(UNDATED) During the 1930s and ’40s, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise received letters from around the world addressed simply to “Rabbi USA.” The U.S. Postal Service was never in doubt about the intended larger-than-life recipient of those letters. There was only one “Rabbi USA.”

And in the 60 years since his death on April 19, 1949, there has never been another.

Wise was the acknowledged leader of the American Jewish community, a major figure in U.S. politics, and a leader of the progressive social justice movement.

During his lifetime Wise, witnessed the “Gilded Age” of the Robber Barons of business; the Spanish-American War; the Progressive Era; the Great Depression; the New Deal; two World Wars; the rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism; the Holocaust; the growth of trade unions; the birth of positive Christian-Jewish relations in America; and the event that brought him the greatest joy: the creation of modern Israel.

Wise responded vigorously to those events — sometimes as an adversary and sometimes as an ally. Never neutral about any aspect of religion or politics, Wise was contemptuous of carefully nuanced positions on public issues. For him, such safe statements were acts of cowardice.

Wise was acclaimed as one of the world’s great orators, comparable to Winston Churchill. Wise’s sonorous baritone voice — I’ve heard recordings of his speeches — still provokes an instant visceral response. Listeners described his sermons as akin to God speaking from Mount Sinai.

Because of his commanding physical presence and rhetorical power, Wise shattered traditional images of passive Jews who begged only for a morsel of mercy and compassion from the world. Wise begged for nothing.

In March 1933, two months after Adolf Hitler came to power, Wise demanded international sanctions and an economic boycott of Nazi Germany. “The world will respect the Jew as unafraid and unashamed much more than the Jew, nervous and fearful and cowardly,” he declared. ” … The world will help us only if we Jews make clear we are resolved not to merely survive ignobly, but to live united, nobly, courageously!”

Wise also used his oratory and charisma as weapons against injustice in America: child labor, women’s rights, shamefully low wages, slum housing, inadequate education, and discrimination against immigrants, blacks, Catholics, and Asians.

“I must become the safe-guarding, justice-dealing brother to all men and women in God’s world,” he said.

Wise’s commitments still permeate the synagogues that bear his name in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. His memory is kept alive in my alma mater that he founded, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and in the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, both of which he established.

Wise galvanized popular sentiment for the creation of Israel, and pressed world leaders for their support. Sadly, even Wise could not persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to permit the mass entry into the U.S. of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism; nor could he gain FDR’s strong support for a Jewish state.

Wise was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP and was closely aligned with the AFL-CIO. He was the model for many activist clergy who came after him, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and Robert Drinan.

He demanded that the teachings of religion, and the teachers of religion, aggressively enter the arenas of social justice and electoral politics. Wise’s transformation of the pulpit into an instrument of reform and change is one of his enduring legacies

When “Rabbi USA” died, Howard Thurman, King’s academic and spiritual mentor at Boston University, described Wise’s life and influence:

“I knew a man who was like one of the ancient prophets. There was something of the eternal in the rolling sound of his majestic voice. … There was something dazzling about the burning brilliance of his mind. When one listened to his words, there were moments that seemed to be all light, and all the little dark caverns of one’s prejudices and fears melted away.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)