Ady Assabi, "unorthodox" rabbi
Hyfler/Rosner
SAPA (South African Press Association)
(Note his dissertation topic towards the bottom of the obit-- doubly
on-topic)
Rabbi Ady Assabi, formerly of the Shalom Independent Congregation and the
Imanu-Shalom Congregation in Johannesburg, has died in Israel at the age of
56. Assabi is remembered in the South African Jewish community as a
religious leader marked by controversy. Even now, he remains highly
controversial, particularly in Reformed congregations, and talk of his role
here continues to elicit great emotion. Dana Kaplan, a United States Jewish
studies academic, has described Assabi as the central figure in the
"terribly destructive" split in what was the country's largest Progressive
congregation, Imanu-Shalom in Johannesburg, about 10 years ago. Assabi's
move at the time from the Reform movement to an affiliation with the
Conservative movement, had precipitated a struggle within the congregation
which ended in a bitter battle and a civil court case. Much of this did not
feature in non-Jewish public life, except for the court case, though it has
been rekindled with news of his early death, of cancer, as former members of
his congregations again try to assess the life and work of a teacher and
scholar who featured large in Jewish Reformed community life. Assabi was
also a member of the South African Law Commission, vice-president of the
South African Zionist Federation, and president of the Democratic Zionist
Federation. His curriculum vitae of the time describes him as an
anti-apartheid activist. In the early 1980s, in Israel, he was a peace
movement activist -- with Shalom Achshav and Yesh G'vul, among others --
when he worked as a journalist and editor of Kol Natanyah and Rechov Rashi,
a chain of local newspapers. It was when he was at Temple Shalom that the
newly-released Nelson Mandela was invited to a Friday night service -- an
event which senior research fellow Steve Friedman of the Centre for Policy
Studies, described on Thursday as "highly unusual". Approached for comment,
Friedman said: "At the time, Rabbi Assabi was politically unorthodox. He
taught a form of Judaism which was consistent with the values of the new
South Africa, and enabled us to engage constructively with the transition in
the country." Unattributed -- by request -- remarks about Assabi after his
death are of him being remembered as "progressive and humane", and as a
"brilliant teacher" of the traditions of Judaism to modern Jews. On the
controversy surrounding Assabi even after his death, it was said that it had
"less to do with the question of Madiba (Nelson Mandela) and Assabi's role
in the period of transition in the country than with his role in internal
progressive politics". At the time of his death, Assabi was working in
Berlin, Germany, but his home was in Israel, where he spent two weeks a
month. His younger son, Yaron Assabi, the CEO of Digital Mall Holding in
Johannesburg, said on Thursday his father died on June 15 after a diagnosis
of brain tumours were made in January. Yaron Assabi said his father worked
at a Progressive Jewish congregation in Berlin, the Berlin Oranienburger
Synagogue, where he had established a number of initiatives and was
preparing to lecture on anti-semitism at a university when he died. Assabi
was born in Israel in March 1947, but his life had its origins in German
Jewry, in Berlin, and much of his family died in the Holocaust. His wife,
Yael Marcus, died in 1983. In an obituary on Thursday (June 26) in London's
The Independent, Rabbi Albert Friedlander described Assabi as having played
a "charismatic, often controversial role as the rabbi of a community under
siege in that troubled land. In the process, he first enlarged and then
divided the Reform community". Friedlander described Assabi as having been a
troubled, wandering, often lonely voice in the world, who was a legend to
those who had come to see the hidden aspects of greatness, but with the
ability to make "those he encountered uncomfortable, and (he) could turn a
community from friends into enemies". Assabi also wrote liturgies, and the
Shalom Independent Synagogue still uses the prayer book, Chadesh Yamenu,
which he wrote in 1995, Friedlander wrote. At the time of his death, Assabi
had almost completed a PhD dissertation on the topic of Judaism and
thanatology (the scientific study of death, and practices related to it).
(Ady Assabi, rabbi: born Tel Aviv 29 March 1947; ordained rabbi 1971;
married 1967 Yael Marcus (died 1983; two sons); died Netanya, Israel 15 June
2003.) Sapa 06/26/03 21-16 C=100