Stephen S. Wise

His mother's father founded the Herend porcelain works, and when Aaron Wise tried to unionize it, the old man bought his son-in-law's family one-way tickets to New York. Their son was an infant. He grew up the son and grandson of rabbis, no relation to Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati, with whom he is still confused, and took a Columbia degree at 18 and a doctorate at 28. In 1906 Temple Emanu-El offered him its pulpit, the most prestigious in American Judaism. Wise asked whether the pulpit would be free, meaning whether he could preach as he saw fit without the board's approval. Told it would not be, he refused, and opened his own congregation the next year: the Free Synagogue, free pews, free pulpit.

From that one room he built outward. The Free Synagogue, then the Jewish Institute of Religion in 1922 to train rabbis his own way. He was among the founders of the NAACP, convened the first American Jewish Congress at Independence Hall in 1918, and created the World Jewish Congress in Geneva in 1936 to fight Nazism. He had been Oregon's commissioner of child labour and he stayed a labour ally, pressing for the factory laws that followed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. He was a Zionist while Reform Judaism was formally against Zionism, and it cost him inside his own movement.

On August 8, 1942, Gerhart Riegner cabled Geneva's warning that the Nazis intended to kill every Jew in Europe. The State Department did not pass it on, and Wise did not learn of it until late that month. He took it to the government, and when Sumner Welles asked him to withhold it pending confirmation he agreed, waiting nearly three months before going public on November 24. Peter Bergson's activists attacked him for it then, and historians including David Wyman and Rafael Medoff have argued since that he protected his access to Roosevelt at the cost of public pressure that might have saved lives. His defenders answer that he had almost no leverage to spend, that the visa doors were held shut well below Roosevelt, and that the confrontational route was tried and moved the administration no further.

He had helped push Woodrow Wilson toward the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and spent the next 30 years on the same argument, though by 1943 Abba Hillel Silver's harder line had taken American Zionism away from him. He carried the case to the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945 and to the Anglo-American commission in 1946, and lived 11 months past the declaration of the state. He died in New York on April 19, 1949, and lies in an unmarked mausoleum at Westchester Hills Cemetery. His congregation renamed itself for him within a month, and Jerusalem, Haifa and Petah Tikva put his name on streets.

Stephen S. Wise's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Improvement of the Moral Qualities other
  His Columbia doctoral work, translating Solomon ibn Gabirol from the Arabic 1902
• The Free Synagogue other
  Free pews and a pulpit no board of trustees could approve in advance 1907
• American Jewish Congress other
  First convened at Independence Hall in Philadelphia 1918
• Jewish Institute of Religion other
  A New York seminary of his own, merged into Hebrew Union College in 1950 1922
• World Jewish Congress other
  Founded in Geneva to fight Nazism. He presided over it until he died 1936

• 1898 aged ~24 Serves as English-language secretary at the Second Zionist Congress in Basel He worked with Theodor Herzl until Herzl's death in 1904.
• 1906 aged ~32 Refuses the pulpit of Temple Emanu-El over whether it would be free The trustees had offered him the most prominent rabbinical post in the country.
• 1907 aged ~33 Opens the Free Synagogue in New York No pew rents, no assigned seats, and no sermon submitted for approval.
• 1909 aged ~35 Joins the founding of the NAACP
• 1918 aged ~44 Convenes the first American Jewish Congress at Independence Hall Its delegates were chosen in nationwide community elections.
• August 1936 aged 62 The World Jewish Congress is founded in Geneva Wise was its president from the founding until his death.
• August 8, 1942 aged 68 Gerhart Riegner cables the extermination plan out of Geneva Riegner asked that Wise be told. The State Department did not pass it on, and he learned of it only at the end of the month.
• November 24, 1942 aged 68 Announces the extermination plan at a Washington press conference He put the number of Jews already murdered at 2 million.
• April 19, 1949 aged 75 Dies in New York City at 75 Eleven months after the State of Israel was declared.

• Isaac Mayer Wise 1819–1900
  Built the three institutions that still hold American Reform Judaism together. no relation, routinely confused
• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. Zionist ally
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. had his ear, and was judged for it
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. co-founded the NAACP with
• Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907–1972
  Rabbi and theologian who linked Jewish thought with civil-rights and antiwar activism. successor in the prophetic pulpit
• Elie Wiesel 1928–2016
  Holocaust survivor, author of Night, and Nobel Peace laureate inherited the argument over silence