Rabbi Walter Jacob dies at 94
The long-serving rabbi of Rodef Shalom Congregation leaves behind a global legacy of scholarship and kindness.
When Rabbi Andrew Busch and Rabbi Debbie Pine were deciding whether to accept positions at Rodef Shalom Congregation in the early 1990s, the young rabbinic couple asked around about its Senior Rabbi Walter Jacob. They noticed a trend.
Everyone who didn’t know Rabbi Jacob personally talked about his professional accomplishments: his decades on the pulpit of one of the leading Reform congregations in the country, the depth and breadth of his scholarship across hundreds of articles and books, the institutions he had created and the leadership positions he had held.
Everyone who knew him personally talked about his kindness.
The late Rabbi Joseph Glaser put it more succinctly when he said Jacob combined “scholarship with menschlichkeit,” a Yiddish term conveying compassion and decency.
Jacob died on Sunday, Oct. 20, at the age of 94. His death brings to a close one of the most admired and globally significant rabbinic careers in the history of this region.
Jacob was born in Augsburg, Germany, on Purim day 1930. He came from a German rabbinic lineage stretching back 15 generations, into the 1600s.
His family lived on the grounds of their Augsburg synagogue, and so he witnessed first-hand the Kristallnacht attacks on Nov. 9, 1938. His family spent two years in transit, frantically escaping Germany for London, then sailing to New York, and finally settling in Springfield, Missouri, where his father was hired as a congregational rabbi.
Although he was actively discouraged from becoming a rabbi, Jacob saw the rabbinate as a way to pursue his twin interests of scholarship and social justice with more authority and autonomy than he might find as either an academic or a social worker.
In addition to the typical responsibilities of pastoral care, moral guidance and religious education, Jacob believed a rabbi could pursue non-religious communal initiatives based around personal enthusiasms. He called this work “the broader role of the rabbi” and felt it was America’s unique contribution to the history of the rabbinate.
And so, when he and his wife Irene were unable to find compassionate living arrangements for their daughter Claire, who had severe developmental disabilities, they joined with other parents in the mid-1970s to create Horizon Homes, which sponsored the first group home in the region. Starting from a single home on Negley Avenue, it now supports some 350 people living in more than 50 homes as Mainstay Life Services.
After decades pursuing gardening as a hobby, Jacob assisted his wife Irene’s efforts to build the Biblical Botanical Gardens on the grounds of Rodef Shalom Congregation in the 1980s. It became one of the most successful interfaith initiatives in the history of the congregation, bringing thousands of people through the synagogue.
Well aware of the limitations facing small Jewish communities throughout the country, Jacob launched the Associated American Jewish Museums in the 1990s to create traveling exhibits, attracting more than 50,000 visitors nationally on a small budget.
And in his retirement, Jacob embarked on what amounted to a second career, reviving liberal Judaism in Germany. Working with Rabbi Walter Homolka, Jacob founded the Abraham Geiger College in 1999. It was the first rabbinic seminary in Germany since World War II. It has since ordained and invested more than 50 rabbis and cantors, leading to a revival of liberal Judaism across Central and Eastern Europe.
Jacob spent most of his active career at Rodef Shalom working alongside Dr. Solomon B. Freehof, one of the most prominent Reform rabbis in the world at the time.
Like Freehof, Jacob’s scholarship focused on developing a liberal interpretation of halakha, the Jewish religious system guiding human activity. His primarily vehicle was responsa, the ancient rabbinic tradition of answering practical religious quandaries.
Jacob first served under Freehof on the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Responsa Committee and later succeeded Freehof as its chair, writing hundreds of responsa. He left the committee upon becoming president of the CCAR in the early 1990s but continued to write private responsa. Jacob later founded the Freehof Institute of Progressive Halahkah to further develop the intellectual underpinnings of the movement.
Jacob was part of a traditional wing of the Reform movement that sought to develop standards for a progressive approach to daily Jewish living. By the mid-1990s, he was actively calling for the movement to set enforceable community standards to offset the growth of individual autonomy. Few were enthusiastic to pursue that course.
Despite this conservative stance, Jacob accommodated radical changes when he felt it served the interests of liberal Judaism as a whole. His 1983 responsum justifying patrilineal descent is among the most consequential religious documents in American Jewish history, firmly setting Reform Judaism apart from the rest of global Jewry at the time.
Jacob graduated from Drury College in Springfield in 1950 and was ordained at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1955. Before settling in Pittsburgh, he held student positions at small congregations in Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Texas, and served as a traveling U.S. Air Force chaplain across a gigantic swath of the South Pacific.
He first arrived at Rodef Shalom in 1955 as an assistant rabbi, while still a rabbinic student. He returned to the congregation in 1957, after his ordination and tour of duty, and he remained with the congregation the rest of his life, becoming an associate rabbi, and then senior rabbi, and settling into a long role as rabbi emeritus. His 69-year affiliation at Rodef Shalom is likely the longest rabbinic tenure in local Jewish history.
Jacob was senior rabbi of Rodef Shalom from 1966 to 1996, a three-decade stretch when American Jewry experienced unprecedented cultural acceptance, requiring community leaders to adopt new strategies for maintaining religious identification.
In his years leading the congregation, Jacob navigated generation gaps, calls for bringing social justice initiatives into religious life, a desire to integrate traditional observances into a liberal setting, the growing importance of Israel in Jewish identity, the integration of Soviet Jewry, the need to address gender inequalities within the synagogue, the demand of gay and lesbian Jews to be treated as equals, the rise of intermarriage, and growing divides between the movements of liberal Judaism and traditional Orthodoxy.
Jacob was skilled at managing change, always looking for the right moment and the right partners, and taking care to address the needs of older and younger generations.
Perhaps more consequential than any ritual or liturgical innovation, Jacob helped change the emotional tenor of Rodef Shalom, leaving behind the austere reverence of the early 20th century in favor of warmth, collaboration and informality. “Anything that makes the rabbi more distant from the congregation is, to my mind, wrong,” he once said.
Jacob wore a suit instead of rabbinic robes. He encouraged congregants to call him “Walter,” rather than “doctor” or “rabbi.” He embraced the pastoral side of being a rabbi, sometimes making dozens of hospital calls in a single day to visit sick congregants.
Among his most astonishing accomplishments was his relationship to personal hardship. His childhood was marked by dislocation and poverty. All three of his children died during his lifetime, and his parents died from a carbon monoxide leak. His beloved wife, Irene, and younger brother Herbert both died from difficult illnesses. The final years of his life were spent watching painful challenges unfold at the Abraham Geiger College.
Jacob seemed to understand that these experiences gave him the authority to compassionately assist others through the struggles of their life. But otherwise he insisted on viewing his own life with gratitude and optimism and an eye ever toward the future.
“The future is ours to shape as we please, for our success, or our needless doom,” he said in his college commencement speech. “Success can only come with hope. We can not look for hope in external sources, we must look toward ourselves as individuals. We must rebuild a faith in the basic goodness of mankind by more fully trusting ourselves as individuals, knowing and believing that each of us can stop the imminent disaster.” PJC
Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center and can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406. He is the author of “The Seventeenth Generation: The Lifework of Rabbi Walter Jacob.”
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