Balfour Brickner
Balfour Brickner, a leading rabbi in the Reform Judaism movement, was rabbi emeritus of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan when he died.
Brickner was a longtime political activist who was involved in the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam antiwar movement and efforts supporting a woman's right to choose abortion.
He lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey and Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Brickner was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father, Barnett, led Congregation Anshe Chesed, one of the country's largest Reform congregations. Brickner served in the United States Navy during World War II. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1948, with a bachelor's degree in philosophy. In 1952, he received his rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.
A year after he was ordained, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he founded Temple Sinai. He served there until 1961, when he moved to New York City for a position in the national headquarters of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the soul of a mensch."
Brickner's book Finding God in the Garden was published by in 2002.
On the occasion of the death of Rabbi Balfour Brickner, Dr. Eugene Fisher, Associate Director of the U.S. Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, wrote that he was “one of the great leaders of Reform Judaism and one of the greatest American religious leaders of the second half of the twentieth century.”
