Rabbi Dr. Stephen S. Wise (1874-1949) was the most prominent and influential Jewish leader of his time. He headed an array of communal institutions, including two major defense groups, the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, as well as the American Zionist movement; the Free Synagogue,...
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Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl (1903-1957) was the first European Jewish leader to urge Allied leaders to bomb Auschwitz and the railway lines leading to it. Weissmandl (1903-1957) grew up in Slovakia and became a prominent figure in the famous Nitra Yeshiva. When the Germans began deporting Slovakia's...
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Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), longtime head of Yeshiva University's rabbinical school and the preeminent figure in shaping of Modern Orthodox Judaism, was one of the 400 rabbis who marched to the White House in 1943 to plead for rescue of European Jewry. Although his participation is not mentioned...
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Louis I. Newman (1893-1972) received his rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and served as Wise's assistant rabbi at the Free Synagogue, in New York City, before becoming the spiritual leader of San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El in 1922 and, later, the rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom,...
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Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz (1921-2009), better known as the Bostoner Rebbe, was one of the 400 rabbis who took part in the 1943 march to the White House to urge the rescue of European Jews. At the time of the march, Horowitz was a recently-married rabbinical student at the Mesivta Torah Vodaas...
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Rabbi Dr. Arthur Hertzberg (1921-2006), a prominent Jewish leader and civil rights activist who took part in the 1963 March on Washington with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also participated in the 1943 rabbis' march to the White House. Writing about that experience, in the introduction to an online...
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Louis D. Gross (1885-1964) was a congregational rabbi and newspaper publisher who riled mainstream Jewish leaders with his spirited calls for U.S. action to aid refugees. Rabbi Gross was spiritual leader of the Union Temple, a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn. He founded the Brooklyn Jewish Examiner,...
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Dr. Israel Goldstein (1896-1986), a Conservative rabbi, served as president of the Synagogue Council of America, and co-chairman of the American Jewish Conference, during the Holocaust years. Although Goldstein was close to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, he sometimes took a more forthright stance than Wise...
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Rabbi Meyer Bar-Ilan (1880-1949), the Jerusalem-based leader of the Religious Zionist movement, visited the United States in 1943 and took part in important meetings with government officials and American Jewish leaders. Bar-Ilan's three-day mission to Washington in February of that year illuminated...
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