Simon Noveck
Rabbi Simon Noveck (1914-2005) combined scholarship, communal service, and pulpit work in his distinguished career.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Noveck attended public school and a five-day-a-week Hebrew school. For his 1932 graduation from Boys’ High, he was chosen as “class orator” amidst speculation he would end up as governor of Georgia.
Instead, Rabbi Noveck recieved a scholarship to attend the Teachers’ Institute of Yeshiva College in New York, where he graduated magna cum laude. He went on to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was was influenced by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, receiving his ordination in 1941. Rabbi Noveck continued his education at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1952, with a thesis on the history of the democratic idea in the United States. He taught at the City College of New York, 1944-1948, and also at the Seminary College of Jewish Studies, while also serving at several part-time pulpits. He considered this period his “apprenticeship.”
In 1949, Rabbi Noveck accepted a post as associate rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, and assumed the role of rabbi a year later. While serving as what he called “an Upper East Side Rabbi,” he entered the field of Adult Jewish Education, directing the National Academy of Adult Jewish Studies of the United Synagogue. He edited the quarterly journal, “Adult Jewish Education,” and published his first books, Judaism and Psychiatry and Adult Education in the Modern Synagogue.
Noveck was recruited to direct the B’nai B’rith Adult Education Program from 1957–1961. Here, he edited B’nai B’rith’s Jewish Heritage Magazine, but most importantly, he turned his attention to the B’nai B’rith Great Books Series, selecting and writing introductions to excerpts from the works of important figures in historical Jewish life.
In 1961, newly married to Doris Bettaur, Rabbi Noveck returned to the rabbinate, becoming Rabbi of Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford, CN, where he served from 1961 to 1969. After a year-long historical tour of European Jewish communities, he resumed his career, dividing his attention between pulpits, scholarship and academia. He wrote the biography of Milton Steinberg, Portrait of a Rabbi, and taught at such institutions as Brooklyn College and the Jewish University in St. Petersburg and in Moscow. He retired in 1990 and continued to pursue his writing.
Ben Yehuda Press is proud to reprint Contemporary Jewish Thought, one of the volumes in his B'nai B'rith Great Book Series.