Rabbi Moshe Sherer: Leader

Because I was sitting shivah for my mother the week of the 25th yahrtzeit of Rabbi Moshe Sherer, I was unable to participate in either the Mishpacha symposium or the Agudath Israel of America documentary celebrating his 50 years of public life.

That was a personal loss, as Rabbi Sherer played a very large role in my life. Indeed, I was shocked to learn that it has actually been a quarter century since his petirah, perhaps because I spent nearly a decade writing a lengthy biography of Rabbi Sherer, and he was a constant presence in my thoughts during that period.

In the three decades after he assumed the reins of Agudath Israel from his cousin Mike Tress in 1967, Rabbi Sherer was the most respected and influential Jewish leader in America. Note that I do not say “Orthodox leader,” but Jewish leader of any stripe. And his biography can serve as a guide for any young Jew who aspires, as Moshe Sherer did from an early age, “to do for the Jewish People.”

One who recognized that was the late Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, the founder of ArtScroll/Mesorah, who not only indulged my interest in historical research and the nitty-gritty of public policy, but insisted upon it. And he did so even at the cost of possibly greater sales. At least one senior figure at ArtScroll once told me that she would have cut at least a third of the book and dropped the technical discussions of major initiatives that unfolded over many years, such as SBCO and AARTS.