Courage of the Spirit

Courage of the Spirit portrays the spiritual struggle of one man during the first half of the twentieth century the author s father, Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, who survived Nazi and communist tyranny to become the first State Rabbi of the community of Holocaust survivors in the German State of Hesse. Rabbi Weinberg s journey spanned thousands of physical miles by freight train and on foot, from cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin to Stalingrad and central Asia as he and his brother Benjamin kept a step ahead of the Nazi armies. The book spans the mental and emotional journey from the medieval shtetl and the great empires to the weak democracies and totalitarian regimes that followed, and finally, to freedom. Courage of the Spirit reconstructs these events from conversations with the author s father and his uncle, from family notes, and from historical documentation.