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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 |
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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, of blessed memory, Everett Gendler, of blessed memory, 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 vibrant community rebranded as TBZ. At present, Waldoks has transitioned from TBZ’s Senior Rabbi to its Founding Rabbi and is offering his services on a part-time basis. [5]
In 2008 Moshe 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).
The tradition of humor in Judaism dates back to the Torah and the Midrash from the ancient Middle East, but generally refers to the more recent stream of verbal and often anecdotal humor of Ashkenazi Jews which took root in the United States over the last hundred years, including in secular Jewish culture. European Jewish humor in its early form developed in the Jewish community of the Holy Roman Empire, with theological satire becoming a traditional way of clandestinely opposing Christianization.
Moses Schreiber (1762–1839), known to his own community and Jewish posterity in the Hebrew translation as Moshe Sofer, also known by his main work Chatam Sofer, Chasam Sofer, or Hatam Sofer, was one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of European Jewry in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman (1886–1969), Hebrew: יוסף שלמה כהנמן, Yiddish: יוסף שלמה כהנעמאן, known also as Ponevezher Rav, was an Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva of the Ponevezh Yeshiva. He was a renowned Torah and Talmudic scholar, a distinguished member of the Council of Torah Sages of Agudath Israel.
Joseph Telushkin is an American rabbi. He has authored more than 15 books, including volumes about Jewish ethics, Jewish literacy, as well as the book Rebbe, a New York Times bestseller released in June 2014.
Mercaz HaRav is a national-religious yeshiva in Jerusalem, founded in 1924 by Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Located in the city's Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, it has become the most prominent religious-Zionist yeshiva in the world and synonymous with Rabbi Kook's teachings. Many Religious Zionist educators and leaders have studied at Mercaz HaRav.
The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada (UOR), often called by its Hebrew name, Agudath Harabonim or (in Ashkenazi Hebrew) Agudas Harabonim ("union of rabbis"), was established in 1901 in the United States and is the oldest organization of Orthodox rabbis in the United States. It had been for many years the principal group for such rabbis, though in recent years it has lost much of its former membership and influence.
Boruch Ber Leibowitz (Yiddish: ברוך בער לייבאוויץ Hebrew: רב ברוך דוב ליבוביץ, romanized: Boruch Dov Libovitz; 1862 – November 17, 1939, known as Reb Boruch Ber, was a rabbi famed for his Talmudic lectures, particularly in that they were rooted styled in the method of his teacher Chaim Soloveitchik. He is known for leading Yeshivas Knesses Beis Yitzchak in Slabodka and Kaminetz.
Hillel Fendel is an editor and author. For 16 years he worked as senior editor and co-founder of Arutz Sheva's "Israel National News". He has worked as a teacher and rabbi in the past.
Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) was a 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 own reson. 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.
The Mirrer Yeshiva Central Institute, commonly known as the Mir Yeshiva or the Mirrer Yeshiva, is a Haredi yeshiva located in Brooklyn, New York.
Michael Joseph Schudrich is an American rabbi and the current Chief Rabbi of Poland. He is the oldest of four children of Rabbi David Schudrich and Doris Goldfarb Schudrich.
Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman is an Orthodox rabbi and one of two people who claim to be the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine.
Pinchas Hirschprung was a Polish-Canadian rabbi, posek, and rosh yeshiva, who served as Chief Rabbi of Montreal from 1969 until his death.
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.
William Novak is a Canadian–American author who has co-written or ghostwritten numerous celebrity memoirs for people including Lee Iacocca, Nancy Reagan, and Magic Johnson. He is also the editor, with Moshe Waldoks, of The Big Book of Jewish Humor. He has also written several "private" books, which he described in a 2015 essay for The New York Times.
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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