Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a leading Orthodox thinker and an early champion of women’s rights, died Dec. 1 in New York. He was 98.
Tributes poured in this week, many of them praising Rackman for being an Orthodox pioneer in trying to ease the plight of agunot, women whose husbands denied them a religious bill of divorce.
Rackman also was among the first rabbis to travel to the Soviet Union after the fall of Stalin and, upon his return, he drew attention to the plight of Jewish refuseniks.
“He believed that halachah [Jewish law] had to live in the present and not the past,” historian Deborah Lipstadt, a childhood congregant of Rackman’s, said in her eulogy, the text of which she posted on her blog. “He was willing to go out on a limb and stand virtually alone when he felt that halachah was not being allowed to rise to the challenges it faced.”
Rackman’s list of achievements is prodigious. 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 U.S. Air Force Reserve in World War II, retiring with the rank of colonel.
Rackman went on to lead New York’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue and Congre-gation Shaarey Tefila in Queens. In 1970 he became provost of Yeshiva University, and in 1977 was named the president of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He served as chancellor there until his death.
One of Rackman’s most controversial achievements — and, some say, his greatest — was in being among the earliest rabbis to demonstrate sensitivity to the plight of agunot, or so-called “chained women.” In the 1990s he helped establish Beit Din L’Ba’ayot Agunot, the Court for the Problems of Chained Women, which annulled hundreds of marriages using innovative talmudic reasoning. The court was widely condemned in the Orthodox world.
After a funeral service Dec. 1 in New York, Rackman was buried Dec. 3 in Israel. He is survived by three sons, Michael, Joseph and Bennett.