It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Gerard Daniel at the age of 102, on Friday, December 14th.
Gerry served as President of the WUPJ from 1980-1988. His legacy of leadership and vision blesses us to this very day. He and his wife Ruth were lifelong builders of Reform Judaism, as you can read in the reflection shared by Rabbi Meir Azari here.
His leadership changed the landscape of Reform Judaism in Israel. During his tenure as World Union President, Gerry partnered with WUPJ Executive Director Rabbi Dick Hirsch to design, fund and construct Beit Shmuel, the World Union’s headquarters in Jerusalem.
Gerard Daniel passed away on December 14, 2018 at the age of 102.
The world will be a different place without Gerry Daniel. Gerry’s personality, energy, wisdom and heart were larger than life. He was a natural story teller with a keen eye for detail and his memory was bar none remarkable. He related to people — so many people from so many walks of life fell in love with Gerry.
Led in partnership with the Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ), the Wilkenfeld International Women’s Leadership Seminar is a leadership training program for women in Reform/Progressive congregations around the world who have been identified as potential emerging leaders. This year, 21 participants from 15 countries, representing a variety of the WUPJ regions, came to Jerusalem for […]
The World Union joins our regional partners, and members of our global Progressive movement, in issuing the following statement protesting the deportations of asylum seekers in Israel. You shall not wrong nor oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22:20) We strongly urge the Israeli government to reverse its decision […]
It is reasonable to assume that no one reading our weekly Torah portion, Vayeshev, will consider these innocuous lines of Torah to be of any particular importance. Coming as they do inside the dramatic first part of the Joseph story, the narrative which will continue until the end of the Book of Genesis, there seems no reason to take special note of this rather curious mention of “a man” meeting Joseph on his way to find his brothers and giving Joseph directions. Rather, the camera is fixed on Joseph, the major protagonist of the narrative, whose tragic life story begins to unfold in our Parasha. Tension mounts as we read about Joseph’s narcissistic dreams, his visions of grandeur, his preferential status in his father’s eyes and his antagonistic relationship with his brothers ending in his being sold into slavery and his eventual imprisonment in Egypt. With all these action scenes to cover in the Parasha, who would possibly pay attention to the few lines describing “the man” giving directions to Joseph.
On September 19, while visiting New York to speak at the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel of using their partnership in the Western Wall agreement as a clandestine way to gain recognition. The World Union, along with its regional affiliates, responded to his charges with the following statement.
The World Union’s Beit Shmuel Conference Center in Jerusalem was recently scheduled to host a conference by Israel’s Ministry of Health. Within 24 hours of the conference’s scheduled opening, MK Yaakov Litzman, Minister of Health and member of the Ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, cancelled the conference because of its association with Reform Judaism. The […]
If I had asked a Jewish person some thousand years ago, what is the meaning of the holiday of Tu B’shvat (15th of Shvat), I imagine they would have scratched their head in confusion. In the times of the Mishna, the 15th of Shvat was the date on which the taxation year for agricultural products […]
Death and Life Are In the Power of The Tongue (Proverbs 18:20)
“These are the words that Moses spoke to all of Israel(1:1)….”
Thus opens the fifth book of Torah, with Moses exhorting the people: where they have been, where they are now and ….towards where are they going. For a moment let us return to the outset of Moses’ mission: God’s summons him, empowering him to redeem the People of Israel.
On the fifth of the Hebrew month of Iyar, 5708 (May 14, 1948), the leaders of the newly established State of Israel signed a Declaration of Independence. … Almost 70 years later, the State of Israel still struggles to balance its Jewish and democratic character – to remain committed to its Jewish values while at the same time remembering that those values obligate it to treat those who are not Jewish as equals.
