g\u2019dolei hador<\/em>, or \u2018great ones\u2019 of Jewish social justice work.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cA true icon, Vorspan shaped much of social justice work of the Reform Jewish Movement, ensuring it lives at the very heart of Reform Judaism. Beginning in 1953, he helped inspire the creation of congregational social action committees across North America, encouraging Reform Jewish synagogues to partner with their local communities in pursuit of tikkun olam, \u2018repairing the world.\u2019 He played a pivotal role in founding the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which remains the hub of the Reform Movement\u2019s social justice work in North America,\u201d Saperstein also said, adding: \u201cA mentor, friend, and inspiration to all who knew him, Al Vorspan was, to many, the personification of Reform Judaism\u2019s social justice efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n
URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs described Vorspan as \u201cone of the towering giants of Jewish social justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAl blazed a trail of courage and conscience that so many of us have walked,\u201d Jacobs said in a tweet. \u201cNot since the biblical prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah walked the earth have we been led by such an inspiring justice leader. Our Reform Movement and our world are bereft, for he cannot be replaced.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1964, Vorspan was jailed with a group of Reform rabbis who at the request of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. joined in the civil rights protests in St. Augustine, Florida. \u201cWe came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler\u2019s crematoria. We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man\u2019s capacity to act,\u201d he later wrote about his reason for joining the protests.<\/p>\n
Vorspan, who had fought in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was an early and vociferous opponent of the Vietnam War, which led Sen. Thomas J. Dodd, a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, to call him \u201ca vociferous minority\u201d rather than holding a mainstream Jewish opinion.
\nHe also criticized Israel\u2019s treatment of the Palestinians, writing in a piece in the New York Times magazine in 1988 at the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada that \u201cIsraelis now seem the oppressors, Palestinians the victims.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1953, Vorspan convinced Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, who was then president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, to create the Commission on Social Action, which worked with the Union and the Central Conference of American Rabbis to guide and shape social action in Reform communities and in Washington, D.C., according to the Religious Action Center\u2019s website.
\nHe then pressed the Union to create the Religious Action Center in order to make the voice of the Reform movement heard in the halls of Congress. The RAC was voted into existence at the 1961 UAHC Biennial in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
He authored several books, which today are standards in Jewish religious education, including \u201cJustice and Judaism, Searching the Prophets for Values\u201d; \u201cTough Choices: Jewish Perspectives on Social Justice\u201d; and \u201cJewish Dimensions of Social Justice: Tough Moral Choices for our Times,\u201d which provides Jewish perspectives and moral policy analysis on issues ranging from abortion to capital punishment and from the Mideast peace process to religious freedom in Israel and the United States.<\/p>\n
He was married to his wife, Shirley, for 72 years until her death on Aug. 27, 2018.<\/p>\n
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