Emil Fackenheim, one of the Jewish world’s foremost thinkers, a distinguished rabbi and acclaimed philosopher, passed away last Friday at his home in Jerusalem. A refugee from Nazi Germany, born in Halle in 1916, he was arrested while studying for the Reform rabbinate in Berlin. Briefly interred after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he escaped to Canada in 1940, making a life there as a rabbi and, from 1948, as a professor of philosophy at the U. of Toronto.

A lifelong Zionist, Emil was a key figure in elaborating a Jewish philosophical-theological response to the immense horror of the Shoah. Deeply committed to the redemptive meaning of a reborn Jewish state in Erez Yisrael, he made aliyah to Israel in 1984, where, living in his beloved Jerusalem, he continued his writing and taught as an adjunct philosopher at the Hebrew University.

Emil was my teacher and my friend, a model for me, and for countless others, of an authentically Jewish life of thought and action. A person of great spiritual strength, immense learning, and remarkable goodness, he was a strong supporter of the work of this Institute, and had prepared, just before he died, a paper for an international conference on global antisemitism CIJR is co-sponsoring in Montreal in March, 2004. (I will be privileged to read that paper at the conference in his name.)

Saddened by the loss of so great a man and so good a Jew, we are also proud, as Rosh Hashonah approaches, to dedicate this issue of our Isranet Briefing to Emil Fackenheim’s memory, by excerpting key passages from a small selection of the powerful works of what will, clearly, be an enduring oeuvre.