Founder of Jewish Renewal movement dies
BOULDER, Colo. – Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, died in his Boulder, Colo. home. He was 89.
Rivkah Walton of the Alliance for Jewish Renewal says Schachter-Shalomi died Thursday morning in his sleep after a long illness.
Schachter-Shalomi started the renewal movement in the early 1960s as a way to use contemporary religious and political scholarship to re-examine Judaism after the Holocaust.
Walton said the nondenominational movement includes 45 affiliated congregations and dozens of others not officially affiliated.
Schachter-Shalomi was born in Poland and raised in Vienna. His family fled during the Holocaust and ended up in New York.
Walton said the rabbi wrote recently he was not naming a single successor but called on all the ordained and laypeople he taught to carry on his work.