First Jewish faculty were refugees

First Jewish faculty were refugees

The first full-time Jewish faculty members at Cornell, Eric Kollman in the history department and Julian Bern in music, both came to this country as refugees from eastern Europe.

According to their daughter Miriam, Kollman and his wife, Gusti, arrived on the Hilltop in 1944 after fleeing rampant anti-Semitism in Vienna in 1939. Kollman, a socialist as well as a Jew, had been rounded up by the Nazis and escaped with the help of a former student who was an officer in Hitler’s SS. With the assistance of a colleague at Columbia University, the Kollmans traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Fairfield, Iowa, and then to Iowa City. The chair of the Cornell history department heard him speak at the University of Iowa and offered him a job. Kollman became a respected faculty member and mentor until he retired in 1973. He died in 1981.

Gusti Kollman taught physical education at Cornell and moved to Iowa City after Eric’s death. She is 104 at the time of this writing.

Julian Bern, a native of Lithuania, escaped from eastern Europe to what is now Israel via the Black Sea on an old Greek freighter to Palestine in 1939, according to his children, Dan Bern and Jennifer Bern Vogel. Along the way he contracted malaria and was almost tossed overboard. Bern lived in Israel from 1939-1952, composing, teaching, and playing concerts.

His wife, Marianne Katzenstein Bern, was born in Germany in 1922. She and her sister were on one of the last Kindertransports in 1939 to London. Marianne traveled to Israel in 1952 and met Julian at a Shabbat dinner. They were engaged a week later.

In 1954 the Berns immigrated to the U.S., where they learned of an opening on the Cornell faculty for a piano professor. Bern retired in 1977 and died in 1989. Marianne Bern died Feb. 21, 2017, at age 94.