16 Facts About Emanuel Rackman

Rabbi Emanuel Rackman was an American Modern Orthodox Rabbi, president of the RCA, vice-president of Yeshiva University.

Emanuel Rackman held pulpits in major congregations and helped draw attention to the plight of Refuseniks in the then-Soviet Union and attempted to resolve the dilemma of the Agunah, a woman who cannot remarry because her husband will not grant a Get, the required religious divorce decree that would free her to remarry under Halacha.

Emanuel Rackman graduated from the Talmudical Academy in 1927, as its valedictorian.

Emanuel Rackman asked for a one-year deferral from Columbia University, and spent the entire year working towards semicha at Yeshiva University, where he was in the shiur of Rabbi Moshe Soloveichik.

Emanuel Rackman earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1931 and was awarded a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1933; Emanuel Rackman was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia in 1953.

Emanuel Rackman practiced law for nine years before his religious service in the military.

Emanuel Rackman entered service during World War II in the United States Army Air Forces in 1943 as a chaplain.

Emanuel Rackman served as a military aide to the European Theater of Operations special adviser on Jewish affairs, where his experiences with survivors of the Holocaust influenced his decision to pursue the rabbinate.

Emanuel Rackman was the eighth in as many generations to earn rabbinic ordination, but the first to earn a living as a rabbi.

Emanuel Rackman said that "it was my father's hope that I would continue the family tradition, insofar as I could be both learned in the Jewish tradition while making a living in another way".

Emanuel Rackman served as Rabbi at Congregation Shaarey Tefila, then in Far Rockaway, Queens, which granted him a lifetime contract in 1952.

Emanuel Rackman was elected by his peers as president of the New York Board of Rabbis in 1955.

Emanuel Rackman served as president of the Rabbinical Council of America.

Emanuel Rackman was the president of Bar-Ilan University from 1977 until 1986, succeeding Max Jammer and succeeded by Michael Albeck, and served as the school's chancellor until his death.

Emanuel Rackman worked to address the situation of agunot through the establishment in the early 1990s of the Beit Din L'Ba'ayot Agunot, which annulled the marriages of hundreds of women, freeing them to remarry.

Criticism came from across the Orthodox spectrum, with the Haredi Agudath Israel of America calling the court's halachic basis "spurious" and British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks claiming that Emanuel Rackman's solution exacerbated the problem it was trying to solve.