Goodblat, Morris

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GOODBLAT, MORRIS

GOODBLAT, MORRIS (1901–1978), Conservative rabbi and educator. Born in Mlawa, Poland, he came to the United States in 1912. He was educated at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School and the Mizrachi Teachers Institute. He received his B.A. from City College of New York (1924) and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1927). He earned his dhl there in 1944.

For more than four decades, he served as a rabbi at Congregation Beth Am Israel in Philadelphia, where he focused on Jewish education. His congregation produced many young men who entered the rabbinate and many more who were educated Conservative Jews. He was president of the Jewish National Fund and the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia and regional president of the Rabbinical Assembly for the Greater Philadelphia area.

In 1960 he established the Academy of Judaism to tutor perspective students for conversion; thus, establishing a regional program for what had until then been the individual responsibility of the local rabbi. He served as dean and director of the academy. The model of a regional program has been adopted in many communities throughout the U.S. as it is an excellent use of resources and an important way of imposing and enforcing standards.

Goodblat co-chaired the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, which tried to standardize congregational curricula and published and developed material for the afternoon hebrew school, which was instrumental in Jewish education. He headed its publication committee and helped hire Abraham Millgram as the Commission's educational director.

He was chairman of the Rabbinical Assembly's special Committee on Ritual Surveys, which compiled a detailed picture of the way in which Conservative Judaism was being practiced in the synagogue and in the major ceremonies from Bar and Bat-Mitzvah and Confirmation to funeral practices. He also chaired the membership committee of the Rabbinical Assembly that opened membership to non-seminary graduates, which facilitated the transformation of some Orthodox congregations and their rabbis to the then rapidly growing Conservative movement. He also served on the prestigious Committee on Jewish Law and Standards for the Rabbinical Assembly.

As a scholar, he wrote Jewish Life in Turkey in the xvi Century as Reflected in the Legal Writings of Samuel De Medina in 1952, about the immediate post-expulsion period in which Jews fleeing from Spain found a haven in Turkey.