Otto Frank and the Liberal Jewish Congregation

Otto Frank grew up in Frankfurt's Westend, a neighbourhood about a fifth of which consisted of - mostly liberal - Jews. His own family also belonged to the liberal Jewish community. His parents considered themselves primarily German Bildungsbürger, for whom Jewish faith played no important role. According to him, his grandmother only attended synagogue on the occasion of her wedding and never again. He himself did not initially concern himself with religious matters either.^[1]

Yet at the Lessing Grammar School, like all students, he received religious instruction in his own faith. He received the Jewish lessons there from Cäsar Seligmann, an old acquaintance of his father. Seligmann was the leading liberal rabbi of the Frankfurt Hauptsynagogue and the liberal Western Synagogue, inaugurated in 1910. Seligmann was considered one of the leading representatives of the liberal Jewish movement in Germany in the early 20th century.^[2]

The arrival of Jews expelled from Germany promoted the liberal Jewish movement in the Netherlands. In May 1934, the liberal rabbi Ludwig Jakob Mehler came to Amsterdam from Frankfurt and his arrival brought momentum to the building of the long-standing liberal movement in that city. These developments elicited negative comments from the orthodox press. Otto Frank was disturbed by this and wrote to the Centraal Blad voor Israëlieten in December 1937: 'I am a convinced Liberal Jew and I find your magazine's way of writing against Liberalism anything but distinguished'. He announced that he no longer wanted to be a subscriber. Clearly agitated, the editors retorted, dismissing Liberal Judaism as a German import:

'Criticism of our magazine is always agreeable to us. But who gives you the right to express this criticism in a form that does not correspond to the facts. Certainly, we reject religious liberalism, but we have found among the Jews who have immigrated here - and almost only among these are the "convinced liberals" - the contact we have sought from the beginning. And that our efforts are right proves the success, even if a single person expresses his "conviction" in his own form".^[3]

When a few months later about 40 members of the Amsterdam LJG signed a petition, Otto Frank was one of them. In doing so, the signatories supported their board who asked Queen Wilhelmina to recognise their congregation as an independent denomination.^[4] In the autumn of 1945, he rejoined the LJG.^[5]