In Memoriam: Leon A. Jick (1924-2005)

The March 2002 issue of American Jewish History featured a spirited symposium entitled "A Fresh Look at a Classic: Leon Jick's The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870."Now the author of that classic, who was also my teacher and predecessor at Brandeis University, has passed away. He was eighty years old.

Leon A. Jick (October 4, 1924–May 19, 2005) was born in St. Louis into an intensely Zionist family. He entered Washington University in 1941, interrupted his studies to spend "three undistinguished years"¹ in the Army Air Force during World War II, and graduated in 1946.He was the first president of the university's then newly organized Hillel Foundation.

Jick began work in the national office of Habonim, the Labor Zionist youth movement, with the goal of getting to Palestine. Unable to obtain the necessary visa, he went instead to Marseilles, where he worked in the San Jerome displaced persons camp and promoted aliyah. In the company of a planeload of DPs, he himself made aliyah soon after the State of Israel was declared. He became part of the garin (seed group) that formed Kibbutz Gesher Haziv in the Western Galilee, and taught at Bet Berl Institute.

Jick returned to the United States in 1950 and, encouraged by his old Hillel rabbi, Robert Jacobs, entered Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. There he befriended historian Ellis Rivkin, and wrote a pioneering rabbinic thesis on the relationship of German industrialists to the Nazi extermination policy. This was terra incognita back in 1954, and it introduced Jick to one of the subjects that would occupy him throughout his scholarly career.

Following his ordination, Jick became assistant rabbi at Temple Israel in Boston, where he served for three years under Roland Gittelsohn, a powerful orator and lifelong advocate of social justice. Jick later described the position as "low in pay but rich in experience."The two men became great friends.

Striking out on his own, Jick in 1957 was elected rabbi of the Free Synagogue of Westchester in Mount Vernon, New York. His nine years there, he later recalled, "were enormously rewarding."He met and married his wife, Millicent Flink. He became active in a wide range of local civic causes, exhorting his congregation to respond courageously to the challenges confronting them. He himself played an active role in the environmental movement, the Soviet Jewry movement, and the civil rights movement, gaining fame as one of sixteen rabbis arrested in St. Augustine in 1964 during a civil rights march led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And he worked on his doctorate at Columbia University under Robert Cross and Salo Baron.

In 1966, Brandeis University invited Jick to join its faculty as director of the newly-established Lown Graduate Center for Contemporary Jewish Studies and as professor of American Jewish history. This represented a major change in the course of his life, but, as Jick later explained, "the opportunity to teach (which I regarded as my central rabbinic function) and to engage the problems of Jewish communal life was irresistible."In time, the program that he inaugurated became known as the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service. In addition to his role in that program, Jick eventually served in many administrative posts at Brandeis, including dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and chairman of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.

Three years after he arrived at Brandeis, Jick convened a colloquium entitled The Teaching of Judaica in American Universities. Forty-seven scholars participated in that colloquium, resulting not only in the inevitable book but also in something far more consequential, the establishment of the Association for Jewish Studies, the professional organization of scholars in the field. Jick strongly advocated for the new organization—"a groupdevoted to scholarship and to their own intellectual pursuits, but also concerned for a total body of knowledge which is called Judaica or Jewish Studies and, in addition, committed...