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Buber's pedagogical work reached a climax under the new conditions created by the Nazi assumption of power. In November 1933 he became head of the newly reopened Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus for Jewish adult education in Frankfurt am Main. In 1934 he became director of the whole organization of Jewish adult education and retraining of Jewish teachers in Nazi Germany, where Jewish teachers and students were being progressively excluded from the educational system. He was a courageous spokesman of spiritual resistance. As against the Nazi nationalism of "blood and soil," he stressed that, while the Jew must maintain his authentic Jewish existence, the educational aim could not be racist (Völkisch). His old slogan "to be human in a Jewish way" was now completed by the demand to be Jewish in a humane way.

After the Nazi secret police forbade his public lectures and then all of his teaching activities, he emigrated as a man of 60 to Palestine. He activated his Hebrew and soon took part in the social and intellectual life of the Palestinian Jewish community. He was appointed to a professorship in social philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a post he held until 1951. He was the first president of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Arts. After the establishment of the State of Israel and with the beginning of mass immigration from the Islamic countries, Buber initiated the founding of the Teachers Training College for Adult Education in Jerusalem and became its head (1949). This college trained what were probably the best educators for the immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, many of them having been chosen from among the immigrants.

As a teacher of adults, Buber enjoyed the cooperation of his political adversaries and sometimes also of his religious adversaries. Though he denied the obligatory character of Jewish religious Law and emphasized a nonlegalistic prophetic type of religion, some of the Orthodox also worked with him. Buber's endeavours in adult education were based on his insight that adults again become educable when crisis threatens their spurious security. (Encyclopedia Britannica)