Photo: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (second right) and Martin Luther King Jr. (center) during the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 21, 1965, marches in favor of the fight for civil rights of African-Americans in the United States, including the right to vote. The first two marches had not succeeded and were violently prevented, notably by the local police and racist associations such as the Ku Klux Klan

Credits: Susannah Heshel

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi.  From an illustrious Hassidic family, he was born in Warsaw and grew up in a deeply pious and erudite Jewish world. At the age of 20, in the 1930s, this young rabbi lived in Berlin where he pursued higher studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Friedrich Wilhelm University.  In 1933, he completed his doctoral thesis, at the height of the Nazification period in Germany. In 1937, Martin Buber made him his successor in Frankfurt as co-director of the Mittelstelle für oseille Thumbs and the Jüdisches Lehrhaus .

In 1938 he was expelled from Germany like many Jews of Polish origin and had to return to Poland. Fleeing from Nazism, he found refuge in England and then in New York in March 1940. In America he pursues a brilliant rabbinic career as a thinker and teacher, notably at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. From 1945 he taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

From the 1960s until his death in 1972, he was committed to inter-religious dialogue and political issues for ethical reasons intrinsic to Judaism. On 14 January 1963, at the National Conference on Religion and Race, he violently denounced racism in a speech entitled "Religion and Race". It was there that he met Martin Luther King, with whom he became a friend.   Abraham Joshua Heschel became a key Jewish figure in the fight for equal civil rights in general, and especially for African American populations.

Close to Cardinal Augustin Béa, he was very active at the time of the Second Vatican Council and helped to give the Vatican the Jewish viewpoint for the drafting of the Bull Nostra Aetate.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a bridge between the traditional world and the modern world without departing from his ethical, mystical, prophetic ideal, his admiration for Maimonides, the teachings of Hasidism.   He leaves an important work in several languages.