[2] He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and later moved to Mandatory Palestine, where he founded a seminary for music teachers and privately taught pianists such as Menahem Pressler and Alexis Weissenberg.

After piano studies with José Vianna da Motta, Hermann Scholtz and Felix Draeseke, Kestenberg attended a master class by Busoni in Weimar in 1900 which introduced him to music by Bach, Schumann and above all Liszt.

He was involved in the popular education project of the Kroll Opera from 1927 to 1930, in Paul Cassirer's art magazine Der Bildermann in 1916, and supported the Commission for Exemplary Workers' Furniture in 1912.

He soon established contacts with the foreign minister Kamil Krofta and with German émigré circles (Oskar Kokoschka, Willy Haas, Ernst Bloch, Golo Mann) and the Prague born Max Brod.

He found himself caught between the fronts of the rather nationalistic Czech musical education in contrast to the simultaneously existing tendency of an increasing international opening.

[10] In the autumn of 1938, Kestenberg was again forced to flee from the Nazis and came to Paris, where he tried, with the help of friends and colleagues, to continue the "International Society for Music Education" founded in Prague.

[4] In Tel Aviv, he first became general manager of the Palestine Orchestra, which had been founded by Heinrich Simon [de] and the violinist Bronisław Huberman with immigrant musicians.

Due to progressive blindness from 1953, he turned to teaching piano students privately, including Menahem Pressler, Alexis Weissenberg, Hadassah Brill, Rina Braverman and Ricci Horenstein.

[14] The musicologist Wilfried Gruhn founded the Internationale Leo Kestenberg Gesellschaft in 2009, an international society researching his life and work, and having published his writings in six volumes until 2013.