1881-1983
Rabbi and Theologian

Youth.

Mordecai Kaplan was born in Lithuania in 1881, the year the pogroms began against Jews in czarist Russia. His biographer, Mel Scult, referred to 1881 as "the year of the beginning of the modern Jew," thus making Kaplan's birth in that year appropriate. He would live 102 years and be as representative of modern Jewry, its thought, conflicts, and community as anyone in the twentieth century. He arrived in the United States in 1889, part of the great Jewish immigration to America that had begun a few years before. His father, Orthodox rabbi Israel Kaplan, lacked a stable position in Lithuani and had taken a rabbinical job in New York. The rest of the Kaplan family followed a year later to join New York's burgeoning Jewish immigrant community. In 1895, at the age of thirteen, Mordecai Kaplan began attending the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as...