Adolf Kober (3 September 1879 in Beuthen, Oberschlesien; 30 December 1958 in New York City) was a rabbi and a historian.
Kober studied History, Philosophy and Oriental Languages at the University of Breslau (Wrocław) and received a PhD there in 1903 with a thesis on the medieval history of the Jews in Cologne. He attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, receiving his rabbinical diploma from Israel Lewi in 1907.
From 1906 to 1908 he acted as substitute rabbi and religious instructor in the Cologne community. From 1908 to 1918 he was rabbi of the City and district of Wiesbaden.
In 1918 he took in Cologne, the then-largest Jewish community in Germany, the office of community rabbi. In 1922, at the time of the inflation, he founded an organization for the relief of distress among people ashamed to ask for aid (Notstand für veschaemte Armte).[1]
In 1925 he took the responsibility of the interregional department for Jewish history at the “Millennium Exhibition of Rhineland“, that took place in the Cologne Fair grounds.
In Cologne Kober started in 1929 the "Jüdische Lehrhaus (Jewish training house)" as a site for Jewish adults education and took the responsibility in the same year of the planning of the contents of the Jewish press pavilion in the large Cologne culture exhibition "Pressa". Beside his rabbi activity Kober devoted himself to several scientific publications on the history of Jews of Rhineland. He was a member of the editorial staff of the Germania Judaica. He lectured at the University of Cologne on Jewish history and Literature.[2]
In the years 1930 he was one of the publishers of the prestigious Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (magazine for the history of Jews in Germany) .
In 1939 Kober, following the Nazi persecution, emigrated into the United States, where, until his death in 1958 in New York, he remained active as a rabbi and a scholar. Also in the USA he was absorbed by the history of the Rhenish Jewish. He still visited Cologne in 1953 and 1957.
In 1963 the town of Cologne gave his name to a street in Stammheim.