This chapter explores the pre-war Jewish leadership, pre-war attributes, and political compositions of the three cities: Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow. It examines how the wartime Jewish leadership of these cities were selected shortly after the German invasion from the remaining pre-war prominent community members., the challenges they faced during the early occupation, and the changes in their roles after the creation of the ghettos. This chapter discusses the abuse and violence suffered by the Jewish communal leadership from German authorities while simultaneously enduring an erosion of power to protect their communities. This chapter also examines the creation and closing of each of the ghettos.

This chapter situates Franz Rosenzweig’s unique and influential contributions to Jewish theology in his Christian historicist and philosophical context of modern European civilization. Doing so allows us to best understand his theological contributions with the interdependent two-fold Jewish exilic tradition of interpreting the Torah as an engaged, dialectical response from the dual perspectives of the living Scriptural authority of their respective communities of faith and the non-Jewish and increasingly secular contexts in which they found themselves. The chapter unfolds as an interpretation that is based on Rosenzweig’s introduction of a novel methodological speech-act philosophy that he calls New Thinking which takes shape in the midrashic form of a messianic aesthetics. Simon claims that this approach enables Rosenzweig to set out a normative guide of teaching-as-practice throughout the entirety of The Star of Redemption, in order to bring the structures of the inter-related processes of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption into functional and dynamic ethical relations.