Louis Grossmann was an American rabbi and educator. He was a professor of ethics and Jewish pedagogy at the Hebrew Union College.
Background
Louis Grossmann was born in Vienna, Austria on February 24, 1863, the son of Ignatz and Nettie (Rosenbaum) Grossmann.
At the age of ten he came to the United States with his father, who had received a call to officiate as rabbi for Congregation Beth Elohim of Brooklyn, New York.
Education
Three years later Louis Grossmann went to Cincinnati to enter the Hebrew Union College which had been founded the previous year as the rabbinical seminary of the Reform group in America.
At the same time he entered Hughes High School, and in 1884, at the University of Cincinnati, he finished his secular education.
The same year he graduated from the Hebrew Union College with the degree of Rabbi and in 1888 he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity.
Career
From 1884 to 1898 Louis Grossmann was rabbi of Temple Beth El, Detroit, Michigan, from which pulpit he was called to become associate rabbi of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun of Cincinnati, Ohio, whose rabbi at that time was Isaac M. Wise, pioneer of American Reform Judaism and founder and president of the Hebrew Union College until 1921, when he became professor emeritus.
Though descended from a line of rabbis and ever sincere and earnest as a preacher, his most distinctive work was that of teacher. Louis Grossmann left a profound impression on his pupils and did much to inspire them with ideals.
He never married, but his love for children made him intensely interested in their welfare and training, and he contributed much to the progress of Jewish religious education.
Although a pioneer in the development of the newer principles of education which have become universal today, either because of his own early, unsystematic, yeshivah training, or because of the manifold interests that engrossed him, he was not able to put into concrete, usable form his oft-times revolutionary ideas, and consequently much of their value was lost.
Two books, Principles of Religious Instruction in Jeivish Schools (Berlin, 1913) and The Aims of Teaching in Jewish Schools (1919), are all that he left on the subject of education.
His other published volumes were mostly sermons and addresses. They include: Inaugural Sermon Delivered in Temple Beth El, Detroit, Michigan, December 6, 1884; The Real Life (1914); Glimpses into Life (1922); Some Chapters on Judaism and the Science of Religion; Maimonides (1890); Some Addresses and Poems by B. Belt matin (1904), which he edited. Together with David Philipson, he also edited Selected Writings of Isaac M. JVise (1900).
He published two services for children for Sabbath and holy days and prepared musical settings for children’s services. He was president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis during the trying years of the World War. In his messages to the Conference he predicted many of the problems that religion would be forced to face in the period of reconstruction which was bound to follow the war, and he urged his colleagues to prepare to meet them.
His death occurred in Detroit when he was in his sixty- fourth year.
Views
Though himself the product of the yeshivah, Louis Grossmann was among the first to realize the importance of adapting modern scientific methods to education, and particularly of applying modern psychology to the problem of Jewish religious training.
Membership
He was a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.