RSS
Rabbi David Ellenson dies; former president of Reform seminary and widely admired mentor was 76
(JTA) — Rabbi David Ellenson, who served for 12 years as president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and mentored a generation of rabbis and scholars as a historian, adviser and confidant, died Thursday morning at age 76.
The cause was a heart ailment, according to a spokesperson for the Reform movement flagship.
A renowned scholar in his own right — whose interests ranged from the origins and development of Orthodox Judaism in Germany to the relationship between religion and state in Israel — he was known and admired among such a wide circle of colleagues and students that the New York Jewish Week tagged him “everyone’s favorite rabbi” when he stepped down as president of HUC-JIR in 2013.
“It is impossible to overstate David’s importance to the Jewish People, Reform Judaism and to Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in particular,” Andrew Rehfeld, the current president of HUC-JIR, said in a statement. “His scholarship and depth of knowledge were world-renowned, and his humility, warmth, generosity of spirit, and deep concern for each individual inspired all of us who had the privilege to know him. I feel blessed to have had him as a friend and mentor and will miss him dearly.”
A raft of tributes flowed in upon news of Ellenson’s passing, which came as a shock even to those who knew him well. He had attended an event celebrating another rabbi just the day before his death.
“He was one of the kindest people I ever knew,” wrote Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where Ellenson taught rabbis in its summer programs and recently joined its research center in New York as a senior fellow. “This is no small thing in general but is downright extraordinary for a person whose life was in leadership and lived in public.”
Rabbi Rachael Klein Miller, associate rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Atlanta, wrote that she came into the rabbinate inspired by Ellenson’s writings in Jewish ethics, although “through my time at HUC I was much more inspired by the genuine kindness and engaging teachings of this Reform Movement giant.”
Even rabbis who weren’t ordained at HUC or didn’t know him well wrote of his influence and example. Rabbi Tali Adler, who is on the faculty of New York’s Hadar Institute, said she had never met Ellenson but that over the summer he had taken a few of her classes online and sent her a handwritten note thanking her. “There was no reason he had to take his time to find out how to reach me and write to me personally,” she wrote. “No reason but the exceptional kindness and love of Torah that everyone who speaks and writes about him knew so well.”
As president of HUC-JIR, Ellenson made a year of study in Israel for rabbinical students a priority, even during the violent second intifada. He also shepherded the institution — which had campuses in Cincinnati, Los Angeles and New York — during the financial crisis of 2008 and ’09. In 2009 HUC-JIR considered closing two of its three U.S. campuses but staved off such moves until 2022, when its board of governors decided to close the rabbinic program in Cincinnati and enroll all rabbinical students at HUC’s campuses in New York and Los Angeles.
Under Ellenson’s stewardship, HUC-JIR expanded the role of women on its board of governors and regional boards of advisors, according to the school. During his tenure, HUC-JIR expanded professional leadership through a variety of fellowships, and introduced new distance learning initiatives.
He also led efforts among Reform and Conservative Jewish leaders to ease the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate’s grip on religious ritual in Israel and expand acceptance and funding for non-Orthodox movements there.
Rabbis David Ellenson, left, and Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform theologian, in 2009, on the occasion of the latter’s 85th birthday. (Courtesy of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion)
In 2018 he returned as interim president after his successor, Rabbi Aaron Panken, died in a plane crash. At the time, Ellenson had just concluded a tenure as director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, a position he held starting in 2015. At Brandeis he also served as a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
Rehfeld was appointed president in 2019, and Ellenson became chancellor-emeritus.
David Ellenson was born in 1947 and grew up in an Orthodox family in Newport News, Virginia. At a tribute dinner in 2014, Skip Vichness, a lifelong friend and former board chair of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, recalled growing up a few blocks away from Ellenson and how the two skinny kids played for the local JCC basketball team. When the team won the local championship, said Vichness, the headline in the southern town’s daily newspaper read: “Upset Of The Year: Jews Win.”
Growing up in the small community, Ellenson recalled in a podcast interview in 2018, he observed “the tensions between what I would call a commitment to Jewish tradition and Jewish identity on the one hand, and a desire to participate fully in the larger world on the other.” He came to the conclusion that Reform Judaism, which does not accept that Torah is the literal word of God, appealed to him as “an ongoing narrative where each generation of Jews writes a different story in which they attempt to capture what it is they feel that God commands in their age.”
Ellenson received a bachelor’s degree at the College of William and Mary in 1969 and a master’s degree in religious studies at the University of Virginia in 1972.
He received his Ph.D. in 1981 from Columbia University, where the eminent Israeli historian Jacob Katz guided him to the study of modern responsa — rabbinic opinions that applied Jewish law to changing social conditions. Having embraced the liberal Reform movement, and after undertaking an unusually intense program of study, he was ordained as a rabbi by HUC-JIR in 1977.
Prior to his appointment as president in 2001, he spent some 30 years at HUC-JIR as a student and faculty member.
“My soul is bound to this institution and to the holy mission that animates it,” he wrote in 2013. “It has been the greatest privilege to devote my life to this school.”
In decades of scholarship, Ellenson invariably focused on the conflicts and possibilities for reconciliation “Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity,” the title of a book of essays collected in his honor in 2014.
One of the most enduring questions he posed in his scholarship, wrote David N. Meyers in his introduction to the volume, was “whether to err on the side of leniency in order to allow for a larger and more inclusive Jewish community or to hold fast to established exclusionary norms.”
In 2011, in an interview he gave soon after becoming HUC’s president, he spoke about applying his scholarly interests to the challenges of reaching Jews on the “fringes” of Jewish life.
“The challenge of our age — at least in America — is that Jews are accepted to such a degree that, unless we respond with compelling initiatives, Jews will disappear in even larger numbers in what is, after all, a voluntaristic society in which we are highly acculturated and overwhelmingly accepted,” he said.
For two decades, Ellenson served as head of the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies at the University of Southern California under the aegis of HUC-JIR. He also served as a visiting professor at both UCLA and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the Conservative movement flagship.
In 2015, New York University appointed him as distinguished visiting professor in the Skirball Department of Judaic Studies.
Ellenson wrote or edited seven books and over 300 articles and reviews. His book, “After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity,” won the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought in 2005. “Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (1990) and “Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Orthodox Responsa” (2012) were nominated for book awards by the Jewish Book Council.
Ellenson is survived by his wife, Rabbi Jacqueline Koch Ellenson; his children Ruth Andrew Ellenson, Rabbi Micah Ellenson, Nomi Ellenson May, Rafi Ellenson, a Hebrew College rabbinical student, and Hannah Miriam Ellenson, a rabbinical student at HUC; and four grandchildren.
He is also survived by the countless friends he attracted and nurtured, a hallmark of his leadership.
—
The post Rabbi David Ellenson dies; former president of Reform seminary and widely admired mentor was 76 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Syria’s Sharaa Says Talks With Israel Could Yield Results ‘In Coming Days’
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks at the opening ceremony of the 62nd Damascus International Fair, the first edition held since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in Damascus, Syria, Aug. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Wednesday that ongoing negotiations with Israel to reach a security pact could lead to results “in the coming days.”
He told reporters in Damascus the security pact was a “necessity” and that it would need to respect Syria’s airspace and territorial unity and be monitored by the United Nations.
Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli airstrikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.
Reuters reported this week that Washington was pressuring Syria to reach a deal before world leaders gather next week for the UN General Assembly in New York.
But Sharaa, in a briefing with journalists including Reuters ahead of his expected trip to New York to attend the meeting, denied the US was putting any pressure on Syria and said instead that it was playing a mediating role.
He said Israel had carried out more than 1,000 strikes on Syria and conducted more than 400 ground incursions since Dec. 8, when the rebel offensive he led toppled former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Sharaa said Israel’s actions were contradicting the stated American policy of a stable and unified Syria, which he said was “very dangerous.”
He said Damascus was seeking a deal similar to a 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria that created a demilitarized zone between the two countries.
He said Syria sought the withdrawal of Israeli troops but that Israel wanted to remain at strategic locations it seized after Dec. 8, including Mount Hermon. Israeli ministers have publicly said Israel intends to keep control of the sites.
He said if the security pact succeeds, other agreements could be reached. He did not provide details, but said a peace agreement or normalization deal like the US-mediated Abraham Accords, under which several Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic ties with Israel, was not currently on the table.
He also said it was too early to discuss the fate of the Golan Heights because it was “a big deal.”
Reuters reported this week that Israel had ruled out handing back the zone, which Donald Trump unilaterally recognized as Israeli during his first term as US president.
“It’s a difficult case – you have negotiations between a Damascene and a Jew,” Sharaa told reporters, smiling.
SECURITY PACT DERAILED IN JULY
Sharaa also said Syria and Israel had been just “four to five days” away from reaching the basis of a security pact in July, but that developments in the southern province of Sweida had derailed those discussions.
Syrian troops were deployed to Sweida in July to quell fighting between Druze armed factions and Bedouin fighters. But the violence worsened, with Syrian forces accused of execution-style killings and Israel striking southern Syria, the defense ministry in Damascus and near the presidential palace.
Sharaa on Wednesday described the strikes near the presidential palace as “not a message, but a declaration of war,” and said Syria had still refrained from responding militarily to preserve the negotiations.
RSS
Anti-Israel Activists Gear Up to ‘Flood’ UN General Assembly
US Capitol Police and NYPD officers clash with anti-Israel demonstrators, on the day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC, July 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Anti-Israel groups are planning a wave of raucous protests in New York City during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) over the next several days, prompting concerns that the demonstrations could descend into antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation.
A coalition of anti-Israel activists is organizing the protests in and around UN headquarters to coincide with speeches from Middle Eastern leaders and appearances by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The demonstrations are expected to draw large crowds and feature prominent pro-Palestinian voices, some of whom have been criticized for trafficking in antisemitic tropes, in addition to calling for the destruction of Israe.
Organizers of the demonstrations have promoted the coordinated events on social media as an opportunity to pressure world leaders to hold Israel accountable for its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, with some messaging framed in sharply hostile terms.
On Sunday, for example, activists shouted at Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon.
“Zionism is terrorism. All you guys are terrorists committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and Palestine. Shame on you, Zionist animals,” they shouted.
BREAKING: PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTORS CONFRONT “ISRAELI” AMBASSADOR DANNY DANON AT THE UNITED NATIONS
1/5 pic.twitter.com/4G1VYEMGzV
— Within Our Lifetime (@WOLPalestine) September 14, 2025
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), warned on its website that the scale and tone of the planned demonstrations risk crossing the line from political protest into hate speech, arguing that anti-Israel activists are attempting to hijack the UN gathering to spread antisemitism and delegitimize the Jewish state’s right to exist.
Outside the UN last week, masked protesters belonging to the activist group INDECLINE kicked a realistic replica of Netanyahu’s decapitated head as though it were a soccer ball.
US activist group plays soccer with Bibi’s mock decapitated HEAD right outside NYC UN HQ
Peep shot at 00:40
Footage posted by INDECLINE collective just as UN General Assembly about to kick off
‘Following the game, ball was donated to Palestinian Genocide Museum’ pic.twitter.com/TQ84sgZhKr
— RT (@RT_com) September 9, 2025
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a radical anti-Israel activist group, has vowed to “flood” the UNGA on behalf of the pro-Palestine movement.
WOL, one of the most prolific anti-Israel activist groups, came under immense fire after it organized a protest against an exhibition to honor the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel. During the event, the group chanted “resistance is justified when people are occupied!” and “Israel, go to hell!”
“We will be there to confront them with the truth: Their silence and inaction enable genocide. The world cannot continue as if Gaza does not exist,” WOL said of its planned demonstrations in New York. “This is the time to make our voices impossible to ignore. Come to New York by any means necessary, to stand, to march, to demand the UN act and end the siege.”
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), two other anti-Israel organizations that have helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza, also announced they are planning a march from Times Square to the UN headquarters on Friday.
“The time is now for each and every UN member state to uphold their duty under international law: sanction Israel and end the genocide,” the groups said in a statement.
JVP, an organization that purports to fight for “Palestinian liberation,” has positioned itself as a staunch adversary of the Jewish state. The group argued in a 2021 booklet that Jews should not write Hebrew liturgy because hearing the language would be “deeply traumatizing” to Palestinians. JVP has repeatedly defended the Oct. 7 massacre of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel by Hamas as a justified “resistance.” Chapters of the organization have urged other self-described “progressives” to throw their support behind Hamas and other terrorist groups against Israel
Similarly, PYM, another radical anti-Israel group, has repeatedly defended terrorism and violence against the Jewish state. PYM has organized many anti-Israel protests in the two years following the Oct. 7 attacks in the Jewish state. Recently, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) called for a federal investigation into the organization after Aisha Nizar, one of the group’s leaders, urged supporters to sabotage the US supply chain for the F-35 fighter jet, one of the most advanced US military assets and a critical component of Israel’s defense.
The UN General Assembly has historically been a flashpoint for heated debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Previous gatherings have seen dueling demonstrations outside the Manhattan venue, with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups both seeking to influence the international spotlight.
While warning about the demonstrations, CAM noted it recently launched a new mobile app, Report It, that allows users worldwide to quickly and securely report antisemitic incidents in real time.
RSS
Nina Davidson Presses Universities to Back Words With Action as Jewish Students Return to Campus Amid Antisemitism Crisis
Nina Davidson on The Algemeiner’s ‘J100’ podcast. Photo: Screenshot
Philanthropist Nina Davidson, who served on the board of Barnard College, has called on universities to pair tough rhetoric on combatting antisemitism with enforcement as Jewish students returned to campuses for the new academic year.
“Years ago, The Algemeiner had published a list ranking the most antisemitic colleges in the country. And number one was Columbia,” Davidson recalled on a recent episode of The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast. “As a board member and as someone who was representing the institution, it really upset me … At the board meeting, I brought it up and I said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
Host David Cohen, chief executive officer of The Algemeiner, explained he had revisited Davidson’s remarks while she was being honored for her work at The Algemeiner‘s 8th annual J100 gala, held in October 2021, noting their continued relevance.
“It could have been the same speech in 2025,” he said, underscoring how longstanding concerns about campus antisemitism, while having intensified in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, are not new.
Davidson argued that universities already possess the tools to protect students – codes of conduct, time-place-manner rules, and consequences for threats or targeted harassment – but too often fail to apply them evenly. “Statements are not enough,” she said, arguing that institutions need to enforce their rules and set a precedent that there will be consequences for individuals who refuse to follow them.
She also said that stakeholders – alumni, parents, and donors – are reassessing their relationships with schools that, in their view, have not safeguarded Jewish students. While supportive of open debate, Davidson distinguished between protest and intimidation, calling for leadership that protects expression while ensuring campus safety.
The episode surveyed specific pressure points that administrators will face this fall: repeat anti-Israel encampments, disruptions of Jewish programming, and the challenge of distinguishing political speech from conduct that violates university rules. “Unless schools draw those lines now,” Davidson warned, “they’ll be scrambling once the next crisis hits.”
Cohen closed by framing the discussion as a test of institutional credibility, asking whether universities will “turn policy into protection” in real time. Davidson agreed, pointing to students who “need to know the rules aren’t just on paper.”
The full conversation is available on The Algemeiner’s “J100” podcast.