Stephen Samuel Wise

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Stephen Samuel Wise (1874 – 1949) was a Hungarian-born U.S. Reform rabbi and Zionist leader.

Contents 1 Education and Early Career 2 Zionist activism 3 Public Office 4 Criticism of Wise 5 Translations 6 Death 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Education and Early Career

He was born in Budapest on St. Patrick's Day, 1874, and thus reportedly always wrote in green ink.^{[citation needed]}

He was the grandson of Mor Fischer, who created the Herend Porcelain Company. When Wise's father, Aaron Wise sought to unionize the company, Mor gave the family one-way tickets to the USA.

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. In 1933, Wise received an L.H.D. from Bates College.

[edit] Zionist activism

Wise was the first (honorary) secretary of the Zionist Organization of American. At the Second Zionist Congress (Basel, 1898), he was a delegate and secretary for the English language. He was also a member of the International Zionist Executive Committee in 1899. Wise's commitment 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.

[edit] Public Office

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 commitment 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.

[edit] Criticism of Wise

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 not to 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.

In 1942, he received the first confirmation of the Holocaust by telegram from Gerhart M. Riegner in Switzerland, but his effort to get the information to President Roosevelt was blocked by Breckinridge Long at the State Department until Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau interceded.

At that time, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, in his on going effort to help Jewry during World War II, enlisted Rabbi Wise for his assistance. It seems that nothing came about from this.

[edit] Translations

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, among other works.

[edit] Death

Rabbi Steven Samuel Wise died on April 19, 1949, aged 75. He is interred in an unmarked mausoleum on top of a hill in Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• Jewish Encyclopedia article on S.S.Wise
• Stephen S. Wise (Jewish Virtual Library)
• Biography at PBS.org
• Article about Rabbi Stephen Wise and the Jewish Leadership during WWII
• On Falsifications Aimed at Slandering Rabbi Stephen Wise and the Jewish Leadership during WWII