Joseph Carlebach

Carlebach gained an academic reputation by books on Levi ben Gershon as well as on Albert Einstein's relativity theory in 1912.

Joseph Carlebach founded the partly German-language Jüdisches Realgymnasium גימנזיום עברי (academic high school) in Kaunas (Kovno; the interwar capital of Lithuania) and directed it until 1919.

The school provided both Jewish and secular studies both for men and women (separately) and was the model for the Yavneh network that Carlebach later founded in collaboration with Leo Deutschlander.

Israeli jurist Haim Cohn described the effect Carlebach had on his students (as well as illustrating Carlebach's fairly unusual position that Orthodox Jews may visit churches): He spent a full day with the boys in the Cologne Cathedral, expertly explaining every detail of the statues, the glass windows, the ornaments, and the intricacies of the Catholic faith and ritual; but I was not allowed to participate, being a Cohen who may not be under the same roof with a corpse or with tombs, lest he become impure; and although, according to the letter of the Law, it is only the Jewish dead the contact with whom renders impure, and not the non-Jewish dead, still Carlebach held that the least possibility that among the dead buried in the cathedral may have been a person of Jewish origin (even though ultimately converted to Christianity), sufficed to make the place taboo to me.

[2] This occurred in the Biķerniecki forest, near Riga, Latvia, which was the site of numerous other shootings perpetrated by the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators, in particular, the Arajs Kommando.

Joseph Carlebach's other son, Julius Carlebach, became a renowned academic and Jewish communal leader in the UK, and was the author of Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), among other books, while his third daughter became Professor Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, who emigrated to Israel in October 1938.

[3] Rabbi Joseph Carlebach's wife managed to send her elder children to England, and they survived the war.

[citation needed] On 18 August 1954 Jerusalem honoured Carlebach's work, among others at the local Lämel-School, by naming a street, Rekhov Carlebach/Karlibakh רחוב קרליבך, after him in the neighbourhood of Talpiot.

In honor of his 120th Birthday in 2003, the "Joseph-Carlebach-Preis" (Joseph Carlebach prize) for Jewish studies was established, awarded every two years, by the State University of Hamburg.