Hildegard and Saul B. Robinsohn Collection

Hildegard Robinsohn (1907-1996), sister of the German-Dutch physician Hans Keilson, studied Law in Berlin and emigrated to Palestine in 1934. Saul Benjamin Robinsohn (1916-1972), after having left Germany in 1933, studied History, Sociology, Philosophy and Pedagogy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

After the War, the couple returned to Germany. From 1959 to 1964, Saul Robinsohn was director of the UNESCO Institute of Education in Hamburg, and from 1964 to 1972, he was one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin.

In the context of the West German educational reform of the 1960s and 1970s, Saul Robinsohn made crucial contributions in the fields of curriculum theory and child and student development.

Hildegard Robinsohn, a successful attorney in restitution cases, always accompanied her husband's scientific educational path. She looked after his estate until her death and assigned the care and continuation of his work to a foundation.

The educational library of Saul Robinsohn was given to the University Library of the Free University of Berlin. The Judaica holdings of the estate library were transferred to the Moses Mendelssohn Center in 1997. It comprises approximately 1,500 titles, 1,000 of which are in Hebrew, covering the fields of Bible and Biblical Studies, including rabbinic commentaries, Rabbinica, as well as the most important new Hebrew historicographic literature.