HUC-JIR Los Angeles Campus

Uri Herscher

Uri D. Herscher was named founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the Skirball Cultural Center in 1996 after having begun work on the Skirball Cultural Center conceptual blueprint in the early 1980s.

From 1970-1974, he was the national Dean of Admissions of Hebrew Union College. In 1975 he was appointed Executive Vice President and Dean of Faculty of the four campus HUC-JIR, a position he held through 1995. In 1979, Dr. Herscher established his headquarters as Executive Vice President on the Los Angeles campus. He continues to hold the rank of professor of American Jewish History at HUC.

He was born in Tel Aviv in 1941 to German Jewish refugee parents who had fled Hitler's rise to power and made their way to British Palestine in the mid-1930s. His grandparents and other immediate family members were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

In the mid-1950s he immigrated to the United States with his parents and brother. They settled in San Jose, California, which at that time was mainly an agricultural area with few Jewish families. There, Dr. Herscher received a warm welcome from the predominantly non-Jewish students of his high school.

After high school, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated with honors in 1964 with a B. A. in History and Sociology. During his undergraduate years he founded Cal Camp, a summer camp which continues to serve underprivileged children in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was ordained a Rabbi at HUC in 1970 and receive a Doctorate in American Jewish history in 1973. He embarked on an academic career and is the author of several books in the field of Jewish immigration to the United States and the sociology of American Jewish life. He hold honorary degrees from the University of Southern California and the University of Judaism.

Dr. Herscher's personal interest in the history of Jewish immigration to the United States and his awareness of the need for Jewish institutions to reach out to their communities led him to propose the creation of the Skirball Cultural Center.

He and his wife Dr. Myna Meshul Herscher have four sons.

 Biography courtesy of the Skirball Cultural Center.