PARR History & Presidents
“In 1946 the rabbis in the far West felt themselves to be so remote from headquarters that they organized a Western Association of Reform Rabbis.” (From Reform Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook, edited by Kerry M. Olitzky, Lance Jonathan Sussman, and Malcolm H. Stern, [1993], p. 283) By the time of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, the acronym WARR had fallen out of favor among the members. In 1968, they changed WARR to PARR.
For many years, Rabbi Joe Glaser z”l organized PARR’s annual conferences, and when Glaser became the Executive Vice-President of the CCAR in 1971, Rabbi Morrie Hershman z”l assumed leadership of PARR.
Rabbi Larry Goldmark, then the rabbi of Temple Beth Ohr in La Mirada, California, succeeded Hershman as PARR’s executive vice-president. From 1985 to 2023 – 38 years! – Goldmark nurtured PARR, growing it into an extraordinary rabbinic association. No wonder he came to be called the ‘PARR Czar”!
PAST PRESIDENTS OF PARR
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1957: Max Nussbaum 1958: Leonard Beerman 1959: Morton J. Cohn 1960: Meyer Heller 1961: Albert Bilgray 1962: Joseph Gitin 1963: Albert Lewis 1964: Bernard D. Rosenberg 1965: Isaiah Zeldin 1966: Wolli Kaelter 1967: Albert Plotkin 1968: Meyer Simon 1969: Alfred Wolf 1970: David Shor 1971: Sidney Akselrad 1972: Irving Mandel 1973: Emanuel Rose 1974: Joel Goor 1975: Floyd Fierman 1976: David Robins 1977: Haim Asa 1978: Joseph Asher 1979: Hillel Cohn |
1980: Herbert Morris 1981: Martin Ryback 1982: Martin Weiner 1983: Henri E. Front 1984: Norman D. Hirsh 1985: Frank Stern 1986: Lester Frazin 1987: Joseph Weizenbaum 1988: Sanford Ragins 1989: Richard Rosenthal 1990: Robert Gan 1991: Ken Weiss 1992: Steven Jacobs 1993: Steven Chester 1994: Allen Krause 1995: Janet Marder 1996: Martin Lawson 1997: James Mirel 1998: James Kaufman 1999: B. Charles Herring 2000: Patricia Karlin-Neumann 2001: Michael Berk 2002: Stephen Einstein 2003: Maynard Bell 2004: Alan Henkin 2005: Deborah Prinz 2006: Bruce Kadden |
2007: Paul Citrin 2008: Roberto Graetz 2009: Denise Eger 2010: Harry Manhoff 2011: Yoel Kahn 2012: Sanford Akselrad 2013: Karen Fox 2014: Marvin Schwab 2015: Bruce Greenbaum 2016: Jason Gwasdoff 2017: Andrea Berlin 2018: Howard Laibson 2019: Cheryl Rosenstein 2020: Evan Goodman 2021: Suzanne Singer 2022: Harry Rosenfeld 2023: Heidi Cohen |