Rabbis of the kehila Over a span of two hundred years the kehila, the Jewish community, was led by ten rabbis. However, of any original documents which may allude to a Rabbi I. Jacoby Koroner as having headed the nascent rabbinate as its first rabbi, as early as 1739, any corroborating historical evidence of his position has yet to be provided. Rabbi Joel ben Meyer, born in Stargard ca. 1730, is however the first acting rabbi of the kehila of whom we have definitive knowledge. He was the son of one of Prussia's prosperous ‘Protected Jews’ the Schutzjude Meyer ben Joseph ben Joseph Asch and his wife Ester, daughter of Ya'akov Koppel Cohen from Stargard. Joel ben Meyer had received s'mikhah from Rabbi Hirsch in Berlin in 1761 and in the year 1779, nearly two generations after the community’s founding, by which time the kehila had gathered much strengthin numbers and economic sustainability, Rabbi Joel ben Meyer became head of the rabbinate andsubsequently led the community for twenty-two years until his death in September 1811. Rabbi Asch's last resting place is in Schönlanke's old cemetery, adjoining the synagogue. It is said that as recently as early in the twentieth century his matzevah, his gravestone, was still standing and in fine condition. Rabbi Yehuda ben Joel Asch, known by the honorific R. Yehuda haChassid, ‘the Pious,’ became the kehila's next rabbi for the following three years, effectively as Schönlanke's third leading rabbi, before he himself became rabbi for the Samter (Szamotuły) community in 1814 where Rabbi Yehuda ben Joel Asch died on 5 February 1831 (22 Shevat 5591) during the cholera epidemic. Ultimately, whilst the Schönlanke rabbinate remained vacant for many years thereafter, the community's day-to-day affairs were handled by the three dayanim (religious judges) Rabbi Jona, Rabbi Salomon and Rabbi Moses Meier.             Rabbi Moses Michel                      1761 – 13 March 1828 Schönlanke Only as late as 1820, after Prussia's political climate had become more settled, did the kehila consider filling the  rabbinical position again. The chosen candidate was the fifty-nine year old Rabbi Moses Michel, for whose position  royal consent was given in 1821. While more documented evidence regarding the rabbi’s lineage, educational  and professional backgrounds have yet to be found by future researchers, at the time before his acceptance assurances  were given to Prussia's bureaucracy by the kehila's elders that the prospective rabbi had passed all rabbinical exams before Berlin's  chief rabbi and assistants, twenty-nine years earlier. In time Rabbi Michel became known for his magnitude of religious  knowledge, and under his guidance the community enjoyed years of harmony. Alas, the rabbi was given less than eight  years to serve Schönlanke's kehila before his health deteriorated. In 1828, at the age of sixty-seven, Rabbi Michel  succumbed to a fatal illness. Survived by his wife Jette Benjamin and daughter Esther Ernestine — Rabbi Moses Michel  was laid to rest in the community's old cemetery.                Rabbi Jehuda Löbel ben Shimshon Halevi Blaschke                              6 November 1782 Rawitsch — 29 April 1861 Schönlanke                                         One year later the community elders chose the highly regarded Rabbi Juda Löbel ben Schimschon Halevi Blaschke to lead the Schönlanke rabbinate — asserted to be one of the most learned men in Talmud and Kabbalah in the province of Posen. Before accepting his position in Schönlanke the rabbi had been a much appreciated teacher of Talmud in Koschmin where he had been guiding the rabbinate since 1818. Rabbi Blaschke and the kehila entered into a legally binding agreement in 1835. The rabbi was of a particular humble and kind disposition and is known to have been an enormous influence on the community. His death in 1861 — a man forever known as the Schönlanker Rav—was deeply felt by the kehila and far beyond its borders. Rabbi Juda Löbel ben Shimshon Halevi Blaschke was given a final resting place in the kehila's new cemetery that had been consecrated in 1822.                                  Rabbi Dr. Salomon Lippmann Wäldler                                                24 March 1831 Svätý Jur -19 May 1904 Schönlanke Following Rabbi Blaschke’s death, given the kehila's straitened fiscal circumstances and a contracting membership, four years passed before the elders considered filling the position of new head of the rabbinate, in time to lead the congregation for the Rosh Hashanah service. Born in 1831 in southwestern Slovakia, he had been well prepared in Talmudic studies by his father Moses. Accepted at the Torah school in St. Georgen, he soon became the pupil of the renowned Rabbi Moshe Schick of Pressburg who may have bestowed s'mikhah upon Salomon Wäldler at the end of his studies. As a learned orthodox man of early-nineteenth century Germany, he helped to establish many of the Schönlanke's Jewish social associations and Vereine, skillfully guiding the kehila for four decades through a maze of fundamental changes that affected most of Germany's Jewish communities in light of Jewish Emancipation. It is with much regret that no portrait of this well-thought-of man who was dedicated to Orthodox Jewish life could yet be located. By early 1904 the seventy-three-year-old Rabbi Wäldler's health no longer allowed him to continue his work in the pulpit. Rabbi Dr. Salomon Lipmann Wäldler died on 19 May 1904, the eve of Shavuot, 5 Sivan 5664. More than a thousand mourners attended the funeral of this beloved rabbi who was mourned by the community, by the town and by many beyond.                        Rabbi Dr. Moses Löb Bamberger                           14 April 1869 Fischbach -11 February 1924 Frankfurt/M.                    The kehila's pulpit remained vacant until the thirty-six-year-old Rabbi Dr. (Mosheh Aryeh ha-Levi)              Moses Löb Bamberger from Unterfranken in Bavaria was chosen as the community's new religious leader.              Rabbi Bamberger’s ancestry of illustrious rabbis can be traced to Wiesenbronn where Jews had already              settled in 1548. As second eldest son of Rabbi Simon Simcha Halevi Bamberger — he was the second grandson              of the Würzburger Raw. As scholar and teacher, Rabbi Bamberger guided the Schönlanke’s kehila through the              years of the new century, the period of the First World War and the years of turmoil of the early 1920s.              Whilst intending to join in the celebration of the marriage of his eldest daughter Yiras to Eugen Neuberger on              12 February 1924 in Frankfurt am Main, Rabbi Bamberger unexpectedly died on 11 February 1924,             one day before the family simcha. Rabbi Bamberger's funeral took place in the old Jewish cemetery in              Frankfurt am Main. Rabbi Dr. Moses Löb Bamberger will forever be known as the Schönlanker Rav. Rabbi Dr. Benjamin (Benno) Cohen 14 April 1895 Hamburg – 31 March 1944 Auschwitz The twenty-nine year old Rabbi Dr. Benjamin Cohen's excellent academic background prompted the kehila to let him occupy the vacant rabbinate in 1924. Son of Rabbi Jacob Cohen and grandson of Sephardic Rabbi Benjamin de Yona HaCohen Jehoram — Rabbi Cohen appeared to be a propitious choice at a time of unprecedented political changes during the Weimar Republic. Rabbi Benjamin Cohen had absolved his theological and rabbinical studies in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg between 1914–1921. In early 1921 he attained his doctorate at the venerated old University of Giessen. Rabbi Cohen's thoughts on contemporary life, essays, critiques, book reviews and literary discussions have endured in the pages of leading Jewish orthodox organs of the time. Over a period of more than two decades, dozens of his writings in Jeschurun and Der Israelit touched on subjects that ranged from biblical history, Torah ethics, Jewish mysticism, to discussions on the ‘Messianic movement in the third century.’  When in 1928 his three-year term in Schönlanke was to pass to a new religious leader, Rabbi Cohen found a home as ‘Landesrabbiner,’ district rabbi of the small community in Friedrichstadt-Flensburg in north-western Germany. In April 1937 Rabbi Cohen moved to Hamburg where he joined the Portuguese Jewish community, but the events of the 1938November pogrom left no Jewish community untouched. After his arrest and incarceration in Hamburg and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp Rabbi Cohen was released on condition to leave Germany within months. With the help of his brother in Amsterdam he secured a position at the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam as Klausrabbiner of the Ets Chajim Yeshiva. It has been said that in the last year of his position in Amsterdam Rabbi Cohen refused an offer to go underground. During a raid on 26 May 1943 he and hisfamily were sent to Westerbork and subsequently deported Auschwitz. His wife and daughter Mirjam were sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Rabbi Cohen's reported date of death is 31 March 1944. Save for his brother Martin with wife and son who had survived underground—three generations of this Cohen family had been obliterated.      Rabbi Dr. Elieser Berlinger 27 January 1904 Illingen – 31 October 1985 Amsterdam                              With the choice of this the twenty-four-year old Rabbi Dr. Elieser Berlinger, a warm, devoted and  highly educated man of strong orthodox convictions in conventional Jewish religious life, the  Schönlanke community found itself in an enviable position among kehilot in the region.  Born in 1904 into a religious family passionately committed to orthodoxy in the small community  of Illingen in the Saar region of South-West Germany, Elieser Berlinger was the son of Moshe Moise Berlinger and Gittel Jettchen Unna. Dr. Berlinger received his ordination in 1928,  'conditional on not serving in a non-Orthodox synagogue.' Without doubt, with Rabbi Berlinger's  accession to his first rabbinate in Schönlanke, the kehila gained a man of outstanding talents with a flair as orator, destined to become an exceptional religious authority. Although only two short years were given to Rabbi Berlinger in the rabbinate of Schönlanke, much documentation of his later life in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands has been preserved.  His tenure as rabbi of the Malmö orthodox congregation in Sweden began with his sermon at Foereningsgatan's synagogue on Rosh Hashanah 5693. His efforts to save the Danish Jews in 1943 stand out as one of his more memorable feats. In 1946 Rabbi Berlinger accepted the position of Finland’s Chief Rabbi in Helsinki, a post he held until February 1954 when he was given an appointment in the Netherlands to serve most of the provinces. For the following thirty years he held the position of Interprovincial Chief Rabbi of Utrecht. Rabbi Berlinger — a man who possessed that rare combined talent in guidance and personality — died in Amsterdam on 16 Cheshvan 5746, - 31 October 1985.Thousands attended his funeral procession through the city, a solemn ceremony that equalled a state funeral. As had been Rabbi Berlinger's wish, his final burial took place in a prominent part of Har HaZeitim, the world's largest 3,000-year old Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Regarded as one of the greatest spiritual leaders of Jewish Netherlands in seventy years, in 1980 Queen Juliana of the Netherlands bestowed on Rabbi Berlinger the honour "Officier in die ordre van Oranje Nassau". Rabbi Dr. Curt Peritz     31 October 1885 Breslau – April 1975 Chicago    The thirty-four year old Rabbi Dr. Curt Peritz became Schönlanke's tenth spiritual leader in 1932.  Born 1 November in 1898 in Breslau, of his lineage and personal life few facts could be brought  to life, nor could his early academic path, locales of institutions or universities where he attained  his doctorate be fully reconstructed, save for the fact that Curt Peritz also graduated from Berlin’s  Adass Jisroel’s Rabbinical Seminary. His first rabbinical position had been from 1928 until 1932  in the orthodox community Adass Jisroel in Königsberg, East Prussia. No aspect of Rabbi Peritz’s  subsequent four years in Schönlanke's kehila is known to us, to the extent that this learned man's period in the Schönlanke rabbinate left neither written evidence in matters of personality, spiritual  guidance or professional qualities. At the end of his four-year term and departure from Schönlanke,  Germany’s leading Jewish press found it prudent instead to report details of Rabbi Peritz’s festive  investiture in the synagogue of Marburg in November 1936 — a position that, alas, lasted no longer  than three years. By October 1939 the British government permitted the rabbi and his wife to settle  in Leeds where by 1942 Rabbi Peritz became the guiding light of the Chayei Adam Synagogue,  Britain’s second largest Jewish community. By 1943 the rabbi had already taken on an appointment as Rabbinical Superintendent of the Burial Society of the Adath Yisroel and Union of Orthodox Hebrew  Congregations. In 1948 Rabbi Peritz and his wife sailed to Halifax, Canada, before moving to Chicago  where he was soon conducting orthodox services for Congregation Chevrath Yeshurun.  Chicago's Hyde Park area eventually became the rabbi's final realm as spiritual leader.  Rabbi Dr. Curt Peritz died in 1975. Rabbi Dr. Gerson Eliyahu Yehudah Feinberg 20 August 1876 Roth – 15 August 1942 Auschwitz Two years after his predecessor's departure an offer by Rabbi Feinberg, born 1876 in Roth, Nürnberg, to assist Schönlanke's ailing community appeared to be a welcome solution for Schönlanke's elders, as a steady flight of members and the subsequent lack of community income continued to have grave effects on the kehila’s very existence. Alas, Rabbi Feinberg’s position in Schönlanke — following his religious studies and exam in Würzburg in 1895, continued studies at University of Zürich and Berlin, a position at the Adass Jeschurun community in Heilbronn and a call to lead a revived Gross Strehlitz — lasted less than two years, whereafter he saw one last opportunity as one more rabbinical vacancy presented itself in the equally humble, century-old Silesian Jewish community of Kreuzburg, a region already familiar to him. With the destruction of its synagogue during the 1938 November pogrom this community ceased to exist and Rabbi Feinberg’s long professional career came to a final halt. Following his release from incarceration in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp ‘on condition of immediate emigration,’ Rabbi Feinberg returned to his wife and youngest daughter at his former residence in Schönlanke. Rabbi Feinberg’s ultimate attempts to secure visas to the USA faltered by that country’s restrictive quota system. The sixty-six-year old Rabbi Feinberg and his wife were deported and murdered on arrival in Riga on 18 August 1942. The continuum of the two-hundred-year history of the rabbinate in the kehila of Schönlanke would have been destined to cease with Rabbi Peritz’s departure in 1936, were it not for Rabbi Gershom Feinberg’s decision to accept his penultimate rabbinical position in Schönlanke.