Toward Peace in Palestine

The rabbi, community leader, educator, and political activist Judah Magnes was born in San Francisco and received ordination from Hebrew Union College in 1900. He served as the rabbi of Temple Israel in Brooklyn and later of Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. Magnes helped to organize the American Jewish Committee (1906) and was president of the Kehillah of New York City from 1908 until 1922; in that capacity, he tried to reconcile differences between the German Jewish and the East European Jewish immigrant communities in America. In 1922, Magnes moved to Mandatory Palestine. There, he was a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and served as its first chancellor, from 1925 to 1935, and then as its president, from 1935 to 1948. Magnes also actively worked to find a modus vivendi between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities and supported the founding of a binational state. The Magnes Press at Hebrew University (est. 1929) is a memorial to him.