c. 2000 Religion News Service
(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)
(UNDATED) The longtime leader of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, who died recently at age 75, was part of that remarkable group of German Jews who escaped Nazism in the late 1930s and made their way, often with great difficulty, to the United States.
American immigration laws in those fateful pre-World War II years were highly discriminatory and rigid. But once they arrived here, Alex and other members of his generation made an extraordinary impact in almost every field of human endeavor and creativity.
While some, like Henry Kissinger, Ruth Westheimer and Albert Einstein, were leaders in diplomacy, psychology and science, Schindler’s historic contribution was in the arena of religion and public policy.
Schindler was born in Munich, ironically the ideological capital city of Nazism, and he fled with his family to New York City in 1937.
His father was a Yiddish poet with deep ties to Hasidic Judaism. As a young man, Schindler served in World War II as a U.S. Army ski trooper. He was wounded in combat in Italy where the future rabbi earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
Like millions of other returning veterans after the war, Schindler enrolled in college under the GI Bill of Rights and received his rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1953.
Twenty years later he became president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, a post he held with great distinction until his retirement in 1996.
During the 23 years of Schindler’s leadership, Reform Judaism grew not only in demographic size, but in spiritual commitment as well. Schindler was keenly aware that Reform Judaism is much more than simply preventing the loss of Jewish identity through assimilation. Rather, he strongly believed the movement must be religiously “restorative,” while still adapting basic Jewish beliefs to the changing modern world.
Today religious leaders of every faith face exactly the same task. Alex Schindler met that difficult challenge by reaching out to oft-neglected sectors of the Jewish community: women, gays, the intermarried and the unaffiliated. He championed their full participation in Jewish life and that is one of his lasting legacies.
He successfully pressed the Reform movement to publicly declare patrilineal descent _ having a Jewish father _ was sufficient to be considered a Jew. This position was counter to the traditional belief that one’s mother alone determines Jewish identity at birth.
While always a progressive religious thinker, Schindler’s unique personal history along with his legendary warmth and wit gained him immediate entry in all areas of Jewish life, including Orthodox Judaism.
Schindler’s leadership talents became necessary in 1977 when the late Menachem Begin was elected prime minister of Israel. At that very moment Schindler was serving as the chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organization, an umbrella group of many disparate American organizations working in support of the Jewish state’s critical quest for security and survival.
For many American Jews, Begin’s election was traumatic because he was the first non-Labor Party prime minister since Israel’s founding in 1948. Some Jewish leaders perceived Begin as an ultra-conservative, a hard-line hawk on military matters, and definitely not in the familiar and comfortable Israeli “mainstream.”
Schindler understood this dilemma perfectly and worked with great skill in introducing the democratically elected Begin to wary American Jews. He performed the same brilliant service by acting as a human bridge between Begin and President Jimmy Carter. Some historians believe Schindler’s efforts helped create the climate of mutual respect and trust between Washington and Jerusalem that led to the Camp David Accords and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979.
Looking back on those tumultuous years, Schindler later said that preserving Jewish unity in behalf of Israel was his basic and most important task. He did it very well.
Active until the very end of his life, Schindler was scheduled to speak at Sabbath services in Kansas City on Nov. 17. But just three days before that could take place, as Alex Schindler slept, God called him home after a life well lived.
DEA END RUDIN