Israel S. Dresner

Israel Seymour Dresner was born in 1929 on Manhattan's Lower East Side into an Orthodox Jewish family.[2] He grew up in Brooklyn, where his father owned a delicatessen, and received his early education in Orthodox yeshivas in a Yiddish-speaking household.[2][3]

As a teenager, Dresner joined the Zionist youth movement Habonim at age 13.[4] His commitment to Jewish causes showed itself early: in 1947 he was already protesting outside a British-owned business in Manhattan against the British government's policy of blocking Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.[2] He worked on Kibbutz Urim in 1951 and 1952, but while in Israel received a military draft notice and returned to the United States, where he served in the Army for two years at Fort Harrison, Indiana — and, according to one account, saw service during the Korean War.[4][3]

It was during his Army years that the path to the rabbinate opened unexpectedly. A Reform rabbi serving as an Army chaplain offered Dresner a ride back to base; the two spoke together in Yiddish, and the chaplain asked Dresner to become his assistant.[4] Dresner had already earned a graduate degree in international relations before entering rabbinical study at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, which lists him in its Class of 1961.[4][1]

Dresner served as assistant to Rabbi Jerome Malino at the United Jewish Center of Danbury, Connecticut, a congregation that held separate Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform services under one roof.[4] In September 1958 he became the first full-time rabbi of Temple Sha'arey Shalom in Springfield, New Jersey, where he would serve for thirteen years.[4] He later held the pulpit at Temple Beth Tikvah in Wayne, New Jersey, for twenty-five years, eventually retiring as rabbi emeritus.[4]

Dresner's engagement with the African-American civil-rights movement began in earnest in June 1961, when he joined an interfaith, interracial clergy Freedom Ride through the South to challenge segregation.[2] He wore a yarmulke throughout the rides so that those he encountered would know he was Jewish.[2] In Tallahassee, Florida, he and Rabbi Martin Freedman joined Protestant ministers in seeking to desegregate the airport restaurant; after the group waited more than three days and the restaurant remained closed to them, they were ordered to disperse and arrested on charges of unlawful assembly.[4] Dresner refused to post bond or pay a fine, and the resulting case — Israel Dresner et al. v. City of Tallahassee — raised civil-rights questions that reached the Supreme Court; the arrested riders were ultimately acquitted or had their charges dropped.[4]

Dresner first met Martin Luther King Jr. during the Albany, Georgia, campaign in 1962.[4] During that campaign the two men spent a night in a house while a mob of white racist protesters surrounded the building. Dresner later recalled thinking they might be killed; King, he said, "never flinched," and the mob eventually dispersed.[4] King spoke from the bimah at Temple Sha'arey Shalom in Springfield in 1963, one of two visits he made to the congregation.[4][3] Dresner also visited King in jail in Albany, and the two developed a close and lasting friendship.[4] King also told Dresner that an Atlanta Passover seder had impressed him because Jews remembered their ancestors' enslavement without shame; he believed Black Americans could draw pride from their own history.[3]

In August 1963 Dresner marched in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.[5] Reflecting on the event fifty years later, he recalled seeing roughly 250,000 people, including approximately 100,000 white participants, and said he suspected that a majority of those white marchers were Jewish.[5]

The following year, at King's personal request, Dresner led a delegation of Reform rabbis — traveling directly from a meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Atlantic City — to St. Augustine, Florida, to protest racial segregation at the Monson Motor Lodge.[2][3] The action brought together sixteen rabbis and has been described as the largest civil-disobedience arrest of rabbis in American history.[2] Dresner was arrested a total of four times during his civil-rights work and served short periods in jail.[2]

During the 1965 Selma voting-rights campaign, Dresner joined King for the second march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When state troopers blocked the marchers, King asked Dresner to lead the group in prayer before the march turned back.[4][3] The Selma campaign contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and King subsequently spoke from the bimah at Temple Sha'arey Shalom.[4]

Beyond the civil-rights movement, Dresner campaigned for the freedom of Soviet Jews beginning in 1966, supporting refuseniks for decades.[2] He was also a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, and he demonstrated repeatedly through the 1970s on behalf of Soviet Jews' right to emigrate.[3] He framed all of this activism in the language of Jewish identity and the obligation of tikkun olam.[2]

In September 2013, Dresner was among several hundred civil-rights veterans honored at the White House for the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington.[5] At that event he urged President Barack Obama to pursue peace between Israelis and Palestinians, saying that peace remained possible despite widespread pessimism.[5] Obama replied, "You still have your passion." Dresner's son Avi told the president that his father had always tried to "speak truth to power."[5]

Dresner died on January 13, 2022, at the age of 92, having recently been diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer.[2] Shortly before his death he said he hoped to be remembered for putting the Jewish idea of tikkun olam into action and for helping "make the world a little better place."[2] One of his final stated goals was a visit to Katz's Delicatessen on the Lower East Side — the neighborhood of his birth — for a pastrami sandwich.[3]

His career linked an Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking upbringing, kibbutz work and military service with Reform rabbinical study and decades of activism in the civil-rights, Soviet Jewry and antiwar movements. Dresner consistently described this work as an expression of Jewish identity and tikkun olam, arguing that his faith required participation rather than detachment.[2][3]

The label "most arrested rabbi" circulated in press coverage of Dresner but rests on media usage rather than any verified comparative ranking.[2][3] His estimate that a majority of white participants at the 1963 March on Washington were Jewish was explicitly his own suspicion, not an independently verified count.[5]

Dresner also held publicly contested political positions in later life. He described himself as an opponent of Israeli rule in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and in 1982 led an unsuccessful effort to persuade the Central Conference of American Rabbis to condemn Israel's invasion of Lebanon, stating that he supported a "democratic and just Israel" and saw the Lebanon campaign as inconsistent with that vision.[3] These positions placed his later activism within longstanding intra-Jewish debates over Israeli policy.