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Famous Like Me > Director > W > Stephen Wise

Profile of Stephen Wise on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Stephen Wise  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 4th December 1967
   
Place of Birth: Royal Oak, Michigan, USA
   
Profession: Director
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Stephen Samuel Wise (1862 - 1949) was a Hungarian- born U.S. rabbi and Zionist leader.

He studied at the College of the City of New York (1887-91), Columbia College (B.A. 1892), and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1901), and later pursued rabbinical studies under Gottheil, Kohut, Gersoni, Joffe, and Margolis. In 1893 he was appointed assistant to Rabbi Henry S. Jacobs of the Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, New York City, and later in the same year, minister to the same congregation. In 1900 he was called to the rabbinate of the Congregation Beth Israel, Portland, Oregon.

Wise was the first (honorary) secretary of the American Federation of Zionists; and at the Second Zionist Congress (Basel, 1898) he was a delegate, and secretary for the English language. He was a member also of the International Zionist Executive Committee in 1899. Wise's committment to Zionism was very atypical of Reform Jews during this period. Reform Jewry, dominated initially by assimilationist Jews of German descent who feared allegations of dual loyalty and had tried to de-ethnicize their Jewish identity in hopes of being accepted as just one more denomination in America,was largely opposed to Zionism until at least the late 1930s.

In 1902 he officiated as first vice-president of the Oregon State Conference of Charities and Correction; and in 1903 he was appointed Commissioner of Child Labor for the state of Oregon, and founded the Peoples' Forum of Oregon. These activities initiated a lifelong committment to social justice, stemming from his embrace of a Jewish equivalent of the Social Gospel movement in Christianity.

He founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, an educational center in New York City to train rabbis in Reform Judaism. It was merged into the Hebrew Union College a year after his death.

He was a close friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who turned to Wise for advice on issues concerning the Jewish community in the United States.

Wise has sometimes been criticized for his initial failure to recognize the Holocaust prior to American entry into World War II, and his dismissal of early reports of the Final Solution as propaganda. Like much of the American Jewish community at the time, his mistakes in this area probably stemmed from a desire to not fan the flames of anti-Semitism by drawing undue attention to the sufferings of the Jewish people in Europe under Nazi rule, fearing an upsurge of anti-Semitism in the United States.

Wise translated "The Improvement of the Moral Qualities," an ethical treatise of the eleventh century by Solomon ibn Gabirol (New York, 1902) from the original Arabic, and wrote "The Beth Israel Pulpit", amongst other works.



This article incorporates text from the public domain 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia.

External Links

  • Jewish Encyclopedia article on S.S.Wise
  • Stephen S. Wise (Jewish Virtual Library)
  • Biography at PBS.org

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Stephen Wise