Frisch, Ephraim

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FRISCH, EPHRAIM

FRISCH, EPHRAIM (1880–1957), U.S. Reform rabbi. An outspoken rabbi who held pulpits in Arkansas, New York, and Texas, Frisch stirred controversy throughout his career by praising communism, denouncing the poll tax, criticizing Zionism as a "menace," and ridiculing legislators who banned evolution texts from the schools.

A native of Shubocz, Lithuania, Frisch was the son of Rabbi David and Hannah Baskowitz Frisch. He immigrated to the United States in 1888 through the Great Lakes port of Duluth, Minn. Religious scholarship and political liberalism were prevalent in his family tree. His maternal great-grand-father, Rabbi Alexander Sender, who was hailed as a gaon, wrote the talmudic commentary, Hatarat Nedarim (1880), discussing contracts and vows. Frisch's cousin, Leonard Frisch (1890–1984), was a national Zionist leader and the editor of American Jewish World, a Twin Cities weekly.

Frisch grew up in Minneapolis and was ordained in 1904 from Hebrew Union College, where he was founding editor of the college annual. At his first pulpit, Anshe Emeth (1904–1912) in Pine Bluff, Ark., he launched the state's first county tuberculosis association, supported an African American minister who hosted biracial gatherings, and criticized the governor for referring to Jesus in a Thanksgiving Day proclamation. In 1912, Frisch moved to Temple Israel in Far Rockaway, Queens. There he established a temple social service department that created Children's Haven of Far Rockaway for temporary care of indigent youngsters.

In the spring of 1915 Frisch founded the New Synagogue, a Manhattan congregation whose credo stressed humanitarian deeds, social action, flexible rituals, and liturgy augmented with secular readings. The following year, he married Ruth Cohen (1890–1934), a pianist and writer and the daughter of Galveston's Rabbi Henry Cohen (1863–1952). Her connections and congeniality drew people to the budding congregation. The New York Evening Post hailed Frisch and his congregation as "post/Darwin." By 1918, however, Frisch's opposition to the Balfour Declaration and his characterization of Zionism as a "menace" led to rebuffs from colleagues, disenchantment among congregants, and a line in the American Hebrew denigrating him as an "obscure rabbi."

In 1923 Frisch became rabbi of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio. In the conservative South, Frisch was a lightning rod for controversy. He criticized compulsory Bible reading in the schools, urged an American boycott of the Berlin Olympics, sympathized with the city's underpaid pecan shellers, and denounced the city's squalid slums. Jewish youth, inspired by Frisch's idealism, gravitated to the rabbi and his wife, who launched a young adult group that staged plays, dances, book reviews, and political debates. Older congregants were less enamored of the rabbi. During sermons favoring the New Deal and Filipino independence, some congregants walked out or spoke up in opposition. In June 1942, despite two years lefton Frisch's contract, the congregation voted the rabbi into retirement. For a short time he directed the Social Justice Commission of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, then quit over administrative matters. Embittered and now a widower, he spent his remaining years living alone in New York.