Akibah Ernst Simon Archive

Akibah Ernst Simon Archive.

כותרת בעברית: ארכיון עקיבא ארנסט סימון.

ARC. 4* 1751, Ernst Akibah Simon archive, Archives Department, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

Akibah Ernst Simon Archive

Fonds Record

Ernst Akiba Simon was an Israeli educator, historian and philosopher of religion. He was born March 15 1899 in Berlin into a German Jewish family. During his school years he supported German nationalist ideas, volunteered 1914 as recruit for the war and, with other students his age, was released from the last school year to join the army. After being injured in Verdun and feeling rampant antisemitism in the army he abandonded his patriotic ideas. At the end of the war, during the November revolution he was a volunteer in the citizen guard. He studied history, philosophy and German langugage and literature in Berlin and later in Heidelberg. During his university years he was involved in the Zionist Jewish student movement. He received his PhD with a dissertation on Ranke and Hegel in 1923. 1926 he passed the state examination in German and began working as secondary school teacher in Frankfurt. As a close student of Franz Rosenzweig he was one of the founders and teachers of the Freie Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt. He joined the writers for Martin Buber's Der Jude as editor between 1923 until 1928. Then he moved to Palestine with his wife Toni (Tonya Rapoport) and began teaching at Reali High School in Haifa. 1934 he returned to Germany for 6 months at the request of Martin Buber, and joined his work in adult education. Simon left Germany forever at the end of 1934, and returned to Jerusalem. He was invited by Ben Zion Dinur to serve as a teacher of Greek philosophy at the high school near the Hebrew University, and the Hebrew teachers' school. In both of these institutions he served as director for several periods. In 1939 he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University in the Department of Education as a lecturer in philosophy and history of education. In 1950 he received the appointment of an associate professor, in 1955 a full professorship and then to the director of the school of education. He served in this position until his retirement from teaching at the university in 1967. He was a founding member of Brit Shalom. 1955 he was one of the founders of the Leo Beck Institute and also co-editor of the אנציקלופדיה חינוכית. He spent much time as visiting professor at many universities in the world. Simon was awarded the Israel Prize in education in 1967, in 1969 he received the Buber-Rosenzweig prize in Frankfurt in recognition of his contribution to the Jewish-Christian dialogue. He died 1988 in Jerusalem.

The archive was received from the creator's family.

The materials are mainly in German & Hebrew.

Akibah Ernst Simon Archive, The National Library of Israel. Digitization and cataloguing of this fonds was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG / German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy - EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research is conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.

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