c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The entertainment industry has its Oscar, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy awards, and every professional sport has its Hall of Fame. So it’s only fair that we now establish the Patriarch and Matriarch Award _ the Pam _ to honor the greatest Jewish leaders of the 20th century.

Because the Pam Award is new, there’s been no time to set up a nominating committee. As a result, mine is the only vote. If you’re upset with my choices, create your own award.

Greatest Jew of the 20th Century: Not even close. The Pam goes to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. Although he died in 1974, B-G’s enormous achievements continue to profoundly influence Jewish, Middle East, and world history.

It was Ben-Gurion who reluctantly and painfully accepted the 1947 United Nations partition plan that divided British mandate Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. It was painful because B-G ardently believed that all of Palestine was the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

But it was he who fully understood the extraordinary opportunity of that momentous moment. In May 1948, after 2,000 years of homelessness, he read aloud in Tel Aviv the Declaration of Independence of a free and democratic Jewish state called Israel.

Most of world opinion at the time urged caution, and then U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall strongly opposed Jewish statehood. But like all great leaders, including those who sat in Philadelphia in 1776 and courageously declared American independence, Ben-Gurion was not deterred and the dream of a born-again Israel became reality.

Since 1948, there have been Middle East wars as well as a fragile yet hopeful peace process. During the last 50 years, there have been both terrible and exhilarating moments in that part of the world, but none of those events has taken place without a Jewish state in existence.

Ben-Gurion’s greatest achievement was to reverse two millennia of Jewish history by guaranteeing that never again would Jews be a people without a land of their own; Jews would never again be the helpless pariah of history. Ben-Gurion knew, of course, that Jews would undoubtedly make mistakes, but he made certain that such mistakes would be made as a sovereign people.

Greatest Rabbi of the 20th Century: This category’s a tough call because there are so many worthy candidates. So it’s a three-way tie among Abraham Joshua Heschel, Menachem Schneerson, and Joseph Soloveitchik, all East European-born men who lived and died in the United States.

The impact of Heschel’s teachings and writings go far beyond the Jewish community. He was a fervent exponent of the unique power of spirituality long before it became fashionable. To Heschel, prayer, God, worship, the Sabbath, the land of Israel, the Hebrew prophets, and nature were more than theological terms. They were the driving forces of his religiously obsessed life.

But Heschel was also a doer and played a major role in the U.S. civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War campaign, and the Jewish contribution to the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church.

Schneerson was a master builder, the inspiration of a battered, remnant Hasidic community devastated by the Holocaust. The beloved”rebbe”of the Lubavitch movement for many years, Schneerson created a worldwide organization that has attracted thousands of followers. He re-energized Jewish life with piety, joy, and strength of belief. Like all leaders, he had his detractors, but Schneerson’s legacy is one of spiritual renewal.

Soloveitchik’s life as a super-scholar and magnificent teacher represents the culmination of hundreds of years of great European Jewish civilization that was destroyed during the Holocaust. He was the ultimate master of Halacha, Jewish religious law and lore.

His many students felt privileged to be taught by a spiritual and intellectual genius who had the wondrous ability to infuse the ancient traditions with a vigor and power that was his alone. Even today, years after his death, I have repeatedly heard many Jewish leaders, when confronted with serious religious questions, ask:”What would Rabbi Soloveitchik say?” It is a tribute to America’s extraordinary tradition of religious freedom and pluralism that all three rabbis escaped the evil of the Holocaust and made their greatest contributions while living and teaching in America.

MJP END RUDIN