Philip Bernstein Dead at 84

Rabbi Philip Bernstein, who was instrumental in aiding the resettlement of the approximately 200,000 displaced Jews from central and eastern Europe after World War II, died of heart failure here December 3. He was 84 years old.

Bernstein, who served as rabbi of Temple B’rith Kodesh here from 1927 to 1973, took a leave of absence during the war to serve as executive director of the Commission on Army and Navy Religious Activities (today, the Commission on Jewish Chaplaincy) of the Jewish Welfare Board. He was in charge of all the Jewish chaplains in the U.S. armed forces.

In 1946, President Truman named him special assistant to Gen. Joseph McNarney, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe. In that capacity, Bernstein urged Congress to appropriate funds to care for the refugees and to admit some to the U.S.

Bernstein was also a powerful advocate of the establishment of the State of Israel, and the author of “Rabbis at War,” and the popular book “What the Jews Believe,” published in 1950 and reprinted more than two dozen times.

Born in Rochester the son of immigrants from Lithuania, Bernstein studied at the (Reform) Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and later at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he enrolled in the first entering class in 1926.

Assuming the pulpit of B’rith Kodesh here at the age of 25, Bernstein was active on behalf of workers’ rights, low-cost housing and family planning. He became the center of local controversy in 1932 when he and the temple sisterhood invited birth control advocate Margar et Sanger to speak at the temple. The Catholic Diocese attacked Bernstein after the meeting. He was also a staunch advocate of civil rights, and denounced the South African government for using what he called “ruthless police-state methods” to oppress Blacks there.

After World War II, he became increasingly prominent in the American Jewish community, serving as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and as chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He was also an adviser and friend of Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir.

Bernstein was active, as well, in a wide range of activities in the Rochester Jewish community. In 1938, he helped establish the Jewish Community Council of that city, which coordinated fund-raising and other activities and helped bridge differences between the German and East European Jews who had settled in Rochester.