Wise, Stephen Samuel

(1874–1949)

   US Reform rabbi, communal and Zionist leader. For some forty years, the convictions and zeal of Stephen Wise pervaded the American Jewish scene. He was one of the best-known religious leaders of any denomination in the country. Wise was brought to the United States as an infant by his Hungarian immigrant parents. He graduated from Columbia University, was ordained as a Reform rabbi and founded his own Free Synagogue in New York. In 1922, he established the Jewish Institute of Religion for training rabbis according to his own concepts, and was its president until it merged in 1948 with the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. As a rabbi, he was an outspoken champion of civil rights for negroes, of fair practice in labour relations, and of child welfare. Towards the end of World War I, Rabbi Wise was the main architect and first president of the American Jewish Congress, a new body conceived on broad democratic lines and with a Zionist slant. In the Jewish representation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he worked with the Zionist leaders and was also active in securing Jewish minority rights in the new states of post-war Europe. In 1936, after the emergence of Hitler Germany, he promoted the World Jewish Congress, of which he became president. The WJC was to do valuable work in assisting Jewish communities in distress but never developed into the authoritative voice of the whole Jewish people as Wise had hoped. Wise was a lifelong Zionist. As early as 1897, he helped found the Federation of American Zionists, and was its honorary secretary. He was a delegate to the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, and attended a number of subsequent congresses. He visited Palestine three times. During World War I, he worked with Louis BRANDEIS to gain President Woodrow WILSON’S sympathy for Zionism. To their disappointment, the White House did not come out in support of the BALFOUR Declaration when it was issued in London on 2 November 1917. In August 1918 the president wrote Wise a letter which expressed guarded approval of the Declaration.

   After the war, differences of opinion arose between the American Zionist leaders and Dr WEIZMANN. The break came at the Cleveland Convention in 1921, when the Brandeis group, including Wise, were out-voted and withdrew from their official positions. Wise remained unhappy about this schism and later returned to Zionist activity. He was for a while chairman of the United Palestine Appeal and from 1936–9 president of the Zionist Organization of America. A sharp critic of the pro-Arab shift in British Palestine policy, he wrote The Great Betrayal (1930). With the outbreak of World War II, Wise helped to set up the American Zionist Emergency Council and was its co-chairman with Rabbi Abba Hillel SILVER. The two men clashed over tactics, Wise relying on President Roosevelt’s support while Silver tried unsuccessfully to push a pro-Zionist resolution through Congress. In 1945, Wise went to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco as a Zionist representative, and in 1946 he appeared as a witness before the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine. Wise wrote an autobiography, Chal-lenging Years (1949), and two collections of his letters have been published.