Contributor

My postings for Haggadot.com are all from the writings of Rabbi Benjamin H. Englander. He was a Palestinian, born in the Holy Land 40 years before the establishment of the modern State of Israel. Binyamin Englander was a native of Petach Tikvah, which had been founded by his grandfather Yehoshua Stampfer in 1870 as the Jews' first defensive agricultural settlement. By the time Rabbi Englander died in 1989, the settlement had grown into an industrialized city. So in 1947, the New Jersey newspapers were quite accurate when they welcomed him to a pulpit in Irvington as a "Palestinian rabbi," even though he had spent most of his life in the United States. Schooled in Philadelphia and Cleveland, Ben Englander went on to become a modern, religiously devout Conservative rabbi. He was one of those early graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York who were respected by their Orthodox counterparts for a profound commitment to traditional religious education, values and lifestyles, albeit with a more open attitude toward accommodation with the modern world.