INTRODUCTION

Daniel J. Elazar
 

        source: Jewish Education and Jewish Statesmanship
                         - Albert Elazar Memorial Book
 

My father, Albert Elazar, was a very special Jewish educator who combined the qualities of an exciting classroom teacher, a far-seeing educational administrator, and a broad-guaged educational statesman, and brought them all to bear on Jewish education in various parts of the diaspora, beginning in Alexandria, Egypt, and Salonika, Greece, in the 1920s and continuing in St. Paul, Minnesota; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; and Detroit, Michigan, as well as in the countrywide Jewish educational institutions of the United States and worldwide. Born in Jerusalem in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was the son of Rabbi Yehuda Elazar, one of the leaders of the Jerusalem Sephardic community, and Naama Elazar of the Abulafia family, one of the illustrious Sephardic families in Jewish history. Raised in Jerusalem, he was active as a young man in the struggle for the adoption of the Hebrew language as the language of the Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel. He graduated from the David Yellin Teachers Seminary in Jerusalem where he was a student of its founder, taught briefly in Alexandria, Egypt, and was then sent by the Zionist authorities to Salonika in Greece as a shaliach for the Maccabi youth movement and a teacher. His two years there, in the city where his family had lived before his grandfather had moved them to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, were fertile ones. He educated a generation of young Salonikan Jews, many of whom settled in Eretz Israel in the late 1920s and 1930s before the community was destroyed by the Germans in World War II.

At the end of the 1920s he came to the United States, initially for a visit, just before the Great Depression in 1929. That year he took a position as a Hebrew teacher at the St. Paul, Minnesota, Talmud Torah. There he met his future wife Nettie Barzon and they were married in 1930. He served eight years in St. Paul, again developing a coterie of students, almost all of whom were prominent in the next generation of Jewish leadership countrywide in the United States, as a result of his influence.

Offered a job as principal of the Bnai Israel of Austin Congregational School in Chicago, he and his family moved there from St. Paul in 1937. He served in that capacity for three years and then in 1941 was invited to Denver to serve as principal of the Beth Medrosh Hagadol Congregation where he had a great impact on the Zionist movement in Colorado. From Denver he was invited to become the educational director of Anshe Emet in Chicago, a position he entered in 1944.

In 1947 he accepted a position at the United Hebrew Schools of Detroit, the largest Talmud Torah or communal supplementary school system in the United States, serving first as Associate Superintendent and then as Superintendent. From 1947 until 1971 when he retired, he built the United Hebrew Schools into not only the largest but the finest supplementary Jewish educational system in the country. He developed partnerships with synagogues of all denominations and with the various Yiddishist schools in the community to develop a community-wide Jewish educational network with strong links to the Jewish Welfare Federation of Greater Detroit.

Upon his retirement he returned to Jerusalem with his wife and was joined by his sons, Daniel and David, and their families at the same time. There he lived for an additional twenty-two years. He was active in various institutions including Congregation Mivakshei Derech. He represented the American Association for Jewish Education in Israel and worked with the Jewish Agency and the Hebrew University to develop various educational programs for the diaspora.

Albert Elazar was the first recipient of the Shazar Prize, named after the late Shneur Zalman Shazar, President of Israel, and presented by the Department of Education and Culture of the World Zionist Organization, for his lifelong contribution and most especially his work in Detroit. In his years in the United States he was a leader of the Jewish education profession in North America, founder of the Midwest Hebrew Teachers Federation, and an officer of the National Council for Jewish Education and the American Association for Jewish Education (now JESNA). He was recognized by his colleagues and associates in other fields of Jewish communal service as well, as a leading Jewish educational statesman who built strong connections to the larger Jewish community to the benefit of both.

As an educator, a Jew, and a man, Albert Elazar was interested in learning and teaching in the religious civilization of the Jewish people and in the advance of democracy in the world. This book brings together students, associates, colleagues, and friends who were influenced by him and presents some aspects of their thought on these issues.

My father was perhaps the truest democrat I have ever known, both in his willingness to consider other points of view, to recognize the legitimacy of many of them in the eyes of their advocates, and wherever reasonable to accommodate those views in practical ways within the institutions that he built and in his own personal relations with those who held views, even ones that he did not find compatible or appropriate. At the same time, Albert Elazar was a true friend of democracy in the spirit of the American founders who understood its limits and how violating those limits one put democracy as a whole in danger. In the words of James Madison in The Federalist, he was the best kind of republican since he not only supported democratic republicanism but he sought "republican remedies for republican diseases," recognizing the existence of those diseases. To me, that has always been the essence of a true democrat, one who is committed to democracy but not blindly, who understands democracies' deficiencies but seeks democratic remedies for those deficiencies. He was accommodating but he was not a person who did not know right from wrong and was not afraid to make judgements about people and issues on the basis of what was right and what was wrong.

With all his strong lifelong and primary commitment to the Jewish people and Judaism, my father was a natural American. Born far from American shores, unlike so many of those who immigrated to the United States, including many if not most of his fellow Jews who never quite fully assimilated into American society or penetrated its essence even when they accepted its beliefs, Albert Elazar seems to have been born with the kind of outlook and principles that represent the best of the United States. He was open, adventurous, broad-guaged; he loved the American landscape and American principles.

Almost immediately on his arrival in the United States, he found the immigrant Jewish ghettos of the East not to be for him and in general found the eastern United States to embody a way of life that was less attractive to him than the American Midwest and West. Within six months of his arrival in the United States he accepted a position in Minnesota and he moved himself from New York to St. Paul and Minneapolis. From then on until he returned to Israel, his life was intertwined with that part of the country, roughly the Mississippi River Valley at its heart and at its broadest extent, and he identified with it fully, working to build Jewish life in those regions that were a synthesis of the two civilizations.

My father never lived elsewhere in the United States, although he was offered positions in other parts of the country. He found what he was seeking in the Mississippi Valley-Great Lakes watershed region, broadly understood. He had the open-ness, energy, and basic sense of trust that was characteristic of people from that interior part of the country. Among other aspects of Americanism, midwestern-style, he rapidly integrated into the Progressive spirit as it was expressed in that region, but always with common sense.

My father saw much in the education movement of Dewey and Kilpatrick, which was translated into Jewish education by Samson Benderly, Isaac Berkson, and their colleagues, that was worthy of emulation, but he never went overboard as so many of his colleagues did, always insisting that it is not only important to teach children rather than subjects, but, equally, that the subjects should be taught and the children should acquire substantive knowledge and not just a good attitude toward learning or toward things Jewish. Thus the textbooks he prepared, along with his wife Nettie, were built on solid progressive principles of integrating various aspects of learning and various facets of knowledge in the classroom, but also were designed to deliver real information and to bring the students to learn, even memorize, appropriate materials from the Jewish heritage.

Albert Elazar also accepted the community spirit inherent in the Progressive movement and sought especially to foster that sense of communal responsibility in the Jewish community. He was a community man from beginning to end. Even as he recognized the differences within the community, he thought that communal responsibility had to be manifested in practical ways.

He was a strong partisan of community Talmud Torahs in Jewish education and spent most of his career teaching within them. He was a strong supporter of the Federation movement and was much involved in it. He saw himself and was seen as a highly valued part of the professional leadership of the Jewish Welfare Federation in Detroit where he was highly respected for his statesmanship and for his sense of community, even by those Federation professionals whose own connections with Judaism were much more limited than his.

By the same token, Albert Elazar was a Zionist who was committed to Jewish peoplehood and a Jewish civilization rooted in Jewish religion. As was typical of most Sephardim, his Zionism was a Zionism of vision, not of revolt. While he moved in his religious practices away from those of his father, his movement was well within the traditional framework and he did not find Jewish tradition a subject toward which he was antagonistic. Zionism for him did not involve the building of a new socialist man but a modern Jew who could live in the modern world including the modern political world while being fully Jewish. He wanted Jewish young people to have as their heroes not only the moral heroes of Jewish tradition but the political and military heroes of Jewish history.

Albert Elazar had many devoted students. Indeed, his influence on his students remained with them lifelong, as so many of them told him in his later years. For example, on his return to Israel he discovered that many of his former students from Salonika had come to Eretz Israel before World War II and had established themselves successfully, principally in the Tel Aviv area. There they were among the prime movers in the development of the Salonikan Great Synagogue on Ibn Gabirol Street, a city showpiece and the major institution preserving the minhag of Salonikan Jewry. (By another ironic twist of fate, when that congregation sought to republish the siddurim and mahzorim of the Salonikan community for their use and the use of others, they found the best preserved examples in an old set of my father's father, Yehuda Elazar, in the possession of my father's brother, Yaakov. They reprinted the entire series from that set. Both the original set and the reprints are now in my possession in Jerusalem.) They greated him ecstatically as the person who had inspired them to come on aliya and had thereby saved their lives from the subsequent Holocaust which destroyed the bulk of Salonikan Jewry.

So, too, he always found other students wherever he went, people who made their mark in every field of human and Jewish endeavor, from businessmen like Charles Rutenberg to medical figures like Harold Bowman, foresters like Yale Weinstein and leading intellectuals like Midge Decter. The late Marver Bernstein, former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and then President of Brandeis University, had been my father's student, as had been his wife Sheva. Albert and Max Vorspan, the first, the leading figure in social action programs in the Reform movement through the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the second, a leading figure in the development of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles for the Conservative movement, were also. I could go on and list so many others.

Many of his former students became rabbis, teachers, and scholars. This book consists of original articles written by his students and colleagues in his memory. It addresses some of the substantive themes of Jewish education and Jewish educational statesmanship that were among his concerns during his five decades as an active Jewish educator. Twelve former students or colleagues have contributed to this volume which is divided into three parts.

Part OneH The Concerns of Jewish Education - examines from a scholarly perspective issues which concerned Albert Elazar in the classroom. Jeffrey H. Tigay, today the A.M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, who began his Jewish studies at the United Hebrew Schools when Albert Elazar was Superintendent and had Albert's wife Nettie as a teacher, explores "The Calendar and Theology." My father believed that it was pedagogically useful to teach many of the subjects taught in an elementary Hebrew school through a framework dictated by the Jewish calendar. In that way it was possible to teach customs and ceremonies, Hebrew language, Bible, Jewish history, and indeed most of the substantive subjects taught in a Jewish elementary school in a coherent fashion that could be meaningful to an American Jewish youngster who lived in a non-Orthodox, indeed, in a non-Jewish environment most of his life. Professor Tigay examines the origins of the Jewish calendar and its connection with Jewish theology.

Joel Roth, Professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a leading halakhic authority for the Masorti movement, also began his Jewish education at the United Hebrew Schools under my father's superintendency. Here he discusses "The Obligation of Educating the Young in Rabbinic Literature," through which he offers us what he describes as "a brief glance" at the educational issues in halakhic literature.

All his life, Albert Elazar was interested in and concerned with issues of politics and government, both as political history and even more important as a major reality of Jewish life in his time. He had keen political insight and, to the best of my knowledge, never lost his political balance. Politically, he was a liberal democrat with a strong sense of the need to preserve the dimensions of political community and solidarity found in the republican commonwealth. His politics was a politics of prudence and balance. In his profession he was known for his prudent risk-taking which led so many of his risks to turn out successfully. At the same time he could almost always see other people's points of view and when he saw them as legitimate, tried to incorporate them in his larger project which was the education of the Jewish people for national revival. As a person who understood politics, he understood that politics involved the responsible exercise of power. For Jews this meant that learning how to exercise power meant learning the responsibilities that went with its exercise.

The late Marvin Fox, Emeritus Professor at Brandeis University, was associated with Albert Elazar while Fox was a student at the University of Chicago and the College of Jewish Studies (today Spertus College) in Chicago. Here he contributes "Jewish Power and Jewish Responsibility," an analysis of an issue very close to my father's heart in terms of the effort to balance the Jewish people's acquisition of significant political and military power and the problem of how to use it responsibly.

My father was not given to intensive philosophic or theological debate. Nevhe formulated for himself his own version of the traditional Jewish understanding of philosophic and theological issues as they had been passed down through the Sephardic tradition from the Golden Age in Spain through his family in Jerusalem. Just how much he was within that tradition is something that I myself did not discover until many years after I learned it from him, when I conducted my own explorations of the tradition.

In that sense, Albert Elazar represented a modernization of traditional Judaism, not through a break from it and the development of a new ideological stance as was the case with both reformers and Orthodox, but a modernization of tradition in place, as it were, not rejecting any part of it, but willing to modify it within broad limits to adapt to the times. This has been the quintessentially Sephardic approach to modernization, especially on the part of those Sephardim whose families came from Spain, the Spaniolim as they are known in the Sephardic community. In many ways he was the best exemplar of the continuity of that tradition that I have ever encountered, understanding its civil and political as well as its religious dimensions and holding them all in equal regard.

Solomon Schimmel, who taught for my father at the United Hebrew Schools and is presently Professor of Psychology at Hebrew College in Boston, writes about "Free Will and Determinism in Jewish Law and Theology: A Psychological Analysis," dealing with the perennial problem in religious thought of how free people are to make their own decisions and how much those decisions are determined a priori. While this was not the kind of question my father ever dealt with directly in his discussions or writings, he had clearly formulated his own position about it for his educational purposes.

Part Two deals with Jewish Education in America. My father also was a natural democrat. Indeed, I have never met a more natural or better democrat anywhere under any conditions. He took to American liberal democracy in its democratic republican form as if he had been born to it. In his case, he took dimensions of a more aristocratic approach to the world and sought to democratize them so as to allow a natural aristocracy to emerge in every field of endeavor. That, indeed, was a key to his educational philosophy.

While my father had his doubts about the theological message of Mordecai M. Kaplan, he was much attracted to his social and political message that combined a concern with Jewish peoplehood, Jewish civilization, and democracy. The first two articles in this section by two good friends and colleagues discuss the application of Kaplan's teachings to education. Dr. Norman Schanin examines "The Educational Teachings of Mordecai M. Kaplan" in an article that provides a broad view of Kaplan's understanding based upon his major books Judaism as a Civilization, Judaism in Transition, and The Religion of Ethical Nationalism. He and Dr. Jack J. Cohen were the founders of Congregation Mivakshei Derech in Jerusalem where my father and mother were active members.

Jack Cohen was formerly the Director of Education at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Reconstructionist movement's "mother synagogue" in New York. He writes on "Religious Education for Democracy: The Contribution of Mordecai M. Kaplan." Cohen, a student and close disciple of Kaplan, was one of those original Kaplanians who attempted to implement the master's ideas in the educational field. The issue raised in this article was another one which preoccupied my father who was committed to both democracy and religious education.

As one who was Israeli-born but whose career was in the diaspora, Albert Elazar was much concerned with the issue and problems of Israel-diaspora relations. Never a negator of the diaspora, he recognized both its weaknesses and its strengths as well as assuming the inevitability of its existence as long as the Jewish people existed. By the same token, he was a vigorous, even militant, Zionist who saw the hope of contemporary Jewry in Israel's return to statehood and the flourishing of Jewish civilization there.

Despite this, he saw Israel "warts and all," in the words of Oliver Cromwell, and did not believe that it was wise to overlook those "warts," just as we should not overlook Israel's positive features and achievements. He was not a socialist and certainly did not share the Bolshevik-like socialism of the Eastern European-originated builders of the Yishuv between the world wars who later took the lead in founding the state. He was a General Zionist who saw the point made by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist Revisionists and the Irgun Zvai Leumi.

Another of Albert Elazar's colleagues, Elazar Goelman, a distinguished American Jewish educator who came to Israel after serving as Dean of Gratz College in Philadelphia, looks at "Israel in Diaspora Jewish Education," a very significant question for those including my father who were exponents of the national-cultural trend in Jewish education with its strong Zionistic component.

Abraham P. Gannes, another distinguished Jewish educator who was a colleague and close friend and who retired as Director of the World Zionist Organization Department of Education in New York, writes on "Community Responsibility for Jewish Education in Perspective," another one of the central issues of educational statesmanship that was of great concern to my father.

My father also much appreciated the possibilities that America opened up for the Jewish people and how the Jewish people had tried to respond to those opportunities. While he did not leave his own field of scholarship which was the modern Middle East, he encouraged his students to explore American Jewish history and its leading figures.

The late Professor Moshe Davis, also a colleague and good friend whose distinguished career straddled both the fields of Jewish education and Jewish history, contributed a study of one of the founding figures of Jewish life in the United States whose educational contributions continue to make him a personage to be reckoned with, in "Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia." Leeser, the hazzan of Kahal Kadosh Mikve Israel in Philadelphia throughout the mid-nineteenth century, initiated many of the trends that became the standard in Jewish education in the United States. As it happens, during his last decade in the United States, I and my family lived in Philadelphia and he had many occasions to be with us and to visit Mikve Israel which, as the oldest congregation in Philadelphia, still adheres to the Sephardic minhag and commemorates Isaac Lesser.

Part Three addresses the question: Albert Elazar and Jewish Educational Statesmanship. The most immediate concerns of a Jewish statesman, for Albert Elazar, were those connected with the building of the Jewish community in the United States and the place of Jewish education within it. My father was a strong believer in communal responsibility, practically expressed through close links between communal Hebrew schools (Talmud Torahs) and the local Jewish Federations, to be paralleled by similar links between their respective countrywide organizations.

The part includes two tributes to him and his work contributed by colleagues who taught at the United Hebrew Schools. Michael Desha, the Israeli poet, contributes "Words Will Forever Flower" and "Avraham Elazar and His Life's Work - Hebrew Education in Detroit." Morris Nobel, for years a principal of one of the elementary schools in the UHS system, discusses the educational activities of Albert Elazar in a piece written at the time of my father's retirement and published in Shvilei HaHinuch.

The final piece, by this writer, is "My Father as an Educator: A Summing Up." It represents my own effort to pull together the various strands of his thought to set out Albert Elazar's educational philosophy.

Taken together, these articles touch on many if not most of the issues that concerned Albert Elazar in his activity as a Jewish educator in the diaspora. He, himself, was not given to writing down his thoughts on matters, but the directions of his thought were made manifest in the schools he led and, most importantly, in the students that he produced. We all miss him. May his memory be a blessing.