Rabbi Ronald Greenwald, Former Nixon Jewish Community Liaison, Dies at 82
Rabbi Ronald Greenwald, who worked to help free Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and others, and served as President Richard Nixon’s liaison to the Jewish community, has died.
Greenwald, of Monsey, New York, died Wednesday in his sleep while on vacation in Florida. He was 82.
In helping to free Sharansky, Greenwald reportedly made 25 trips to East Germany in the 1970s and ’80s. Sharansky, who was released in 1986, now serves as the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Greenwald also worked to free political activist Lori Berenson, who was held in a Peruvian prison, and spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard. He was successful in negotiating the rescue of an Israeli citizen, Miron Markus, from Mozambique in 1978.
He became active in politics in 1962, and worked on the New York gubernatorial campaign of Nelson Rockefeller, helping him win a large share of the Jewish vote for a Republican at the time. The Rockefeller campaign recommended Greenwald to the Nixon campaign, and he worked in the Jewish community for Nixon’s 1972 reelection.
During the Watergate scandal, Greenwald contacted Democratic Jewish members of Congress, including Elizabeth Holtzman, Bella Abzug and Arlen Specter, working to convince them that impeaching the president would weaken the United States and, by extension, hurt Israel.
In 1965, he founded the Camp Sternberg Orthodox Jewish summer camp for girls in the Catskill Mountains, which he continued to operate. He also ran the Monsey Academy for Girls.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO