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Moshe Waldoks | |
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| Born | July 17, 1949 |
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Moshe Waldoks is an American rabbi who co-edited The Big Book of Jewish Humor. [1]
| The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies .(January 2015) |
Moshe Waldoks | |
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| | |
| Born | July 17, 1949 |
| Education | |
Moshe Waldoks is an American rabbi who co-edited The Big Book of Jewish Humor. [1]
Waldoks was born on July 17, 1949, in Toledo, Ohio to Holocaust survivors who arrived from displaced person’s camps surrounding Munich two weeks earlier. His father Yidel, a native of the Vohlynia, Western Ukraine city of Lutzk and its environs, was a sole survivor of a large nuclear and extended family. Yidel's wife and daughter perished in the wake of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile killing units that entered Poland in 1941. His mother, Bronia Lipnicka, was from Sosnowitz in Upper Silesia that was annexed into the Reich immediately after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. She, her mother and one sister survived a large nuclear and extended family in a Nazi labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Waldoks was raised in a Yiddish speaking home and was enrolled in Yiddish speaking yeshivot (parochial schools) for his primary and part of his early high school education - Yeshiva of Eastern Parkway and BTA, Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, a high school associated with Yeshiva University.
Waldoks is married to Anne Pomerantz Waldoks, a clinical psychologist, and is the father of 3 daughters.
Waldoks attended the Washington Square campus of NYU from 1966 to 1968 and then completed undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he studied The History of Jewish Thought. In 1971, he entered into a doctoral program at Brandeis University in the department of Near East and Jewish studies. He completed his doctorate in 1984, with a dissertation on Hillel Zeitlin, a Warsaw-based Yiddish journalist, Hebrew writer and mystic who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942.
Upon his arrival in Boston in 1971, Waldoks became engaged in community activism and served on numerous boards of Jewish organizations. He was on the executive committee of the Jewish Community Relations Council for 17 years. From 1974 to 1977, while a graduate student, Waldoks helped establish a full time position as Hillel Director at Tufts University. From 1979 to 1986, he taught Jewish studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA and served in many adjunct positions at Colleges and Universities in the Boston area.
In 1981 he, along with-co-editor William Novak, published THE BIG BOOK OF JEWISH HUMOR (HarperCollins). A 25th anniversary edition with additional material was published in 2006. In 1994, Waldoks co-edited the Best of American Humor (Simon & Schuster). [2] From 1982 to 1990, Waldoks produced close to two hundred cable television programs for the then early pre-internet years of community cable stations. This series named Aleph was the first Jewish television show in the Boston area. From 1986 to 1998, Waldoks traveled and performed as a stand-up comedian, storyteller, philosopher and sage for over 100 communities in the United States and Canada. He also performed at National conferences and many fundraising events.
Since 1974, Waldoks has been heavily involved in interfaith relations. First with the Christian, particularly the Catholic, community; later the Tibetan-Buddhist community, and in recent years with the Muslim community. In 1985, Waldoks visited the former Soviet Union to connect with Jewish “refusniks" who were held back from leaving the country for a variety of reasons, security and otherwise. In 1988, he participated in the Polish Bishops Conference in Tinietz, a monastery located in a Krakow suburb. This trip, sponsored by the ADL, was a groundbreaking opportunity to assess the situation of Jewish-Catholic relations in Poland that had hardly been influenced by the Vatican II encyclicals Nostra Aetate of 1965, when Pope John XXIII provided the most inclusive statement of the Church and the Jews. In 1989 and 1990 Waldoks was instrumental in helping to convene the first Jewish-Tibetan Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, first in the New York area and in the following year at the seat of the Tibetan government in Exile in Dharamsala, India. [3] In 1999, Waldoks participated as one of the Jewish leaders in a Catholic-Jewish pilgrimage to Israel and Rome sponsored by the New England Region of the Anti-Defamation League.
In 1996, Waldoks was ordained as a non-denominational Rabbi by his mentors Rabbis Zalman- Schachter-Shalomi, Everett Gendler, and Arthur Green. [4] In 1998, he took on the transformation of a moribund synagogue, Temple Beth Zion, in Brookline, Massachusetts and was successful over the next 21 years in creating a community rebranded as TBZ, of which he became founding rabbi, serving on a part-time basis. [5]
In 2008 Waldoks was named by Newsweek magazine as one of the top 25 pulpit rabbis in the United States. [6]
Yitzchak Hutner, also known as Isaac Hutner, was an American Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva (dean).
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Chaim Ozer Grodzinski was a Av beis din, posek, and Talmudic scholar in Vilnius, Lithuania in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for over 55 years. He played an instrumental role in preserving Lithuanian yeshivas during the Communist era, and Polish and Russian yeshivas of Poland and during the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, when he arranged for these yeshivas to relocate to Lithuanian cities.
Porat Yosef Yeshiva is a Sephardic yeshiva in Jerusalem, with locations in both the Old City and the Geula neighborhood. The name Porat Yosef means "Joseph is a fruitful tree" after the biblical verse Genesis 49:22.
Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) was an Ashkenazi Yiddish and Hebrew writer and poet. A leading pre-Holocaust Jewish journalist, he was a regular contributor to the Yiddish newspaper Moment, among other literary activities. He was the leading thinker in the movement of pre-World War II "philosophical Neo-Hasidism".
From the founding of political Zionism in the 1890s, Haredi Jewish leaders voiced objections to its secular orientation, and before the establishment of the State of Israel, the vast majority of Haredi Jews were opposed to Zionism, like early Reform Judaism, but with distinct reasoning. This was chiefly due to the concern that secular nationalism would redefine the Jewish nation from a religious community based in their alliance to God for whom adherence to religious laws were "the essence of the nation's task, purpose, and right to exists," to an ethnic group like any other as well as the view that it was forbidden for the Jews to re-constitute Jewish rule in the Land of Israel before the arrival of the Messiah. Those rabbis who did support Jewish resettlement in Palestine in the late 19th century had no intention to conquer Palestine and declare its independence from the rule of the Ottoman Turks, and some preferred that only observant Jews be allowed to settle there.
Rabbi Wolf Gold was a rabbi, Jewish activist, and one of the signers of the Israeli declaration of independence.
David Neiman was a renowned scholar in the fields of Biblical Studies, Jewish history, and the long and often complicated relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews.
This article deals in more detail with some of the notable synagogues of Jerusalem that do not have their own page as yet.
Moshe Hillel Hirsch is the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivas Slabodka in Bnei Brak, Israel. He is a native of the United States who studied at Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood under the Talmudic tutelage of Rabbi Aharon Kotler.
Erlau, is a Haredi dynasty of Hungarian origin, which follows the teachings of the Chasam Sofer and is often considered Hasidic.
Rabbi Sholom Rivkin was an Israeli-born American rabbi. He was the last Chief Rabbi of St. Louis, Missouri, and the last chief rabbi of one of only a few cities in the United States that has ever had a chief rabbi. He held the post of Chief Rabbi from 1983 until 2005 and was Chief Rabbi Emeritus until his death in 2011. He was also a chief judge on the Beth Din of the Rabbinical Council of America, and head of the Vaad Hoeir of St. Louis, the governing body of the St. Louis Orthodox Jewish community. He was an expert in Jewish law, especially family and divorce law, and was consulted by rabbis and rabbinical courts around the world.
The Lomza Yeshiva was an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva in Łomża, Poland, founded by Rabbi Eliezer Bentzion Shulevitz in 1883. Rabbi Yechiel Mordechai Gordon served as the yeshiva's rosh yeshiva for many years, and Rabbi Moshe Rosenstain served as the mashgiach. A branch of the yeshiva was established in Petach Tikvah, Palestine in 1926, where Rabbi Reuven Katz served as co-rosh yeshiva alongside Rabbi Gordon.
After the German invasion of Poland in World War II and the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, many yeshivas that had previously been part of Poland found themselves under Soviet communist rule, which did not tolerate religious institutions. The yeshivas therefore escaped to Vilnius in Lithuania on the advice of Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski. In Lithuania, the yeshivas were able to function fully for over a year and many of the students survived the Holocaust because of their taking refuge there, either because they managed to escape from there or because they were ultimately deported to other areas of Russia that the Nazis did not reach. Many students, however, did not manage to escape and were killed by the Nazis or their Lithuanian collaborators.
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