Reeve Robert Brenner

Reeve Robert Brenner (born 1936) is an American Reform rabbi, inventor and author.

Biography

Brenner is a native of New York City. Since his ordination at the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in 1964, he has been a U.S. Army chaplain in West Germany, senior staff chaplain at the clinical center of The National Institute of Health (NIH), and served a number of congregations. As the first rabbi on faculty, he taught Jewish religious thought and philosophy at St. Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pa., and is currently spiritual leader of Congregation Bet Chesed, serving the greater Washington Community since 1986.

His first major work, American Jewry and the Rise of Nazism, received the YIVO Jewish Scholarship Prize. His book, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, is the result of nine years of research conducted in Israel among survivors to explore the way the victims, themselves, came to understand the meaning of the Holocaust for Jewish belief and practice. It was a finalist for the 1981 National Jewish Book Awards. Brenner is also the author of The Jewish Riddle Collection: A Yiddle's Riddles , and the books Jewish, Christian, Chewish, and Eschewish: Interfaith Pathways for the New Millennium an outgrowth of his extensive work with interfaith couples, and his defense of the reality of the Exodus entitled While the Skies were Falling.

Inspired by his young cousin, Janice Herman, who uses a wheelchair after an...
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