Nadich, Judah 1912-2007

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 13, 1912, in Baltimore, MD; died of heart failure, August 26, 2007, in New York, NY. Rabbi and author. Nadich served Conservative Jewish congregations from Illinois to Massachusetts for more than fifty years, spending the last thirty years of his rabbinate at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, where he retired in 1987. He is remembered, though, for the years he spent at the end of World War II as a military chaplain in Europe and advisor on Jewish affairs to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. As senior Jewish chaplain, it was Nadich's task to look after the concentration camp survivors who had been gathered into camps for displaced persons to await repatriation under conditions that were not much more comfortable than their prisons had been. He once told CA that he was the one who convinced Eisenhower to improve the living conditions at these camps until the people living there could be relocated to their homelands or elsewhere. In peacetime, Nadich ministered to his urban congregations and became an advocate for civil and minority rights, the rabbinical ordination of women, and opportunities for the disabled. He was affiliated with the Jewish Braille Institute, the Jewish Book Council of America, the National Jewish Welfare Board, and the hospice committee of Beth Israel Medical Center, among many other similar organizations. Nadich also wrote books, the best-known of which is Eisenhower and the Jews (1953). He compiled other works as well, including The Flowering of Modern Hebrew Literature (1959), Jewish Legends of the Second Commonwealth (1983), and The Legends of the Rabbis (1994).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2007, p. B9.

New York Times, September 2, 2007, p. A23.

Washington Post, September 4, 2007, p. B6.