Volume 27 of the CGL-Studies – “Jewish Horticultural Schools and Training Centers in Germany and their Impact on Horticulture and Landscape Architecrture in Palestine / Israel“ – presents the results of a symposium which was held in September 2016 at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, jointly organized by the Leo Baeck Institute, the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning of the Technion, Haifa, and the Center of Garden Art and Landscape Architecture of Leibniz University Hannover.

The volume presents four main chapters. The first, „Hachsharot in Context“, deals with the context and changing role of Jewish agricultural training in Germany and Hachsharot in the time of the Nazi dictatorship. In the next chapter, „Perceptions of Nature“, ideas of the Jewish youth movement about nature and landscape and the perceptions of nature among Hachshara members are discussed. „Hachsharot in Germany and Palestine“, the third chapter, presents papers on Jewish horticultural training centers in Germany in the regions of Hannover and Berlin/Brandenburg, as well as on Gross-Gaglow, a cooperative Jewish settlement located near Cottbus, and on Kfar Ruppin and Sde Eliyahu, a secular and a religious Kibbutz in Israel, respectively. The papers in the concluding chapter „Beyond Hachsharot“, deal with the lives and work of female Jewish gardeners and garden architects in Vienna, and with the Ahlem memorial and documentation center, established at the site of the former Israelitische Gartenbauschule Ahlem (Jewish Horticultural School Ahlem) in Hannover.