David Ellenson, leading Jewish scholar and former HUC president, dies at 76
Ellenson helped shape the Reform movement during his tenure as president of Hebrew Union College
Rabbi David Ellenson (left), former president of Hebrew Union College, has died at 76. Courtesy of Hebrew Union College
Rabbi David Ellenson, an American rabbi and academic whose vision of liberal Judaism influenced generations of Reform leaders, died on Thursday at age 76.
First appointed a faculty member at Hebrew Union College in 1979, Ellenson served as president from 2001–2013, and was afterwards appointed chancellor emeritus. During his time at HUC — the oldest surviving seminary in the Americas — he sought to cultivate a coherent ideology for Reform Jewry, one that recognized the constantly evolving nature of Jewish practices while maintaining a commitment to Jewish tradition and identity.
Born in 1947 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Rabbi Ellenson was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Newport News, Virginia. After being ordained at HUC in 1977, he received his Ph.D from Columbia University in 1981.
Ellenson published books and articles on a wide variety of topics in Jewish studies, including the development of Orthodox Judaism in Germany in the 19th century, Jewish religious thought and ethics, and trends in American Judaism.
He advocated for religious tolerance and pluralism in both Israel and the American Jewish community, and took great interest in the question of how to live a meaningful Jewish life in the modern world. Ellenson won awards from the National Jewish Book Council’s twice — first in 2005, for After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity, and again in 2006, as coauthor with his daughter, Ruth Andrew Ellenson, for The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt.
In his final opinion piece for the Forward, for which Ellenson was a longtime contributor, Ellenson wrote against a planned expansion of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, capturing some of the anguished questions facing American Jews over Israel — questions that, since the piece was published in 2020, have only become more prominent.
“I recognize that my soul has been entwined with the state since my own birth seventy-two years ago — the same year that the state was born,” he wrote — a connection that showed “the American Jewish community not only has the right but the mandate to critique our Israeli brothers and sisters when they are acting in a way that ensures that Israel cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state.”
During his tenure at HUC, Rabbi Ellenson was head of the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies — the undergraduate program in Jewish studies at the University of Southern California — for two decades. Following his presidency at HUC, Rabbi Ellenson served as director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and visiting professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies at Brandeis University.
“More than anything else, I will miss his loving presence,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the movement’s advocacy arm in Washington, D.C. “He found deep, emotional connections to all of us who knew him.”
“Even beyond his brilliant scholarship, he loved so much. I will try to honor his memory by loving more, even when it’s hard.”
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