Few figures in Jewish life today have contributed to the community in as many capacities as Sid Schwarz:  social entrepreneur, activist, organizational leader, author, congregational rabbi and public intellectual. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, founder of CLAL and one of American Jewry’s most notable leaders, has written about Sid: “Rabbi Sid Schwarz’ life and career embody a unique mix of religious vision and an ability to implement that vision in the real world”.

Raised in a traditional Jewish household in New York by parents who were survivors of the Holocaust, Sid was sent to an Orthodox yeshiva. As a high school student he became active in USY and he participated in the second year of USY’s Eastern European Pilgrimage (1970). His experience of visiting Soviet Jewish refuseniks ignited Sid’s political passions. He spent the next 25 years as an activist in the Soviet Jewry movement.

Sid graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Philadelphia in 1980. He was hired to be the student rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Media, PA and continued to serve Beth Israel for a total of eight years. Sid’s innovations in the congregation became noteworthy enough to lead to his being hired as an adjunct faculty at the RRC to teach several courses including one called, “Creating Alternative Communities”.

While completing his Ph.D. in Jewish history at Temple University, Sid founded Raayanot (Ideas), the journal of thought and opinion of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and edited it for four years. During that time he also established a Zionist think tank of Philadelphia –based academics, linked to an international network of similar groups around the world spearheaded by Ephraim Katzir, then the president of the State of Israel.

In 1984 Sid was hired to become the executive director of the Jewish Community Council in Washington D.C. Overseeing the community relations work in the nation’s capital, his work focused on advocacy for the state of Israel, endangered Jewish communities around the world and issues of social justice. He served on the executive committee of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington D.C. and was instrumental in the passage of a policy condemning the proselytization of Jews by Christian ministries.  In 1985 Sid helped to organize a major demonstration at Arlington National Cemetery to protest President Ronald Reagan’s visit to a military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany which included the graves of Nazi SS officers. In 1987 Sid was one of the organizers of the historic Summit Rally for Soviet Jewry which led to a change in Premier Gorbachev’s policies and resulted in the immigration of close to one million Soviet Jews to Israel and the West.

In 1988, at age 34, Sid ventured out on his own to create PANIM. He had a simple idea with huge implications. Observing how many young Jews were alienated from their Jewish identity and drifting away from Jewish affiliations, he conceived of an educational method that might be transformative for Jewish teens and, by extension, offer a conceptual model for transforming the face of the American Jewish community. PANIM became the institutional vehicle for this groundbreaking work. Working out of his house with no budget and taking no salary for the first six months of the organization’s history, over 20 years Sid grew the organization to 21 staff people and a $3 million dollar budget. PANIM has trained tens of thousands of Jewish youth for a lifetime of leadership, activism and service to the Jewish people and to the world at large.

PANIM’s work has also had impact beyond the confines of the Jewish community. One of Sid’s innovations was to take the methodology of PANIM and bring it to other faith communities. The E Pluribus Unum project, funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation, was a four year experiment that explored religion, social justice and the common good. The project not only generated some important research with broad application to the fields of interfaith relations, education, service-learning and social justice but it also inspired several successor projects that continue to this day.

Remarkably, in the very same year that Sid founded PANIM, he also founded Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD. He led both institutions concurrently for eight years until he handed over the reins of Adat Shalom to his student rabbi, Fred Scherlinder Dobb, so that he could devote his full energies to the growth and expansion of PANIM. Adat Shalom has grown to be a vibrant congregation of over 500 households. Building on his earlier work as the rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in Media, PA and a course he developed for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College on creating alternative communities, Sid was quite conscious about the need to re-invent the American synagogue. His groundbreaking book, Finding a Spiritual Home (Jossey Bass, 2000),was widely read by rabbis and lay leaders in the American Jewish community as it charted out a new paradigm for congregations that Sid called the “synagogue community”. Sid spends a significant amount of time speaking at and consulting for synagogues across the denominational spectrum.

Sid has been the recipient of numerous awards including being named in 2007 by Newsweek magazine one of the 50 most influential rabbis in America. No award is more representative of Sid’s pioneering spirit than his receipt of the prestigious Covenant Award in 2002 for his entrepreneurship in the field of Jewish education by creating PANIM.

In 2006 Sid published his second book Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World (Jewish Lights) in which he provides a history and theology of Jewish social justice and a prescription for how to bring about a renaissance of American Jewish life.

Commenting on the book, author and communal leader, Dr. Jonathan Woocher wrote: “As he did in his masterful first book, Finding a Spiritual Home, Rabbi Schwarz opens a window into some of the most creative activity taking place in American Jewish life today and shows how the Jewish community can again be a source of moral inspiration, fellowship, and profound meaning for contemporary Jews.  In Judaism and Justice Rabbi Schwarz brings to bear his own decades of experience as both a leader in the Jewish community relations field and a Jewish educator par excellence to demonstrate why a passion for social justice is critical to ensure the very “continuity” that the community so ardently seeks.” Dr. David Gordis, president of Hebrew College, Boston, wrote: “Judaism and Justice provides a long awaited prophetic vision for the nexus between Jewish tradition and culture and a commitment to social justice”.