101 Facts About Abraham Feinberg

Abraham Feinberg was an American rabbi who lived much of his life in Canada.

Abraham Feinberg's parents often spoke to him about the shetl that they had left behind, and Feinberg stated that he felt that Grinkishki was a part of him.

Abraham Feinberg's father, Nathan was a rabbi, while his mother, Sarah was a housewife.

Abraham Feinberg was the 7th of the 10 children in his family.

Bellaire was an impoverished coal-mining town located on the Ohio river across from Wheeling, West Virginia and Abraham Feinberg grew up in poverty.

Abraham Feinberg found himself shocked by the mistreatment of the black residents of Bellaire when he was growing up.

Abraham Feinberg's childhood experiences left him with a strong sympathy for Afro-Americans as fellow victims of prejudice, and throughout his life he was a champion of civil rights.

An intellectual prodigy, Abraham Feinberg graduated from high school at the age of 14.

Bellaire was a tough working class town where violence and heavy drinking were the norm, and Abraham Feinberg was hardened by his youth.

Abraham Feinberg was educated at the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920.

Abraham Feinberg worked as a rabbi in a number of American cities between 1924 and 1930.

Abraham Feinberg began his rabbinical career at Temple Beth-El in Niagara Falls, New York.

In 1928, Abraham Feinberg became the rabbi at a New York synagogue, the Temple Israel, attended by a wealthy congregation, and he often went to parties and dinners hosted by New York's Jewish elite on exclusive Park Avenue.

Abraham Feinberg is made to fear a loss in membership more than the wrath of God.

Joseph L Lewis, president of the Freethinkers of America, invited Feinberg to join him on a "crusade for truth" against all religion, an offer he declined.

Abraham Feinberg should have remembered that it is not fair to condemn the religious institution as a whole because some human errors had upset his inspiration.

Abraham Feinberg then went to France, where he studied singing at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau for a few months.

Abraham Feinberg's persona was that of a "vagabond prince" who would "visit" a different country every radio show and sing love songs in whatever language of the nation he was pretending to visit.

The man that Abraham Feinberg was already married was kept a secret to make him more appealing to his female fans.

Abraham Feinberg noted with amusement that his fans, unaware that he was Jewish, always sent him Christmas cards.

Abraham Feinberg later stated that in view of what was happening in Germany that he could not be a singer and had to return to the service of God.

Mount Nehob was so poor the synagogue had been lacking a rabbi for some time as most rabbis did not wish to accept the low salary the synagogue offered, but Abraham Feinberg accepted the position as he wanted to be close to the poor.

Abraham Feinberg's principle worry was the Third Reich, and from 1935 onward, he sought to build alliances outside of the Jewish community to rally a front against the Nazi regime.

In 1942, Abraham Feinberg attempted to volunteer as a chaplain with the US Army, but was turned down on the account of a medical disability.

Abraham Feinberg was an enthusiastic supporter of the war, urging Canadians to never slacken in the war against the 3rd Reich, and urged able-bodied Jewish men to enlist in the military as "active" members.

An extremely charismatic man and an excellent speaker, Abraham Feinberg soon became the best known rabbi in Canada, who hosted a weekly radio show where he spoke about various political and social issues.

Abraham Feinberg often wrote about social issues in publications such as the Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Maclean's, and the Toronto Star.

Abraham Feinberg condemned not only antisemitism in Canada, but criticized the Liberal Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, for interning the entire Japanese-Canadian population in 1942.

Abraham Feinberg was the chairman the Joint Public Relations Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai B'rith, who pressed the committee to lobby Ontario to end mandatory Christian prayers and the singing of Christmas carols in Ontario's public schools.

The Canadian historian Gerald Tulchinsky wrote that Abraham Feinberg had little interest in Jewish theology, but instead saw himself as a champion of all oppressed peoples, seeing himself as an advocate of a "Jewish social gospel" that required him to fight for justice and dignity for all.

In Easter 1944, Abraham Feinberg gave a speech in Toronto saying:.

Abraham Feinberg's speech caused much controversy with the Social Credit MP Norman Jaques distorting his speech to claim that Abraham Feinberg had called the New Testament a fraud.

Abraham Feinberg led the opposition to Drew's changes in education, saying it was "undemocratic, imperiling the separation of Church and State, and leading to disunity in society".

In 1944, Abraham Feinberg joined the advisory board of the Toronto Progressive Labour Party, which was a front for the Canadian Communist Party, causing the RCMP to begin monitoring him as a possible Soviet spy.

In 1945 Abraham Feinberg attended a fundraising dinner for the United Jewish People's Order, a left-wing group linked to the Canadian Communist Party, which led to further suspicions by the RCMP that Abraham Feinberg was at very least a Communist.

In 1945, Abraham Feinberg wrote an article in Maclean's charging that there was rampant antisemitism in Canada, writing:.

In February 1947, Abraham Feinberg was part of a Canadian Jewish Congress delegation who met Social Credit Party leaders in Ottawa to ask them to purge their party of its vocal anti-Semitic wing.

Abraham Feinberg attended later in 1947 a meeting of the CJC leaders that concluded that the Social Credit movement, whose support was mostly found in western Canada and in Quebec, was the most dangerous anti-Semitic movement in Canada, and the CJC should do everything within its power to discredit Social Credit.

In 1948, Abraham Feinberg attended a conference of the World Jewish Congress in Paris, where he criticized Canadian immigration law for excluding Jewish nurses and domestic workers from coming to Canada.

Abraham Feinberg became the vice president of the Toronto Association for Civil Rights.

The town of Dresden, Ontario was notorious as being the most segregated town in Canada, and Abraham Feinberg was active in campaigning to end the discrimination suffered by the black residents of Dresden.

Carter was from Dresden, and Abraham Feinberg usually stayed with his family when he was in Dresden.

In December 1950, Abraham Feinberg set off a notable row in Toronto when he delivered a sermon denouncing as an injustice that Jewish children in public schools were being forced to sing Christmas carols.

Three Orthodox rabbis in a public letter denounced Abraham Feinberg's sermon, saying that Canada was a "Christian country" and Jews should respect the wishes of the majority least it give rise to antisemitism.

The Globe and Mail in an editorial on 5 December 1950 entitled "A Deplorable Proposal" condemned Abraham Feinberg, asking how it was possible for a rabbi to want "to eliminate Christmas from public schools".

Abraham Feinberg continued to be a supporter of Zionism, and engaged in debates with the United Church of Canada over the issue.

Abraham Feinberg observed that it was President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt who was threatening in his speeches to wipe Israel off the face of the world while the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was making no such threats about Egypt.

Abraham Feinberg wrote that he felt sad about the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, but he stated that there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who were expelled or fled from Arab nations such as Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen living in Israel, which did not excite the passion of the Observer in same way that Palestinian refugees did.

In 1957, Abraham Feinberg became the first rabbi to receive an honorary degree from the University of Toronto.

Abraham Feinberg protested against the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, and became president of the Toronto Committee for Disarmament.

Abraham Feinberg's activism led the Canadian government to regard him as a trouble-maker and during his time as rabbi of Holy Blossom from 1943 to 1961, he was spied upon by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a "subversive".

In 1961, Abraham Feinberg retired and was granted the title of rabbi emeritus.

Abraham Feinberg noted Canada welcomed all Hungarian refugees because they were white and anti-communist, despite the fact that many of them had health problems, while turning away healthy immigrants from the West Indies, despite that fact the former British colonies in the Caribbean were members of the Commonwealth "family".

In July 1964, when the Lions Club of Toronto invited the white supremacist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, to give a lecture on race relations, Abraham Feinberg was the principle organizer of the protests against Wallace coming to Toronto.

Abraham Feinberg argued that through people of different races look different, but there was no evidence that any race was inferior, arguing that low results on aptitude tests achieved by blacks and First Nations peoples were due to an "environment" that discouraged intellectual achievement, instead of being hereditary.

Abraham Feinberg argued that as long as people refused to marry people of different races, racism would persist.

Abraham Feinberg condemned the Vietnam War as "immoral", saying that in all good conscience he must speak out against the war.

Ho disliked meeting Westerners and it was most unusual that Abraham Feinberg was allowed to meet him.

Abraham Feinberg called Ho this "paragon of durability impervious to events", who spoke to him in French and told him he was convinced that North Vietnam would win.

On his way back to Toronto, Abraham Feinberg stopped in London to give a press conference, where he stated that Ho had told him that he was willing to meet Johnson in Hanoi to discuss peace "but without a gun at his hip".

On 26 January 1967, Abraham Feinberg met in New York with Arthur Goldberg, the American ambassador to the United Nations, to ask if it was possible to set up a Ho-Johnson summit.

Goldberg told the amateur diplomat Abraham Feinberg that it was a serious violation of diplomatic protocol for him to announce the offer of a summit in London without informing Johnson first, saying the president was very angry at him.

Abraham Feinberg dictated Ho's offer to Goldberg's secretary, who typed it down along with a profuse apology for having broken diplomatic protocol.

Abraham Feinberg praised the Soviet Union as an improvement over Imperial Russia, saying the "evil stench of the czars" was gone, but he criticized the treatment of Soviet Jews as being very far from equal.

Abraham Feinberg further reported that all of the Muscovite Jews he talked to expressed their gratitude to the Red Army for defeating Nazi Germany, observing that if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow in 1941, then the Jews of Moscow would have been exterminated just like the Jews of Kiev, Smolensk, Odessa, Kishinev, Sevastopol, Minsk and so many other Soviet cities taken by the Germans had been exterminated.

Abraham Feinberg wrote the "heroic" Red Army soldiers who defeated Nazi Germany had saved the entire Soviet Jewish community from being exterminated during the Holocaust, making him grateful for the sacrifices of the ordinary soldiers of the Red Army, who fought so hard and suffered so much.

Abraham Feinberg wrote that many of the older Muscovite Jews told him that they still had nightmares of the postwar anti-Semitic purges.

Abraham Feinberg noted that the assimilation policies of the Soviet regime was having its effects with the younger Soviet Jews speaking Russian instead of Yiddish, and the distinctive culture of the Ashkenazim was being subsumed into Russian culture.

Abraham Feinberg, who was fluent in Yiddish, but did not speak Russian, reported he had to use translators to speak to the younger Soviet Jews.

Abraham Feinberg wrote that he had an "affectionate admiration for the Russian people", which made the barely veiled anti-Semitic remarks he heard from Soviet officials even more painful.

Abraham Feinberg accused the Soviet regime of seeking to "obliterate every trance of a Jewish identity", and reported that almost all of the Jews he spoke to were living through lives of "tensions, deprivation and confusion".

Abraham Feinberg called Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish "homeland" located in the desolate countryside along the banks of the Amur river that formed the border with China as being a sort of cruel joke.

Abraham Feinberg wrote that "governmental indifference and intimidation" was bearing down hard on Soviet Jews.

Abraham Feinberg criticized the Cold War, writing that tensions with the Western powers, especially the support for West German rearmament given by the United States, hindered the case for liberalization in the Soviet Union.

Abraham Feinberg wrote that a nuclear war between the United States vs the Soviet Union or between China vs the Soviet Union would be a disaster for humanity and world leaders needed to do more to reduce Cold War tensions.

Finally, Abraham Feinberg called upon the Soviet Union to allow unrestricted Jewish emigration to Israel, saying that those Jews who wanted to make the Aliyah should be allowed to do so.

Besides for the status of Jerusalem, Howse and Abraham Feinberg clashed over the origins of the Holocaust.

In 1969, Abraham Feinberg went to Montreal to join John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their "Bed In For Peace".

Abraham Feinberg suggested some changes to the lyrics of "Give Peace a Chance," which were incorporated by Lennon.

The Montreal Gazette in its edition of 30 May 1969 credited Abraham Feinberg with coining the title of the song.

In 1967, Ho had given Abraham Feinberg a walking cane with an Asian dragon craved as its head as a parting gift, which Abraham Feinberg almost gave to Lennon as a gift, but decided it would be insult to Ho to give away his Vietnamese cane.

Abraham Feinberg served as one of the backup singers making up the chorus in Give Peace A Chance together with Timothy Leary, Petula Clark, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Smothers, Kyoko Cox, Derek Taylor and many others.

The success of his duet with Lennon inspired Abraham Feinberg to resume his singing career and he released more 10 songs over the last years of his life.

At Lennon's encouragement, Abraham Feinberg recorded an album I Was So Much Older Then, which was recorded in 1969 and released in 1970.

The songs on I Was So Much Older Then were mostly covers of songs by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, which a reviewer on Billboard noted in 1970 gave one a clue to the kind of music that Abraham Feinberg was listening to.

Abraham Feinberg asked for the Black Panthers to dissociate themselves with the PLO, which he described as a group committed ending to Israel via violence, and to driving the two million Jews of Israel out.

On 11 March 1970, Abraham Feinberg was a lead speaker at a Toronto fundraiser hosted by Red, White and Black group that sought raise money for the defense lawyers of the "Chicago 7".

On 14 February 1971, Abraham Feinberg's wife died in Toronto of cancer.

Abraham Feinberg settled in Berkeley, California, and worked as the rabbi for the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco which catered to "the outcasts of our social system".

Abraham Feinberg became the "Rabbi-in-Residence" at the Glide Memorial Church, a Methodist church mostly attended by homosexuals and homeless people.

Abraham Feinberg served as a rabbi at the Center for Religion and Life at the University of Nevada.

Abraham Feinberg argued what he called "sex negationism" was a distortion of Judaism.

Abraham Feinberg used books from the Tanakh such as highly erotic the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs with their remarks about how a husband should keep his wife happy to base his case against "sex negationism".

Abraham Feinberg maintained that female genital mutilation, which involved cutting out the clitoris, was an especially brutal form of male control.

Abraham Feinberg noted that female genital mutilation is very common in the Near East.

Abraham Feinberg noted on his visits to Jerusalem that he saw in the Orthodox neighborhoods signs that denounced women who wore short skirts or uncovered their arms as "prostitutes".

Abraham Feinberg noted that many of the peoples the ancient Hebrews were in conflict with such as the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and the Greeks worshiped goddesses such as Isis, Ishtar, Diana, and Aphrodite, which increased the contrast between the patriarchal Yahweh vs the goddesses of their enemies.

Abraham Feinberg further noted that many of the goddess cults in the ancient Middle East such as the Great Mother of the Gods with her seven breasts openly displayed, had both priests and priestess who were equals.

Abraham Feinberg argued that such cults increased the male fear of women in Judaism, observing the Prophets of the Tanakh denounced with great vehemence the licentious religion practiced by the peoples of Canaan and Phoenicia.

Abraham Feinberg argued that Judaism had more respect for women, observing the cult of Ishtar required all women to serve as sacred prostitutes in her temples at least once a year while the worship of Moloch required human sacrifice by burning children alive.

Abraham Feinberg argued for the acceptance of gay rabbis and gay synagogues as being a correct expression of Judaism.