Menorah (Illustrated Monthly for the Jewish Home)
MENORAH (Illustrated Monthly for the Jewish Home)
MENORAH (Illustrated Monthly for the Jewish Home ), a German-language family journal for science, art, and literature, founded in Vienna in July 1923 by Paul J. Diamant. In his preface, Diamant defined the paper's aims "in the first place to advance the efforts directed towards bridging the various, often conflicting tendencies within Jewry, hoping, on a cultural basis, to bring about the necessary harmony. We intend carefully to cherish the spiritual and artistic traditions, to look back to those times when Judaism was deeply rooted in genuine soil, unsophisticated by sickly questionings. We intend to cooperate – a lofty aspiration – in creating a homogeneous Jewish cultural atmosphere." As a liberal-conservative Jewish paper, Menorah was primarily directed towards acculturated and educated bourgeois circles, including women and the younger generation, presenting the Jewish family as "the bulwark and prop of Judaism" at all times. While the journal sought to publish articles on all aspects of Jewish life (its main interest, however, lay in fields of Jewish religion and East European Jewish culture), it consistently maintained a high level of scholarship and of literary and artistic quality. Though "not tied to any party," Menorah tended to support the Zionist *Revisionist movement and published articles by its leader, Vladimir *Jabotinsky. During the first year, some contributions even appeared in Hebrew and in English, thus facilitating the paper's intended circulation throughout Western and Eastern Europe, the United States, and Palestine. However, the periodical does not seem to have been widely read.
In July 1924, Menorah passed into the hands of Norbert Hoffmann. He reorganized the paper, dropped its English subtitle (the Hebrew was kept until December 1925), and appointed new permanent staff members such as Nathan Birnbaum (Hamburg), Friedrich Matzner, and Robert Weiss (Vienna), Hoffmann's wife, Fine, the composer Rudolf *Réti, the chess champion Richard *Réti, and W. Loewinger. Moreover, from July 1924, Menorah was jointly edited in Vienna and Frankfurt/Main, and from Oct. 1928 in Vienna and Berlin, then mostly as double issues every two months (until January 1929 together with the publisher Abraham *Horodisch). From January 1926, Menorah was reduced in size and its German subtitle "Illustrierte Monatsschrift fuer die juedische Familie" changed to "Juedisches Familienblatt fuer Wissenschaft / Kunst und Literatur." Frequently, artwork was included or special editions issued, such as on the Jews in Vienna (March 1926) and Silesia (May 1926), on Jewish hygiene (June/July 1926) and folklore (Oct. 1926), on the Jews in Poland (June/July 1927), on the artist Max *Liebermann (August 1927), on Mainz and the Maharil (December 1927), on the Jewish section (jsop) of the International Press Exhibition "Pressa" in Cologne (June/July 1928), or on the Jews in Bavaria (Nov./Dec. 1928). In December 1932, Menorah ceased publication. Norbert Hoffmann, together with his wife, immigrated to Palestine in 1938. He died in 1977.
bibliography:
S. Federbush (ed.), Ḥokhmat Yisrael be-Ma'arav Eropah, 2 (1963), 403–6; I. Gartner, "Menorah. Juedisches Familienblatt fuer Wissenschaft / Kunst und Literatur (1923–1932), Geschichte einer Wiener Zeitschrift – mit einer deskriptiv-analytischen Bibliographie" (Ph.D. dissertation, Innsbruck University, 1997).
[Johannes Valentin Schwarz (2nd ed.)]