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No. 39. | Vienna, 26 September 1902. | 6th Year

Rabbi Dr. Isaac Rülf.

With great sorrow we have received the news of the passing of our beloved veteran master, Dr. Isaac Rülf. We must mourn the loss of one of our best and dearest, who, in unshakable faith in the future of his people, gave it everything that a man can give to his people. To all of us he was at once friend, teacher and master, and his death leaves a gap in our ranks that cannot be filled. Henceforth the good and noble man belongs only to our memory. But his name, his labours and his works are inseparably bound up with the history of the rejuvenated people.

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Rülf is dead! Wherever two Zionists meet upon the wide earth, the sorrowful lament will sound: Our Rülf is dead. For he was ours long before the great rallying call to Basle went out to us, when the longing for Zion still slumbered formless in our hearts, long before the word "Zionism" had been coined. When, a few minutes after the dreadful tidings reached me, I stepped to the bed of the master, transfigured by the gentle silence of death, I felt in advance the great grief that now thrills through all Israel.

To few Jewish men has it been granted to engrave their names so indelibly upon the hearts of their kinsmen as it was given to Isaac Rülf. And what he became and what he was, he owed to himself — this self-made man of the noblest kind, a shining emblem of the strength and ability of our race.

Born on 10 February 1831 at Rautisch-Holzhausen, a small Hessian village, Rülf worked as teacher and preacher in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, and until 1865 as assistant rabbi in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. After taking his doctorate in the same year, he began his rabbinical career in the Prussian frontier town of Memel. In this town, situated on the border of Western European civilisation, far from the intellectual centres of cultural life, he spent the greater part of his life, which was filled with richly blessed labours in the service of learning, of suffering humanity, and of his people. Rülf belonged to those divinely gifted natures whose creative power was not exhausted by a single activity, to those natures who with their minds "grasp the highest" and "the deepest". His philosophical writings, "The Science of World-Thought", "The Science of the World of Thought", etc., are significant works of imperishable value. But his extensive philosophical studies still left him time for comprehensive journalistic activity. Fortunately! For without it posterity would esteem him only as one of the great in Israel, not as one of the best. And one of the best he was. When the vast misery of his brethren groaned across the frontier, he took up his pen and, in the writings "My Journey to Kowno" and "Three Days in Jewish Russia", depicted the immense suffering of these pariahs to the Western European Jews, who had only the vaguest notions of the mass misery in Russia. And he did not merely take up the pen. The year 1867, the grievous year of want in East Prussia, found him at the head of the relief committee that had been formed under the patronage of the noble Crown Prince. From then on this single man worked as the benefactor of thousands upon thousands of the distressed, and his labours saved thousands from certain death by starvation. The man of living deed, who saw mighty stores of moral strength and energy slumbering in these Jewish masses of the East, bowed down by physical and moral oppression, became a national Jew — was bound to become one. The work "Aruchas Bas-Amı" — "The Healing of My People", which appeared in 1883, already shows us Rülf as a Zionist in the fullest sense of the word. He had simply drawn the ultimate consequences of his national-Jewish outlook on life. From then on Zionism governed his world of thought and feeling; it became the principle of his life, which he championed in word and writing to the end of his days. Alas, that we here on the Rhine were permitted to rejoice in him for only a few short years! Now he is dead, the man with snow upon his head and the young heart in his breast. By his bier stands mourning the Jewish people, to whom his life belonged and whom he loved with all the ardour of his great soul. But we, bowed with grief, find comfort in Dr. Herzl's word: "Not a single one of us is any longer indispensable to-day. Whoever of us disappears or falls from the ranks, the cause goes on."

Bonn a. Rh.

Dr. E.