heights, located in upper Manhattan in New York City; see Khal Adath Jeshurun.

Shimon Schwab continued to lecture and teach, but his health deteriorated and he died at the age of 86 on Purim katan, 1995.

Shimon Schwab was succeeded after his death by Rabbi Zechariah Gelley, the Sunderland Rosh Yeshivah who had already joined the kehilla several years earlier as second Rav.

Shimon Schwab, being a product of both the German Torah im Derech Eretz movement and the Eastern-European yeshiva world, initially identified strongly with the latter.

Shimon Schwab thus wrote his pamphlet "These and Those", in which he champions the Torah im Derech Eretz approach as being equally valid.

Rav Shimon Schwab opposed both secular and religious Zionism, both in his writings and in his speeches.