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ABOUT MORTIMER J. COHEN Mortimer J. Cohen, D.D., Ph.D., D.H.L. was born in New York City on March 1, 1894, and educated at City College of New York, Columbia University, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. As a young rabbi in 1918, he was recommended to a just-organizing congregation in North Philadelphia. The congregation, Beth Sholom, began in the basement of a private home. As membership grew, so did the need for a synagogue, and so a prominent building was constructed in Logan. As the congregation continued to grow and members relocated to the suburbs , Rabbi Cohen, with the assistance of Boris Blai, Dean of Temple University’s Tyler Art School, convinced the country’s most prominent architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, to design a new synagogue—the architect ’s only synagogue—in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. Throughout Rabbi Cohen’s fifty-year career, adult education and the printed word were very important to him. After fifteen active years in the rabbinate, Rabbi Cohen continued his education and worked toward his doctorate from Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning. His thesis, a reappraisal of one of the memorable controversies in eighteenth-century Jewish life, was published in his first book, Jacob Emden: A Man of Controversy. Much of Rabbi Cohen’s recognition and expertise evolved from experiences and mentors before and during his rabbinical career. As a scholarship college student at City College of New York, he won local and national oratory awards. He served as secretary to Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan while a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary and was influenced in his Reconstructionist ideology by Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Ira Eisenstein. Throughout his years serving as the spiritual leader of a large congregation, writing poetry and playlets, and making literary contributions to secular and nonsecular publications, he never lost sight of his commitment as a Jew to his community. His six-year relationship working with Frank Lloyd Wright on the new synagogue for his community was the apex of his years as a rabbi. Pathways Through the Bible grew out of Dr. Cohen’s lifelong interest in the Bible both as literature and as the fountainhead of the Jewish religion . In his role as a teacher of the Bible to young people and adults, he sought to make reading the Holy Scriptures vital and meaningful. He About Mortimer J. Cohen ■ 517 was gratified when Pathways was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and used throughout the Jewish communities of Mexico and South America. He was proud that the first mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, had Pathways Through the Bible on a table in his office, and that Catholic priests used this book for student nuns in Namaqualand, Union of South Africa. He would be pleased that this book, the product of his experience and his lifelong interests, is being recognized by new generations of readers. HEDVAH C. MARGOLIES ELEFRITZ Daughter of Mortimer J. Cohen 518 ■ Pathways Through the Bible ...

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