W. Gunther Plaut, 1912–2012

The rabbi whose commentary on the Torah helped introduce tens of thousands of Reform Jews to their faith got an early lesson in the importance of literary interpretation soon after arriving in America, in 1935. He saw a newspaper in Cincinnati that, to his eyes, announced surprising news of a revolution in Italy. The headline: “Reds Murder Cardinals.”

Wolf Gunther Plaut was born in Münster, Germany, and earned a doctorate in law at the University of Berlin, said the Toronto National Post. But when the Nazis came to power, they barred Jews from practicing law, so Plaut began studying Jewish theology. “I wanted to know what it truly meant to be a Jew if I was made to suffer for it,” he later said. He received a scholarship to study in the U.S. in 1935, was ordained as a rabbi in 1939, and became a U.S. citizen in 1943. Having enlisted with the U.S. Army as a chaplain, he witnessed the liberation of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp at the end of the war. He recalled the survivors as desperate for theological relief. “Their first request was not for food, but for Jewish religious items,” he said.

Plaut settled in Toronto, said The New York Times, where he wrote his “magnum opus,” a modern commentary on the Jewish holy scriptures that became a “touchstone for Judaism’s liberal branches” upon its publication in 1981. Prior to Plaut’s edition, the only available translation of the Torah was one published in the 1920s with an Orthodox commentary. Plaut’s Torah interpreted Hebrew scripture “in ways that a strict adherence to tradition did not admit.” The book is now used in Reform synagogues throughout the U.S. and Canada. “You may never have met Rabbi Plaut personally,” said U.S. Reform Rabbi Jan Katzew, “yet it is likely that he taught you Torah.”

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Plaut was a fierce opponent of discrimination and prejudice throughout his life, said the Toronto Star, whether it was directed against Jews in the Soviet Union or racial minorities in North America. “He was a defender of human and civil rights at a time when many didn’t even know its meaning,” said Bernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress. “We stand on the shoulders of such men.”