“Among the last of his kind” was how Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan described his former professor, Rabbi Eugene Mihaly, who died June 7 at his home. He was 83. The retired professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati had lived in Tiburon for the past five years.
Born in Hungary in 1918, Mihaly first studied at the New Israel Yeshivah in Baltimore and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva University in New York. But after serving two Orthodox congregations, he felt drawn toward the Reform movement and was ordained a second time at HUC-JIR in 1949. He received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1952.
In 1945, he married Cecile Bramer.
Mihaly spent the rest of his career at HUC, as Deutsch professor of Jewish jurisprudence and social justice, professor of Jewish rabbinic literature and homiletics and finally, as executive dean and vice president for academic affairs.
Mihaly was known in the movement for being an early advocate of women and, later, gays and lesbians in the rabbinate and believed Reform rabbis could perform interfaith wedding ceremonies. He published widely and simultaneously taught about the importance of tradition, while advocating views that were often way ahead of their time.
Wolf-Prusan, a rabbi at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El, considered himself fortunate to have Mihaly as his thesis adviser in rabbinical school. After Mihaly retired and moved to Tiburon, Wolf-Prusan began studying with him once again, visiting his former teacher on his days off.
“In studying with him, you were aware that this is a man whose mind is conversant with the Talmud, as in, he lives there,” he said. “And he lived here. He was thoroughly involved in modern philosophy and thought, and completely conversant in classic Jewish texts so that when you learn with someone like this, he was your tour guide to the complexity of Western thought and the incredible depths of Jewish philosophy.”
Wolf-Prusan described Mihaly further in an e-mail he sent out to his colleagues.
“When I last saw Rabbi Eugene Mihaly it was the last full day of his life. The skin of his hands looked and felt like the pages of the Talmud folios in his library. The man who in life was, for me at least, the living embodiment of the consciousness of the Talmud, had become in his dying the sensation of the text itself.”
Mihaly is survived by his wife of 57 years, Cecile Mihaly of Tiburon; sons Eugene Mihaly of Barrington, R.I. and Marc Mihaly of San Anselmo; sisters Susan Taragin of Berkeley and Irene Glassgold of San Francisco; five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held for Mihaly 2 p.m. Sunday at Congregation Rodef Shalom, 170 N. San Pedro Road, San Rafael.