Joseph Breuer, also known as Yosef Breuer (March 20, 1882 – April 19, 1980) was a rabbi and community leader in Germany and the United States. He was rabbi of one of the large Jewish synagogues founded by German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression that had settled in Washington Heights, New York. Life and career Joseph Breuer was born in 1882 in Pápa, Hungary, to the local rabbi Solomon Breuer and Sophie Breuer née Hirsch, who was the youngest daughter of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. After the passing of Hirsch in 1888, Solomon Breuer was elected his successor as rabbi of the Austrittsgemeinde (seceded community) of Orthodox Jews known as Khal Adath Jeshurun. Here, Breuer Sr. founded a yeshiva called the Torah Lehranstalt and became its first Rosh Yeshiva. Joseph studied at the Torah Lehranstalt until 1903, when he was awarded semicha, and in 1905 he completed university studies at the University of Strasbourg with a PhD on the work of legal scholar Anselm von Feuerbach. He became a teacher at the Realschule (secondary school) and lecturer at the Torah Lehranstalt. He married Rika Eisenmann of Antwerp, granddaughter of Eliezer Liepman Philip Prins in 1911. In 1919 he was also appointed rabbi of the Klaus synagogue of Frankfurt. Following Solomon Breuer's death, in 1926, Joseph Breuer succeeded him as Rosh Yeshiva which he practically had already been before his father's death. Joseph Jonah Horowitz succeeded Solomon Breuer as rabbi. In 1933, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved the yeshiva to Fiume, Italy, where he had assumed the rabbinate, but this arrangement lasted only until the next year and the family and the yeshiva returned to Frankfurt. It was formally dissolved by the Nazis in 1935, but continued to function unofficially. On the day after Kristallnacht, Breuer was arrested but subsequently released. The family left Germany, initially to Antwerp. A former pupil was then, with the assistance of Bernard Revel, able to procure an affidavit of support, which enabled Breuer and his family to relocate to New York in 1939. Bernard Revel offered Joseph Breuer a teaching position in his institution, which he brusquely turned down. He reportedly said that he would rather "clean the streets". In New York, Breuer took the initiative to start a congregation with the numerous German refugees in Washington Heights, which would closely follow the morale and customs of its