Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, an architect of modern Christian-Jewish dialogue and one of the most widely respected representatives of the Jewish community on interreligious matters, is dead at age 66.
Tanenbaum, who was buried Monday, died of heart failure July 3 after undergoing heart surgery here last month.
In the more than 40 years which he devoted to forging understanding between Jews and Christians, Tanenbaum earned the respect of religious leaders all over the world for his commitment, wisdom and sensitivity.
He forged close relationships with Christians from a wide range of denominations, including Pope John XXIII, the Rev. Billy Graham and Desmond Tutu, the black Anglican archbishop of Johannesburg.
Some 2,000 people representing many faiths attended Tanenbaum’s funeral at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue. Pews were filled with clergy wearing the garb of Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox priests.
Among those delivering eulogies was Cardinal John O’Connor, the archbishop of New York.
Tanenbaum was an indefatigable advocate of better understanding among faiths.
Though he retired in 1989 from the American Jewish Committee, where he worked as interreligious affairs director and director of international relations for 30 years, Tanenbaum continued to crisscross the country, speaking at universities and seminaries until illness forced him to stop earlier this year.
Tanenbaum first investigated Christian anti-Semitism while a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which he attended after graduating from Yeshiva University.
His interest, said colleagues, was fueled by his own memories of Eastern European pogroms and the Holocaust. Tanenbaum’s parents fled Europe and settled in Baltimore, where he was born in 1925.
OBSERVED SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL
After his ordination as a Conservative rabbi in 1950, Tanenbaum briefly worked in publishing and public relations, and then went on to become one of the first Jewish professionals to devote himself full time to Christian-Jewish relations.
He worked in the late 1950s as executive vice president of the Synagogue Council of America, a body of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews that represents the American Jewish community in interfaith dialogue, and went to work for the American Jewish Committee in 1960.
A measure of his accomplishment even at that relatively early point in Tanenbaum’s career is that he was invited to Rome by Pope John XXIII as an official observer of the Second Vatican Council, which lasted from 1960 to 1965.
He was the only rabbi to attend the proceedings that produced the watershed Catholic document Nostra Aetate. The document rejected anti-Semitism and the teaching that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.
Tanenbaum hosted a syndicated weekly radio show on religious matters beginning in 1965, and wrote a weekly column for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during the 1980s.
In 1983, Tanenbaum was the first Jewish leader to address 4,000 Protestant delegates attending the World Council of Churches assembly in Vancouver.
And in the early 1980s, Tanenbaum was a member of an International Rescue Committee delegation which made three trips to Southeast Asia to research the plight of the Vietnamese boat people.
Upon reaching the Thai-Cambodian border, Tanenbaum joined Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in the recitation of Kaddish for the 1 million Cambodians who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge.
He was also one of the founders in 1985 of the American Jewish World Service, a development and relief agency.
MADE DECLARATIONS COME TO LIFE
In 1987 he was elected chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, the body that represents the international Jewish community in its dealings with other religions.
And in May 1988, he was awarded the Interfaith Medallion by the International Council of Christians and Jews.
President Jimmy Carter invited Tanenbaum to represent American Jewry as one of 10 national religious and academic leaders to discuss “the State of the Nation” at the Camp David summit meetings in 1979. He was also a member of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust Advisory Committee.
His passing has been called the end of an era by many of those who worked with him.
“He really took the declarations and resolutions and proclamations and made them come to life in human terms with an extraordinary amount of passion and intelligence,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, the current interreligious affairs director at the American Jewish Committee.
“One of the things I learned from him is that interreligious relations are really about human relationships,” he said.
His commitment was not to good relationships with Christians at any cost, according to his friend of 25 years, Rabbi Arnold Turetsky, but to creating a fuller Christian understanding of Jews and Judaism without sacrificing his own integrity.
“Marc spoke out, he risked his newly gained friendships with the highest-power Christians in the world. His mission was not to befriend Christians, but to bring his people to a sense of pride,” said Turetsky.
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