Prof. Baruch Kurzweil with students of the Brno Jewish Gymnasium during the celebration of Lag ba omer in 1935. Photo from Margot Kurzweil from the archive of prof. Avidov Lipsker
Prof. Dr. Baruch (Benedikt) Kurzweil (1907 - 1972) was born into a pious rabbinical family in Brtnice in 1907.
Under the tutelage of Solomon Breuer, he studied at a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, in Frankfurt am Main, and then studied at the university there. In addition to his professional work, he taught at the Jewish highschool in Brno.
In 1939 he emigrated to Palestine, where he first taught at a high school in Haifa, then became a professor at Bar Ilan University, where he founded the Hebrew literature department. He was a respected Israeli literary critic who saw in modern secularism without faith in God a tragic apostasy from the fundamental pillar of humanity, in which the cult of the individual ego fills the empty space.