Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a leading Orthodox thinker and an early champion of women's rights, has died in New York at the age of 98. Tributes praised Rackman for being an Orthodox pioneer in trying to ease the plight of agunot – women whose recalcitrant husbands denied them a religious bill of divorce. He was also an early supporter of interdenominational dialogue and one of the first rabbis to travel to the Soviet Union after the end of Stalinism to raise the plight of Jewish refuseniks.
Born in 1910, he earned a law degree and a doctorate in political science at Columbia University while studying for the rabbinate at Yeshiva University. He served as a military chaplain in the US Air Force in World War II, retiring with the rank of colonel. He went on to lead New York's Fifth Avenue Synagogue and Congregation Shaarey Tefila in Queens. He was also a president of both the New York Board of Rabbis and the Rabbinical Council of America. In 1970 he became provost of Yeshiva University, and in 1977 was named the president of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Rackman served as chancellor there until his death. “The university and the Jewish world have lost a giant of a man whose greatness was derived not only by his intellect, but his passion and sense of social justice,” said Bar-Ilan's president, Moshe Kaveh.
