Voice for a Nation

LEADING THE WAY “He was responsible for making The Jewish Observer the premier spokesman for daas Torah” explains Rabbi Nosson Scherman. “For 40 years he was its editor. He trained writers showing them how to write clearly and logically and usually contributing a great deal of his own rewriting. More often than not the most delicate and significant articles were written by him”

W hen the late Rabbi Moshe Sherer assumed the helm of Agudath Israel of America from his ailing cousin Elimelech (Mike) Tress his first concrete goal was the creation of a Torah magazine of ideas in English. He wrote to Telshe Rosh Yeshivah Rav Mordechai Gifter “[O]ur greatest tragedy is that we have no public organ through which to speak to the masses… I have always dreamed of putting aside all my other work and devoting myself exclusively to a large-scale English magazine.”

The magazine Rabbi Sherer envisioned would be a balance of the “timeless” and the “timely.” In the former category he placed fealty to the direction of gedolei Torah including the 1956 psak of the 11 roshei yeshivah against participation in umbrella organizations with heterodox groups as members and the falsity of the standard portrayal of Judaism as consisting of “three streams” of equal validity. The “timely ” which was even more critical in Rabbi Sherer’s view consisted of the analysis and interpretation of current events through the lens of Torah.

The mission statement in the first issue of The Jewish Observer which appeared in 1963 under the editorship of Rabbi Nachman Bulman noted that until then the American Torah world had “ ‘spoken’ its mind and heart to the remainder of American Jewry almost entirely through the literary ‘mouths’ of its critics and detractors.”