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Israel S. Dresner, a New Jersey rabbi who ventured into the Deep South within the Nineteen Sixties to champion civil rights, befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was jailed a number of occasions for demonstrating in opposition to racial segregation, died on Jan. 13 in Wayne, N.J. He was 92.
His demise, at a senior dwelling middle, was attributable to colon most cancers, his son, Avi, mentioned.
By the point Rabbi Dresner joined the civil rights motion, he was already a veteran of political protests, having been arrested at 18 in 1947 outdoors the British Empire Constructing at Rockefeller Middle in Manhattan in a protest in opposition to Britain’s refusal to let the Exodus, a ship loaded with Holocaust survivors, land in British-controlled Palestine, an incident that impressed the novel of the identical title by Leon Uris in 1958 and a subsequent movie.
In 1961, as a part of the primary Interfaith Clergy Freedom Journey to the South, Rabbi Dresner and 9 others, generally known as “the Tallahassee Ten,” had been charged with illegal meeting in attempting to combine an airport restaurant in Tallahassee, Fla.
They had been launched on bond following their convictions and, with Rabbi Dresner because the lead plaintiff, pursued appeals all the best way to the USA Supreme Courtroom, which remanded the case to the Florida courts. He and the others then returned to Florida to serve transient jail phrases.
In 1962, in Albany, Ga., he was booked in what was described because the nation’s largest mass arrest of non secular leaders, throughout a march demanding desegregation. It was there that he first met Dr. King, shaking palms via the bars of the cell wherein Dr. King, too, had been jailed with a whole lot of different protesters.
In 1964, Rabbi Dresner led 16 fellow clergymen, together with different rabbis, in a protest outdoors a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Fla. Through the demonstration, 5 Black protesters plunged into the whites-only swimming pool and had been clubbed by the police.
“We got here as Jews who keep in mind the thousands and thousands of faceless individuals who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” the rabbis mentioned after their arrest. “We got here as a result of we all know that, second solely to silence, the best hazard to man is lack of religion in man’s capability to behave.”
Dr. King wrote to Rabbi Dresner that yr, saying: “It’s your valiant act that touches the conscience of Individuals of fine will. Your instance is a judgment and an inspiration to every of us.”
In 1965, at Dr. King’s behest, Rabbi Dresner delivered a prayer in Selma, Ala., two days after marchers had been brutally attacked by law-enforcement authorities in what was immortalized as Bloody Sunday because the protesters tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their method to Montgomery, the state capital, to demand voting rights.
Dr. King reciprocated by preaching twice at Rabbi Dresner’s synagogue, Temple Sha’arey Shalom, in Springfield, N.J.
All informed, Rabbi Dresner was convicted in three civil rights circumstances, his son mentioned. His final arrest got here in 1980 outdoors the South African consulate in New York Metropolis in a protest in opposition to apartheid.
In 2015, he informed the St. Augustine Document that Jewish doctrine had persuaded him to observe his conscience to take motion in the reason for civil rights with the conviction “that racism and slavery in America was incorrect, and segregation in America was incorrect.”
After he acquired a colon most cancers analysis, he informed NPR late final yr, “I really feel slightly responsible leaving the current world the place the forces of hatred and discrimination appear to be on the rise and democracy appears to be at risk.”
He was in a position, no less than, to finish his private agenda, his son mentioned. He visited the graves of his mother and father and grandparents together with his youngsters, went to a Broadway present (“The Ebook of Mormon”), attended companies at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, and ate a pastrami on rye at Katz’s delicatessen on the Decrease East Aspect.
Israel Seymour Dresner (generally known as Sy, or Si) was born on April 22, 1929, on Manhattan’s Decrease East Aspect to immigrants from Japanese Europe. The household moved to Borough Park in Brooklyn, the place his father, Abe, owned a delicatessen not removed from Ebbets Discipline. His mom, Rose (Sternchos) Dresner, was a homemaker.
After going to Orthodox Jewish colleges and graduating from New Utrecht Excessive College in Brooklyn, he went to Brooklyn Faculty, attended the Habonim Institute to turn out to be an organizer for the Labor Zionist Youth Motion and earned a grasp’s diploma in worldwide relations from the College of Chicago in 1950.
He hitchhiked via Europe and was engaged on a kibbutz within the Negev Desert when he discovered in a telegram from his mom that he had been drafted. He served within the Military from 1952 to 1954 in Indiana, the place he grew to become a chaplain’s assistant.
Rabbi Dresner was in his mid-20s when, in 1954, he enrolled at Hebrew Union Faculty-Jewish Institute of Faith, the Reform rabbinical seminary in Manhattan. He was ordained in 1961.
“I believe changing into a rabbi was his method to meld his Orthodox schooling and background together with his Zionist political activism and fervour for social justice,” Avi Dresner mentioned of his father.
Israel Dresner served as a pupil rabbi to a congregation in Danbury, Conn., after which to the Reform congregation Temple Sha’arey Shalom in Springfield from 1958 to 1960, after which he grew to become its first full-time rabbi.
His marriage to Toby Silverman resulted in divorce in 1991. Along with his son, he’s survived by their daughter, Tamar; his sisters, Phyllis Meiner and Eileen Dresner; and two grandchildren.
His son served within the Israeli Protection Forces, and his daughter volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel. They’re producing a documentary referred to as “The Rabbi and the Reverend,” about their father’s function within the civil rights motion and his relationship with Dr. King.
Rabbi Dresner was an early supporter of Soviet Jewry, opposed the conflict in Vietnam and supported the rights of the poor, ladies, immigrants, non secular and ethnic minorities, disabled folks, and homosexual males and lesbians. He was president of the Schooling Fund for Israeli Civil Rights and Peace (now Companions for Progressive Israel) and favored a two-state answer to the Palestinian battle.
He was honored by President Barack Obama on the White Home on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, which he attended. Whereas he remained an optimist about race relations, informed NPR, “we have now an extended method to go.”
He retired as a rabbi in 1996 however by no means stop being a public citizen. His final public protest, in Trenton, N.J., was on Jan. 20, 2017, the day President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated. Rabbi Dresner was 87 on the time.
“Just a few years in the past,” Avi Dresner mentioned, “after I referred to as my dad for one in all our twice weekly cellphone conversations, I requested him how he was doing, and he mentioned, ‘Nicely, I haven’t misplaced my sense of righteous indignation, so I assume I’m doing OK.’
“I believe that just about tells you every little thing it is advisable find out about him,” his son added.
Final month, in an interview with WCBS-TV in New York, Rabbi Dresner mentioned, “I wish to be remembered as anyone who not solely tried to maintain the Jewish religion however to invoke the Jewish doctrine from the Talmud, which is named ‘tikkun olam’ — repairing the world — and I hope that I made slightly little bit of a contribution to creating the world slightly higher place.”
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