While August is a quiet time for many Northern California professions (snow removal specialists, say, or umbrella retailers), rabbis are busy sweating it out as they prepare for what arguably is the most important hour of their rabbinic year: the Yom Kippur sermon. Especially if you are a junior rabbi, prudence suggests you shouldn’t be too political, or too brash, too early in your tenure.
Rabbi Jacob J. Weinstein took a different view. Congregation Sherith Israel’s third senior rabbi, the 29-year-old Weinstein was a passionate defender of many social causes, and his sermons drew a disproportionate number of the poor and unemployed. In 1932, he found himself in some very hot water when he used his Yom Kippur pulpit to support San Francisco’s striking dock workers. It was during the Depression, and the struggle between City Hall and the longshoremen had turned ugly. Despite the many business owners in the congregation, Weinstein urged the community to publicly support the union and even to surround City Hall as a show of solidarity.
He became a lightning rod for local and national attention, and resigned from Sherith Israel after less than two years. He moved to Chicago, where he founded the influential synagogue Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv in Hyde Park. Weinstein became one of the country’s most prominent rabbis, and was known afterward as “Labor’s Rabbi.”
This column is provided to j. by Daniel Schifrin, writer-in-residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where stories of local Jewish life are explored in “California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present,” www.bit.ly/california_dreaming