Dr. David Ellenson, President, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

February 5, 2003 at 7:00 pm
Admission free, Photo ID required for entrance

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum
One West 4th Street (between Broadway and Mercer Street)
New York City

Dr. David Ellenson, President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Gus Waterman Herrman Presidential Chair, will present a lecture entitled “To Keep Evil to a Minimum”: Modern European Orthodox Responses to Conversion and Intermarriage. The lecture will explore diverse traditional approaches to matters of conversion, personal status, and intermarriage in the modern era. It will look at a variety of sources representing different opinions on these questions, and will attempt to draw out their implications for policy direction in the American Jewish community today.

Dr. David Ellenson is a distinguished rabbi, scholar, and leader of the Reform Movement. He is internationally recognized for his publications and research in the areas of Jewish religious thought, ethics, and modern Jewish history. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981 and was ordained by HUC-JIR in 1977. He is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem and a Fellow and Lecturer at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Rabbi Ellenson’s extensive publications include Tradition in Transition: Orthodoxy, Halakhah and the Boundaries of Modern Jewish Identity (1989), Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (1990) (nominated for the National Jewish Book Council’s award for outstanding book in Jewish History, 1990), and Between Tradition and Culture: The Dialectics of Jewish Religion and Identity in the Modern World (1994).

The Dr. Samuel Atlas Memorial Lecture is made possible through the generosity of the Dr. Bernard Heller Foundation. We are grateful to the trustees of the Foundation, Mrs. Ruth O. Freedlander, Mrs. Beatrice Weidman, and Carole L. Weidman, Esq.