(Jewish Group) 'Be kind': Rabbi Doug Goldhamer, founder of first synagogue for the deaf, dies at 76

When Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer arrived in Chicago from Cincinnati in the early 1970s, he found deaf Jews attending church services because they had no synagogue to accommodate their needs or view them as equals.

So in 1973, Goldhamer founded Congregation Bene Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Skokie, Illinois, that interprets all of its services in American Sign Language. In 1992, he created the Hebrew Seminary, the world’s first and still only rabbinic school for the deaf, which has graduated more than 20 rabbis.

“Many rabbis now are knocking down the walls of bigotry,” he told the Forward in a 2021 profile. “Every person whether deaf, blind, African American, Christian, Jew, should be allowed to sit in any pew in a synagogue.”

Rabbi Goldhamer, who died Feb. 3 at age 76 after a brief illness, is the inaugural subject of our new short-form series, “Sign of the Times,” celebrating Jewish role models who practice activism and social justice into their later years. Our production company, Silver Screen Studios, is producing the series in partnership with the Jewish arts-and-culture nonprofit Reboot.

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