Gilles Bernheim has just been elected chief rabbi of France. He succeeds Joseph Sitruk who held this post for 21 years.
Bernheim was born in Aix-les-Bains in 1952 where he grew up. His parents would have liked their son to be a doctor but instead he studied philosophy and became a rabbi in 1978. After his marriage, he spent two years in a kollel in Jerusalem. He has been the rabbi of France’s largest synagogue in Paris for over ten years, la grande synagogue de Paris, and has written several books on Jewish ethics and modern issues. He has four children, two of which have settled in Israel.
The two men embody two different streams of French Judaism. Sitruk is closer to the yeshivah world and has backed the development of Chabad in France while Bernheim wishes to promote modern and open Orthodox values and commitments while tightening the bond between all Jews.
3 Comments
June 23, 2008 at 9:09 pm
“Bernheim wishes to promote modern and open Orthodox values and commitments while tightening the bond between all Jews.”
Just curious: would that include women taking a more active role in Jewish public life (inc. becoming rabbis) or is that unheard of even in modern orthodox Judaism?
June 23, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Veredd: No, I honestly don’t think Bernheim’s agenda includes women becoming rabbis.
September 4, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I know it´s a little bit late, this comment of mine, but I´ve read Bernheim´s interview in L´Arche (a French Jewish mag), and I´ve read his opinions about “other currents”(Conservative and Reform); from what I understood, he really considers the non-Orthodox as being “foreign imports” (from the US) that don´t really fit into French Judaism.
I have never read anything written by him. Do you think that he will promote a modern, open Orthodoxy ?
Shabat shalom, I will be G-d willing this Erev Shabat in A.S. . If you are there, I will probably be wearing a black suit, white shirt, no tie, black kippah. Do you think I will stand out ?? I don´t know what people there wear as it will be my first visit to a service.
José