21 April, 2006
Arthur Hertzberg, a leading scholar and American rabbi, has died at the age of 84 in Englewood, New Jersey. An outspoken writer and speaker, Hertzberg was a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement and was among the prominent participants in Martin Luther Kings 1963 March on Washington. Nine years later, he became chairman of the first Jewish delegation to meet formally with the Vatican about the Catholic church's silence during the Holocaust. He called for the creation of a Palestinian state after the 1967 Six-Day War and once called the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington the “national cathedral of American Jewry’s Jewishness", according to the "New York Times". Hertzberg was president of the American Jewish Congress from 1972 to 1978 and vice president of the World Jewish Congress from 1975 to 1991. He also edited the journal “The Zionist Idea". Rabbi Hertzberg was born in Poland and came to the United States with his family at the age of five.
