The newspaper article in this Document Study comes from Rabbi William G. Braude's personal papers, and brief biographies of Rabbi Braude and other Rabbis involved in the incident are included.
William G. Braude (1907-1988)
Born in Lithuania in 1907, William Braude came to America with his parents in 1920. In 1931, he was ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement's seminary. His first and only pulpit was at Temple Beth-El in Providence, RI, where he worked on behalf of African Americans even before the formal beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and continued his involvement as a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, he did not support all civil rights legislation. In this he differed from many of his congregants who disagreed with his conservative politics.
Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the rabbinic school of the Conservative movement, Saul Leeman had a pulpit at the Cranston Jewish Center in Cranston, RI (now Temple Torat Yisrael) during the 1960s.
Nathan Rosen's first pulpit was in Savannah, GA, where he learned about Jim Crow laws and the degradation of America's African American community first hand. By the 1960s, Rabbi Rosen was the director of the Hillel Foundation at Brown University, in Providence RI.
How to cite this page
Jewish Women's Archive. "Background." (Viewed on October 27, 2016) <http://jwa.org/node/11886/lightbox2>.