Rabbi Harrison served Congregation Temple Israel, St. Louis, Missouri for over 37 years (1891-1928) and he is listed along with other rabbis who served St. Louis congregations. You can find the full list at SAINT LOUIS RABBIS.
___________________________
Son of Gustave and Louisa (Nelson) Harrison. Ordained in Brooklyn in 1886. Co-editor of Editors' Encyclopedia in Dept. of Semitics; Chautauqua and lyceum lecturer; founder of several charitable institutions. Member of Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia College Alumni of Missouri; also member Contemporary and Columbian Clubs. Unmarried.
(From Who's Who in the World, 1912)
___________________________
OBITUARY
Secular Press
September 5, 1928
MANY MOURN RABBI LEON HARRISON; ASCRIBE DEATH TO VERTIGO NOT SUICIDE
St. Louis, Mo, Sep. 4 (JTA)
The entire community was moved by the death of Rabbi Leon Harrison in New York on Saturday morning. Eulogies from men of all faiths and editorials in the press praised the contributions of the Rabbi to the community.
The "Globe Democrat" in an editorial said: "He was one of those who helped make this a thinking community and the time and places were many when he was called upon to define the significances of special occasions, to voice more accurately the happiness than we could ourselves express the thoughts and emotions."
The "Post Dispatch" in an editorial declared that "He outgrew all the normal confines of his pastorate and became firmly established as one of the presiding minds of the community. Any attempt to mitigate the degree of loss occasioned by his death would be perfectly idle. Such men are never replaced. He was not merely the epitome of the very best in Jewish culture, he was an ornament to the city and to mankind. This entire community is better, wiser and more tolerant because he lived in it and to that extent he lives on."
The funeral will be held here, burial to be at Mount Sinai Cemetery. The body will be brought here by Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Rabbi Harrison, Mrs. David C. Goodman, a sister, and Mr. Goodman. It will lie in state at Temple Israel, of which he was rabbi for thirty-seven years, from Wednesday until the funeral on Thursday.
Before the departure of Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Dr. Leon Harrison, for St. Louis, taking with him the body of the deceased, services were held at Temple Israel, New York.
Dr. Harrison D. Samuel officiated and eulogies were pronounced by Dr. Max Harris, retired rabbi of New Orleans, Dr. Thurman, Dr. Simon Cohen of Temple Israel and Dr. Max Heller.
It was at first thought that Dr. Harrison's death, when he fell in front of an I. R. T. subway train at the 116th Street and Broadway station on Saturday morning, was a case of suicide. The entry on the police blotter was later changed to "accidental death" when Abraham Harrison explained that his brother had been suffering from arterial and nervous diseases and was nearsighted. Mr. Harrison said that Dr. Harrison had been suffering from hardening of the arteries and had recently had a nervous breakdown. He had no cause for despondency and the fall was attributed to an attack of vertigo.
Dr. Harrison, who was 62 years old, arrived in New York last Sunday on the steamer Belgenland after spending the summer in Europe.
One of the outstanding leaders of Liberal Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Harrison was born Aug. 13, 1866 in Liverpool, England, and came to the United States at an early age. He was educated at Columbia University and Emanuel Theological Seminary, New York. He was ordained Rabbi by Rabbis Kohler and Gottheil in 1886.
At the age of 21, he delivered an oration at the funeral services of Henry Ward Beecher and delivered the McKinley memorial address in St. Louis Coliseum at the invitation of the municipality. He was founder of the Social Settlement League and the Fresh Air Society of St. Louis, where he served as rabbi of Temple Israel since 1891.
He was an editor of the Semitics Department of the Editor's Encyclopedia, vice-president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society and founder of the Sisterhood of Personal Service in St. Louis. Rabbi Harrison was one of the first Reform rabbis in this country to conduct the services not only in Hebrew but also in English, having himself translated a number of the prayers into English. He also introduced Sunday morning services at Temple Israel, announcing that these services were open to Jews, Catholics and Protestants and anyone who cared to come within its doors.
***********************************
Biographical sketch written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
Of Temple Israel' s first hundred years, more than a third were under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Leon Harrison. I did not get to know him personally until the last ten years of his life. For the earlier years, I must rely on what I've have read and learned from others, a story that has been recounted so often as to make it unnecessary for this centenary occasion to do more than briefly recall some of the highlights of that period.
It begins with the resignation of Rabbi Sonneschein and, I presume, the appointment of a committee to look for his successor. The search evidently ended in a small reform congregation in Brooklyn, New York. There the committee must have listened, spell-bound, to the boy-rabbi who occupied the pulpit
Leon Harrison was only 24 years old, but he had already won considerable fame in the New York community. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1866, he had come to this country with his family in his early teens, and after a few years in New York City's schools, had won admission to Columbia University at the age of 16, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors and second in a class of over 900. Some years after his death, I was told by the then president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, who had been a classmate of Harrison, that the top three men in the class ranked as follows: first, Benjamin Cardozo, the future Supreme Court Justice, second, Leon Harrison, third, Nicholas Murray Butler, the future president of Columbia University!
But it was probably not his scholarship that had brought the young student to public attention. Rather, it was his extraordinary talent as an orator. At the age of 21, while continuing with graduate studies at Columbia and preparing for the rabbinate at Emanuel Theological Seminary, he was chosen to deliver the oration for the Jewish Community at the funeral services in 1887 for the famous American preacher, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe).
The young rabbi began his tenure at Temple Israel in 1891 and it could not have been long before his sermons became the talk of the town. His sermons were "beautifully spoken essays," as they were described by a renowned editor of a contemporary literary magazine. The congregation's membership, which included some of the city's leading business and civic figures (most of them of German origin) grew so rapidly that by 1908 it could afford to build a new and much larger sanctuary for itself, the classically designed edifice at the northwest corner of Washington and Kingshighway Boulevards. It was there that Harrison's magnificent voice, often compared to a finely turned organ, coupled with his vast learning and facility of expression, raised him to prominence—"one of the great ecclesiastical orators of the nation," as the Post-Dispatch described him—and it was there that Harrison continued his leadership of the congregation until his death in 1928. In those twenty years, the services at Temple Israel were often attended not only by many Jewish non-members but by Christians as well, and not only on Saturday mornings, when his subject was usually of a more secular nature, but even at the regular Friday Evening services. For though he loved to dwell on the lessons and the traditions of Judaism, his outlook was always humanitarian and universal, the product, no double, of the broad philosophic and liberal education that he had received at Columbia University and that he never ceased to supplement with his own omnivorous reading. The popularity of Harrison's sermons has nowhere been explained better than by Dr. Abram Sachar, the founding president and now the chancellor of Brandeis University, who also enjoyed a close friendship with "the bishop" as we used to call him. In the introduction to a collection of Harrison's sermons which he edited a few years after Harrison's death under the title, "The Religion of a Modern Liberal," he wrote:
"Through the wide variety of subjects on which he expressed himself, a consistent philosophy of religion shone clear. Rabbi Harrison's Judaism was not narrow. He could have preached his message from any liberal Christian pulpit. His preaching, in other words, was not hemmed in by any theological barriers. He was Hellenic in his love for the aesthetic, Voltarian in his crisp, satiric attack upon bigotry. American in his theological pragmatism."
It was on the occasion of my first meeting with Rabbi Harrison that he invited me to come to his Sunday School. He wanted me to meet a group of young people there, especially Erwin Steinberg, who had just entered Washington University and, like me, was planning a career in law. I got the impression that Erwin's own father could not have shown more pride than Harrison in the honors that he had won and the brilliant career that lay ahead of him. I did come to the Sunday School and was given the Confirmation Class to teach. Tess Haas was then the principal and big Adolph Newman, the Temple's rector, coached the confirmands in the speaking parts. Steinberg led the post-confirmation group and he and I became fast friends, as Harrison had wished. Promising each other that we would someday be partners in the law practice. Unfortunately, Erwin fell ill one day with a strep throat. This was before penicillin and death came within a few days. I shall never forget the funeral and the sight of Harrison breaking down on the pulpit and weeping openly, as a father would for a lost son.
In addition to his interest in the young leaders of his Sunday School, there were those years in the early twenties when he led a group called "The Hashomrim" at the old Y. M. H. A., the predecessor of the J. C. C. A., which occupied a beautiful old residence at Delmar and Grand Avenues. I was a member along with Sachar and a dozen others of our age. The meetings would be held in the evening, once a month, and would begin with a modest dinner. One of the members would then read a paper on the scheduled subject, and a general discussion with Harrison as moderator would follow. He would then close the meeting with his own commentary which, though extemporaneous, was always so stimulating in thought and expressed in such beauty of language as to leave us awe-stricken. Often, after the meeting was over, some of us would accompany him to his car, and I can still hear the snow crunching under our shoes one wintry night, straining not to miss a word he uttered. For, as Sachar also points out, he was "even more impressive as a conversationalist than as a preacher. Few could match his endless flow of wit, bubbling in cascades of sparkling prose. "With all this, he also had a sense of humor and a gift of telling a story with a cockney or Irish accent worthy of a professional comedian."
But, I suppose, there was still another reason for Harrison's seeking the companionship of young people. He never seemed to lose an eagerness to enjoy life as a young person would, physically as well as mentally. He not only preached but strove in every way to practice the joy of living. His almost daily bicycling, despite his near-sightedness that made him a familiar but hazardous object to be carefully avoided on the streets of St. Louis; the mountain climbing that I understand he used to do in his 30's and 40's; his frequent travels abroad and especially the cycling he did with me during the summer of 1924 when he was 59 years old and we biked and push-biked our way from Naples to Milan and across the Alps by way of the Little St. Bernard Pass, and the following summer when we pedaled down the Rhone to the Mediterranean, then to Lourdes, where he spent hours observing and making notes on the parades and the rituals that attended the "miracle healings" at the famous grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. Before his return to St. Louis he had, I am sure, a wealth of materials for his future sermons.
Three years later, on his return from another European trip, this time for health reasons, a tragic accident took his life in a New York subway and ended my friendship with the most unforgettable man I have ever known.
Written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's commemorative booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
___________________________
Scroll down this page and just below the final photo on the right, click on the access link to reveal more photos. Double-click on any photo image to enlarge it and to reveal any captions, or attributions by scrolling to the bottom of the photo.
_________________________
The rabbi featured on this Find A Grave page is one of many included in a "Virtual Cemetery" of rabbis who've passed but who served on St. Louis pulpits during their rabbinate. The complete "Virtual Cemetery" list can be found at SAINT LOUIS RABBIS. Questions about this "Virtual Cemetery" project may be directed to:
Steven Weinreich
Email: [email protected]
___________________________
Son of Gustave and Louisa (Nelson) Harrison. Ordained in Brooklyn in 1886. Co-editor of Editors' Encyclopedia in Dept. of Semitics; Chautauqua and lyceum lecturer; founder of several charitable institutions. Member of Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia College Alumni of Missouri; also member Contemporary and Columbian Clubs. Unmarried.
(From Who's Who in the World, 1912)
___________________________
OBITUARY
Secular Press
September 5, 1928
MANY MOURN RABBI LEON HARRISON; ASCRIBE DEATH TO VERTIGO NOT SUICIDE
St. Louis, Mo, Sep. 4 (JTA)
The entire community was moved by the death of Rabbi Leon Harrison in New York on Saturday morning. Eulogies from men of all faiths and editorials in the press praised the contributions of the Rabbi to the community.
The "Globe Democrat" in an editorial said: "He was one of those who helped make this a thinking community and the time and places were many when he was called upon to define the significances of special occasions, to voice more accurately the happiness than we could ourselves express the thoughts and emotions."
The "Post Dispatch" in an editorial declared that "He outgrew all the normal confines of his pastorate and became firmly established as one of the presiding minds of the community. Any attempt to mitigate the degree of loss occasioned by his death would be perfectly idle. Such men are never replaced. He was not merely the epitome of the very best in Jewish culture, he was an ornament to the city and to mankind. This entire community is better, wiser and more tolerant because he lived in it and to that extent he lives on."
The funeral will be held here, burial to be at Mount Sinai Cemetery. The body will be brought here by Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Rabbi Harrison, Mrs. David C. Goodman, a sister, and Mr. Goodman. It will lie in state at Temple Israel, of which he was rabbi for thirty-seven years, from Wednesday until the funeral on Thursday.
Before the departure of Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Dr. Leon Harrison, for St. Louis, taking with him the body of the deceased, services were held at Temple Israel, New York.
Dr. Harrison D. Samuel officiated and eulogies were pronounced by Dr. Max Harris, retired rabbi of New Orleans, Dr. Thurman, Dr. Simon Cohen of Temple Israel and Dr. Max Heller.
It was at first thought that Dr. Harrison's death, when he fell in front of an I. R. T. subway train at the 116th Street and Broadway station on Saturday morning, was a case of suicide. The entry on the police blotter was later changed to "accidental death" when Abraham Harrison explained that his brother had been suffering from arterial and nervous diseases and was nearsighted. Mr. Harrison said that Dr. Harrison had been suffering from hardening of the arteries and had recently had a nervous breakdown. He had no cause for despondency and the fall was attributed to an attack of vertigo.
Dr. Harrison, who was 62 years old, arrived in New York last Sunday on the steamer Belgenland after spending the summer in Europe.
One of the outstanding leaders of Liberal Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Harrison was born Aug. 13, 1866 in Liverpool, England, and came to the United States at an early age. He was educated at Columbia University and Emanuel Theological Seminary, New York. He was ordained Rabbi by Rabbis Kohler and Gottheil in 1886.
At the age of 21, he delivered an oration at the funeral services of Henry Ward Beecher and delivered the McKinley memorial address in St. Louis Coliseum at the invitation of the municipality. He was founder of the Social Settlement League and the Fresh Air Society of St. Louis, where he served as rabbi of Temple Israel since 1891.
He was an editor of the Semitics Department of the Editor's Encyclopedia, vice-president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society and founder of the Sisterhood of Personal Service in St. Louis. Rabbi Harrison was one of the first Reform rabbis in this country to conduct the services not only in Hebrew but also in English, having himself translated a number of the prayers into English. He also introduced Sunday morning services at Temple Israel, announcing that these services were open to Jews, Catholics and Protestants and anyone who cared to come within its doors.
***********************************
Biographical sketch written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
Of Temple Israel' s first hundred years, more than a third were under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Leon Harrison. I did not get to know him personally until the last ten years of his life. For the earlier years, I must rely on what I've have read and learned from others, a story that has been recounted so often as to make it unnecessary for this centenary occasion to do more than briefly recall some of the highlights of that period.
It begins with the resignation of Rabbi Sonneschein and, I presume, the appointment of a committee to look for his successor. The search evidently ended in a small reform congregation in Brooklyn, New York. There the committee must have listened, spell-bound, to the boy-rabbi who occupied the pulpit
Leon Harrison was only 24 years old, but he had already won considerable fame in the New York community. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1866, he had come to this country with his family in his early teens, and after a few years in New York City's schools, had won admission to Columbia University at the age of 16, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors and second in a class of over 900. Some years after his death, I was told by the then president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, who had been a classmate of Harrison, that the top three men in the class ranked as follows: first, Benjamin Cardozo, the future Supreme Court Justice, second, Leon Harrison, third, Nicholas Murray Butler, the future president of Columbia University!
But it was probably not his scholarship that had brought the young student to public attention. Rather, it was his extraordinary talent as an orator. At the age of 21, while continuing with graduate studies at Columbia and preparing for the rabbinate at Emanuel Theological Seminary, he was chosen to deliver the oration for the Jewish Community at the funeral services in 1887 for the famous American preacher, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe).
The young rabbi began his tenure at Temple Israel in 1891 and it could not have been long before his sermons became the talk of the town. His sermons were "beautifully spoken essays," as they were described by a renowned editor of a contemporary literary magazine. The congregation's membership, which included some of the city's leading business and civic figures (most of them of German origin) grew so rapidly that by 1908 it could afford to build a new and much larger sanctuary for itself, the classically designed edifice at the northwest corner of Washington and Kingshighway Boulevards. It was there that Harrison's magnificent voice, often compared to a finely turned organ, coupled with his vast learning and facility of expression, raised him to prominence—"one of the great ecclesiastical orators of the nation," as the Post-Dispatch described him—and it was there that Harrison continued his leadership of the congregation until his death in 1928. In those twenty years, the services at Temple Israel were often attended not only by many Jewish non-members but by Christians as well, and not only on Saturday mornings, when his subject was usually of a more secular nature, but even at the regular Friday Evening services. For though he loved to dwell on the lessons and the traditions of Judaism, his outlook was always humanitarian and universal, the product, no double, of the broad philosophic and liberal education that he had received at Columbia University and that he never ceased to supplement with his own omnivorous reading. The popularity of Harrison's sermons has nowhere been explained better than by Dr. Abram Sachar, the founding president and now the chancellor of Brandeis University, who also enjoyed a close friendship with "the bishop" as we used to call him. In the introduction to a collection of Harrison's sermons which he edited a few years after Harrison's death under the title, "The Religion of a Modern Liberal," he wrote:
"Through the wide variety of subjects on which he expressed himself, a consistent philosophy of religion shone clear. Rabbi Harrison's Judaism was not narrow. He could have preached his message from any liberal Christian pulpit. His preaching, in other words, was not hemmed in by any theological barriers. He was Hellenic in his love for the aesthetic, Voltarian in his crisp, satiric attack upon bigotry. American in his theological pragmatism."
It was on the occasion of my first meeting with Rabbi Harrison that he invited me to come to his Sunday School. He wanted me to meet a group of young people there, especially Erwin Steinberg, who had just entered Washington University and, like me, was planning a career in law. I got the impression that Erwin's own father could not have shown more pride than Harrison in the honors that he had won and the brilliant career that lay ahead of him. I did come to the Sunday School and was given the Confirmation Class to teach. Tess Haas was then the principal and big Adolph Newman, the Temple's rector, coached the confirmands in the speaking parts. Steinberg led the post-confirmation group and he and I became fast friends, as Harrison had wished. Promising each other that we would someday be partners in the law practice. Unfortunately, Erwin fell ill one day with a strep throat. This was before penicillin and death came within a few days. I shall never forget the funeral and the sight of Harrison breaking down on the pulpit and weeping openly, as a father would for a lost son.
In addition to his interest in the young leaders of his Sunday School, there were those years in the early twenties when he led a group called "The Hashomrim" at the old Y. M. H. A., the predecessor of the J. C. C. A., which occupied a beautiful old residence at Delmar and Grand Avenues. I was a member along with Sachar and a dozen others of our age. The meetings would be held in the evening, once a month, and would begin with a modest dinner. One of the members would then read a paper on the scheduled subject, and a general discussion with Harrison as moderator would follow. He would then close the meeting with his own commentary which, though extemporaneous, was always so stimulating in thought and expressed in such beauty of language as to leave us awe-stricken. Often, after the meeting was over, some of us would accompany him to his car, and I can still hear the snow crunching under our shoes one wintry night, straining not to miss a word he uttered. For, as Sachar also points out, he was "even more impressive as a conversationalist than as a preacher. Few could match his endless flow of wit, bubbling in cascades of sparkling prose. "With all this, he also had a sense of humor and a gift of telling a story with a cockney or Irish accent worthy of a professional comedian."
But, I suppose, there was still another reason for Harrison's seeking the companionship of young people. He never seemed to lose an eagerness to enjoy life as a young person would, physically as well as mentally. He not only preached but strove in every way to practice the joy of living. His almost daily bicycling, despite his near-sightedness that made him a familiar but hazardous object to be carefully avoided on the streets of St. Louis; the mountain climbing that I understand he used to do in his 30's and 40's; his frequent travels abroad and especially the cycling he did with me during the summer of 1924 when he was 59 years old and we biked and push-biked our way from Naples to Milan and across the Alps by way of the Little St. Bernard Pass, and the following summer when we pedaled down the Rhone to the Mediterranean, then to Lourdes, where he spent hours observing and making notes on the parades and the rituals that attended the "miracle healings" at the famous grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. Before his return to St. Louis he had, I am sure, a wealth of materials for his future sermons.
Three years later, on his return from another European trip, this time for health reasons, a tragic accident took his life in a New York subway and ended my friendship with the most unforgettable man I have ever known.
Written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's commemorative booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
___________________________
Scroll down this page and just below the final photo on the right, click on the access link to reveal more photos. Double-click on any photo image to enlarge it and to reveal any captions, or attributions by scrolling to the bottom of the photo.
_________________________
The rabbi featured on this Find A Grave page is one of many included in a "Virtual Cemetery" of rabbis who've passed but who served on St. Louis pulpits during their rabbinate. The complete "Virtual Cemetery" list can be found at SAINT LOUIS RABBIS. Questions about this "Virtual Cemetery" project may be directed to:
Steven Weinreich
Email: [email protected]
Rabbi Harrison served Congregation Temple Israel, St. Louis, Missouri for over 37 years (1891-1928) and he is listed along with other rabbis who served St. Louis congregations. You can find the full list at SAINT LOUIS RABBIS.
___________________________
Son of Gustave and Louisa (Nelson) Harrison. Ordained in Brooklyn in 1886. Co-editor of Editors' Encyclopedia in Dept. of Semitics; Chautauqua and lyceum lecturer; founder of several charitable institutions. Member of Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia College Alumni of Missouri; also member Contemporary and Columbian Clubs. Unmarried.
(From Who's Who in the World, 1912)
___________________________
OBITUARY
Secular Press
September 5, 1928
MANY MOURN RABBI LEON HARRISON; ASCRIBE DEATH TO VERTIGO NOT SUICIDE
St. Louis, Mo, Sep. 4 (JTA)
The entire community was moved by the death of Rabbi Leon Harrison in New York on Saturday morning. Eulogies from men of all faiths and editorials in the press praised the contributions of the Rabbi to the community.
The "Globe Democrat" in an editorial said: "He was one of those who helped make this a thinking community and the time and places were many when he was called upon to define the significances of special occasions, to voice more accurately the happiness than we could ourselves express the thoughts and emotions."
The "Post Dispatch" in an editorial declared that "He outgrew all the normal confines of his pastorate and became firmly established as one of the presiding minds of the community. Any attempt to mitigate the degree of loss occasioned by his death would be perfectly idle. Such men are never replaced. He was not merely the epitome of the very best in Jewish culture, he was an ornament to the city and to mankind. This entire community is better, wiser and more tolerant because he lived in it and to that extent he lives on."
The funeral will be held here, burial to be at Mount Sinai Cemetery. The body will be brought here by Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Rabbi Harrison, Mrs. David C. Goodman, a sister, and Mr. Goodman. It will lie in state at Temple Israel, of which he was rabbi for thirty-seven years, from Wednesday until the funeral on Thursday.
Before the departure of Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Dr. Leon Harrison, for St. Louis, taking with him the body of the deceased, services were held at Temple Israel, New York.
Dr. Harrison D. Samuel officiated and eulogies were pronounced by Dr. Max Harris, retired rabbi of New Orleans, Dr. Thurman, Dr. Simon Cohen of Temple Israel and Dr. Max Heller.
It was at first thought that Dr. Harrison's death, when he fell in front of an I. R. T. subway train at the 116th Street and Broadway station on Saturday morning, was a case of suicide. The entry on the police blotter was later changed to "accidental death" when Abraham Harrison explained that his brother had been suffering from arterial and nervous diseases and was nearsighted. Mr. Harrison said that Dr. Harrison had been suffering from hardening of the arteries and had recently had a nervous breakdown. He had no cause for despondency and the fall was attributed to an attack of vertigo.
Dr. Harrison, who was 62 years old, arrived in New York last Sunday on the steamer Belgenland after spending the summer in Europe.
One of the outstanding leaders of Liberal Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Harrison was born Aug. 13, 1866 in Liverpool, England, and came to the United States at an early age. He was educated at Columbia University and Emanuel Theological Seminary, New York. He was ordained Rabbi by Rabbis Kohler and Gottheil in 1886.
At the age of 21, he delivered an oration at the funeral services of Henry Ward Beecher and delivered the McKinley memorial address in St. Louis Coliseum at the invitation of the municipality. He was founder of the Social Settlement League and the Fresh Air Society of St. Louis, where he served as rabbi of Temple Israel since 1891.
He was an editor of the Semitics Department of the Editor's Encyclopedia, vice-president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society and founder of the Sisterhood of Personal Service in St. Louis. Rabbi Harrison was one of the first Reform rabbis in this country to conduct the services not only in Hebrew but also in English, having himself translated a number of the prayers into English. He also introduced Sunday morning services at Temple Israel, announcing that these services were open to Jews, Catholics and Protestants and anyone who cared to come within its doors.
***********************************
Biographical sketch written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
Of Temple Israel' s first hundred years, more than a third were under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Leon Harrison. I did not get to know him personally until the last ten years of his life. For the earlier years, I must rely on what I've have read and learned from others, a story that has been recounted so often as to make it unnecessary for this centenary occasion to do more than briefly recall some of the highlights of that period.
It begins with the resignation of Rabbi Sonneschein and, I presume, the appointment of a committee to look for his successor. The search evidently ended in a small reform congregation in Brooklyn, New York. There the committee must have listened, spell-bound, to the boy-rabbi who occupied the pulpit
Leon Harrison was only 24 years old, but he had already won considerable fame in the New York community. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1866, he had come to this country with his family in his early teens, and after a few years in New York City's schools, had won admission to Columbia University at the age of 16, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors and second in a class of over 900. Some years after his death, I was told by the then president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, who had been a classmate of Harrison, that the top three men in the class ranked as follows: first, Benjamin Cardozo, the future Supreme Court Justice, second, Leon Harrison, third, Nicholas Murray Butler, the future president of Columbia University!
But it was probably not his scholarship that had brought the young student to public attention. Rather, it was his extraordinary talent as an orator. At the age of 21, while continuing with graduate studies at Columbia and preparing for the rabbinate at Emanuel Theological Seminary, he was chosen to deliver the oration for the Jewish Community at the funeral services in 1887 for the famous American preacher, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe).
The young rabbi began his tenure at Temple Israel in 1891 and it could not have been long before his sermons became the talk of the town. His sermons were "beautifully spoken essays," as they were described by a renowned editor of a contemporary literary magazine. The congregation's membership, which included some of the city's leading business and civic figures (most of them of German origin) grew so rapidly that by 1908 it could afford to build a new and much larger sanctuary for itself, the classically designed edifice at the northwest corner of Washington and Kingshighway Boulevards. It was there that Harrison's magnificent voice, often compared to a finely turned organ, coupled with his vast learning and facility of expression, raised him to prominence—"one of the great ecclesiastical orators of the nation," as the Post-Dispatch described him—and it was there that Harrison continued his leadership of the congregation until his death in 1928. In those twenty years, the services at Temple Israel were often attended not only by many Jewish non-members but by Christians as well, and not only on Saturday mornings, when his subject was usually of a more secular nature, but even at the regular Friday Evening services. For though he loved to dwell on the lessons and the traditions of Judaism, his outlook was always humanitarian and universal, the product, no double, of the broad philosophic and liberal education that he had received at Columbia University and that he never ceased to supplement with his own omnivorous reading. The popularity of Harrison's sermons has nowhere been explained better than by Dr. Abram Sachar, the founding president and now the chancellor of Brandeis University, who also enjoyed a close friendship with "the bishop" as we used to call him. In the introduction to a collection of Harrison's sermons which he edited a few years after Harrison's death under the title, "The Religion of a Modern Liberal," he wrote:
"Through the wide variety of subjects on which he expressed himself, a consistent philosophy of religion shone clear. Rabbi Harrison's Judaism was not narrow. He could have preached his message from any liberal Christian pulpit. His preaching, in other words, was not hemmed in by any theological barriers. He was Hellenic in his love for the aesthetic, Voltarian in his crisp, satiric attack upon bigotry. American in his theological pragmatism."
It was on the occasion of my first meeting with Rabbi Harrison that he invited me to come to his Sunday School. He wanted me to meet a group of young people there, especially Erwin Steinberg, who had just entered Washington University and, like me, was planning a career in law. I got the impression that Erwin's own father could not have shown more pride than Harrison in the honors that he had won and the brilliant career that lay ahead of him. I did come to the Sunday School and was given the Confirmation Class to teach. Tess Haas was then the principal and big Adolph Newman, the Temple's rector, coached the confirmands in the speaking parts. Steinberg led the post-confirmation group and he and I became fast friends, as Harrison had wished. Promising each other that we would someday be partners in the law practice. Unfortunately, Erwin fell ill one day with a strep throat. This was before penicillin and death came within a few days. I shall never forget the funeral and the sight of Harrison breaking down on the pulpit and weeping openly, as a father would for a lost son.
In addition to his interest in the young leaders of his Sunday School, there were those years in the early twenties when he led a group called "The Hashomrim" at the old Y. M. H. A., the predecessor of the J. C. C. A., which occupied a beautiful old residence at Delmar and Grand Avenues. I was a member along with Sachar and a dozen others of our age. The meetings would be held in the evening, once a month, and would begin with a modest dinner. One of the members would then read a paper on the scheduled subject, and a general discussion with Harrison as moderator would follow. He would then close the meeting with his own commentary which, though extemporaneous, was always so stimulating in thought and expressed in such beauty of language as to leave us awe-stricken. Often, after the meeting was over, some of us would accompany him to his car, and I can still hear the snow crunching under our shoes one wintry night, straining not to miss a word he uttered. For, as Sachar also points out, he was "even more impressive as a conversationalist than as a preacher. Few could match his endless flow of wit, bubbling in cascades of sparkling prose. "With all this, he also had a sense of humor and a gift of telling a story with a cockney or Irish accent worthy of a professional comedian."
But, I suppose, there was still another reason for Harrison's seeking the companionship of young people. He never seemed to lose an eagerness to enjoy life as a young person would, physically as well as mentally. He not only preached but strove in every way to practice the joy of living. His almost daily bicycling, despite his near-sightedness that made him a familiar but hazardous object to be carefully avoided on the streets of St. Louis; the mountain climbing that I understand he used to do in his 30's and 40's; his frequent travels abroad and especially the cycling he did with me during the summer of 1924 when he was 59 years old and we biked and push-biked our way from Naples to Milan and across the Alps by way of the Little St. Bernard Pass, and the following summer when we pedaled down the Rhone to the Mediterranean, then to Lourdes, where he spent hours observing and making notes on the parades and the rituals that attended the "miracle healings" at the famous grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. Before his return to St. Louis he had, I am sure, a wealth of materials for his future sermons.
Three years later, on his return from another European trip, this time for health reasons, a tragic accident took his life in a New York subway and ended my friendship with the most unforgettable man I have ever known.
Written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's commemorative booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
___________________________
Scroll down this page and just below the final photo on the right, click on the access link to reveal more photos. Double-click on any photo image to enlarge it and to reveal any captions, or attributions by scrolling to the bottom of the photo.
_________________________
The rabbi featured on this Find A Grave page is one of many included in a "Virtual Cemetery" of rabbis who've passed but who served on St. Louis pulpits during their rabbinate. The complete "Virtual Cemetery" list can be found at SAINT LOUIS RABBIS. Questions about this "Virtual Cemetery" project may be directed to:
Steven Weinreich
Email: [email protected]
___________________________
Son of Gustave and Louisa (Nelson) Harrison. Ordained in Brooklyn in 1886. Co-editor of Editors' Encyclopedia in Dept. of Semitics; Chautauqua and lyceum lecturer; founder of several charitable institutions. Member of Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia College Alumni of Missouri; also member Contemporary and Columbian Clubs. Unmarried.
(From Who's Who in the World, 1912)
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OBITUARY
Secular Press
September 5, 1928
MANY MOURN RABBI LEON HARRISON; ASCRIBE DEATH TO VERTIGO NOT SUICIDE
St. Louis, Mo, Sep. 4 (JTA)
The entire community was moved by the death of Rabbi Leon Harrison in New York on Saturday morning. Eulogies from men of all faiths and editorials in the press praised the contributions of the Rabbi to the community.
The "Globe Democrat" in an editorial said: "He was one of those who helped make this a thinking community and the time and places were many when he was called upon to define the significances of special occasions, to voice more accurately the happiness than we could ourselves express the thoughts and emotions."
The "Post Dispatch" in an editorial declared that "He outgrew all the normal confines of his pastorate and became firmly established as one of the presiding minds of the community. Any attempt to mitigate the degree of loss occasioned by his death would be perfectly idle. Such men are never replaced. He was not merely the epitome of the very best in Jewish culture, he was an ornament to the city and to mankind. This entire community is better, wiser and more tolerant because he lived in it and to that extent he lives on."
The funeral will be held here, burial to be at Mount Sinai Cemetery. The body will be brought here by Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Rabbi Harrison, Mrs. David C. Goodman, a sister, and Mr. Goodman. It will lie in state at Temple Israel, of which he was rabbi for thirty-seven years, from Wednesday until the funeral on Thursday.
Before the departure of Abraham Harrison, brother of the late Dr. Leon Harrison, for St. Louis, taking with him the body of the deceased, services were held at Temple Israel, New York.
Dr. Harrison D. Samuel officiated and eulogies were pronounced by Dr. Max Harris, retired rabbi of New Orleans, Dr. Thurman, Dr. Simon Cohen of Temple Israel and Dr. Max Heller.
It was at first thought that Dr. Harrison's death, when he fell in front of an I. R. T. subway train at the 116th Street and Broadway station on Saturday morning, was a case of suicide. The entry on the police blotter was later changed to "accidental death" when Abraham Harrison explained that his brother had been suffering from arterial and nervous diseases and was nearsighted. Mr. Harrison said that Dr. Harrison had been suffering from hardening of the arteries and had recently had a nervous breakdown. He had no cause for despondency and the fall was attributed to an attack of vertigo.
Dr. Harrison, who was 62 years old, arrived in New York last Sunday on the steamer Belgenland after spending the summer in Europe.
One of the outstanding leaders of Liberal Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Harrison was born Aug. 13, 1866 in Liverpool, England, and came to the United States at an early age. He was educated at Columbia University and Emanuel Theological Seminary, New York. He was ordained Rabbi by Rabbis Kohler and Gottheil in 1886.
At the age of 21, he delivered an oration at the funeral services of Henry Ward Beecher and delivered the McKinley memorial address in St. Louis Coliseum at the invitation of the municipality. He was founder of the Social Settlement League and the Fresh Air Society of St. Louis, where he served as rabbi of Temple Israel since 1891.
He was an editor of the Semitics Department of the Editor's Encyclopedia, vice-president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society and founder of the Sisterhood of Personal Service in St. Louis. Rabbi Harrison was one of the first Reform rabbis in this country to conduct the services not only in Hebrew but also in English, having himself translated a number of the prayers into English. He also introduced Sunday morning services at Temple Israel, announcing that these services were open to Jews, Catholics and Protestants and anyone who cared to come within its doors.
***********************************
Biographical sketch written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
Of Temple Israel' s first hundred years, more than a third were under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Leon Harrison. I did not get to know him personally until the last ten years of his life. For the earlier years, I must rely on what I've have read and learned from others, a story that has been recounted so often as to make it unnecessary for this centenary occasion to do more than briefly recall some of the highlights of that period.
It begins with the resignation of Rabbi Sonneschein and, I presume, the appointment of a committee to look for his successor. The search evidently ended in a small reform congregation in Brooklyn, New York. There the committee must have listened, spell-bound, to the boy-rabbi who occupied the pulpit
Leon Harrison was only 24 years old, but he had already won considerable fame in the New York community. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1866, he had come to this country with his family in his early teens, and after a few years in New York City's schools, had won admission to Columbia University at the age of 16, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors and second in a class of over 900. Some years after his death, I was told by the then president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, who had been a classmate of Harrison, that the top three men in the class ranked as follows: first, Benjamin Cardozo, the future Supreme Court Justice, second, Leon Harrison, third, Nicholas Murray Butler, the future president of Columbia University!
But it was probably not his scholarship that had brought the young student to public attention. Rather, it was his extraordinary talent as an orator. At the age of 21, while continuing with graduate studies at Columbia and preparing for the rabbinate at Emanuel Theological Seminary, he was chosen to deliver the oration for the Jewish Community at the funeral services in 1887 for the famous American preacher, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe).
The young rabbi began his tenure at Temple Israel in 1891 and it could not have been long before his sermons became the talk of the town. His sermons were "beautifully spoken essays," as they were described by a renowned editor of a contemporary literary magazine. The congregation's membership, which included some of the city's leading business and civic figures (most of them of German origin) grew so rapidly that by 1908 it could afford to build a new and much larger sanctuary for itself, the classically designed edifice at the northwest corner of Washington and Kingshighway Boulevards. It was there that Harrison's magnificent voice, often compared to a finely turned organ, coupled with his vast learning and facility of expression, raised him to prominence—"one of the great ecclesiastical orators of the nation," as the Post-Dispatch described him—and it was there that Harrison continued his leadership of the congregation until his death in 1928. In those twenty years, the services at Temple Israel were often attended not only by many Jewish non-members but by Christians as well, and not only on Saturday mornings, when his subject was usually of a more secular nature, but even at the regular Friday Evening services. For though he loved to dwell on the lessons and the traditions of Judaism, his outlook was always humanitarian and universal, the product, no double, of the broad philosophic and liberal education that he had received at Columbia University and that he never ceased to supplement with his own omnivorous reading. The popularity of Harrison's sermons has nowhere been explained better than by Dr. Abram Sachar, the founding president and now the chancellor of Brandeis University, who also enjoyed a close friendship with "the bishop" as we used to call him. In the introduction to a collection of Harrison's sermons which he edited a few years after Harrison's death under the title, "The Religion of a Modern Liberal," he wrote:
"Through the wide variety of subjects on which he expressed himself, a consistent philosophy of religion shone clear. Rabbi Harrison's Judaism was not narrow. He could have preached his message from any liberal Christian pulpit. His preaching, in other words, was not hemmed in by any theological barriers. He was Hellenic in his love for the aesthetic, Voltarian in his crisp, satiric attack upon bigotry. American in his theological pragmatism."
It was on the occasion of my first meeting with Rabbi Harrison that he invited me to come to his Sunday School. He wanted me to meet a group of young people there, especially Erwin Steinberg, who had just entered Washington University and, like me, was planning a career in law. I got the impression that Erwin's own father could not have shown more pride than Harrison in the honors that he had won and the brilliant career that lay ahead of him. I did come to the Sunday School and was given the Confirmation Class to teach. Tess Haas was then the principal and big Adolph Newman, the Temple's rector, coached the confirmands in the speaking parts. Steinberg led the post-confirmation group and he and I became fast friends, as Harrison had wished. Promising each other that we would someday be partners in the law practice. Unfortunately, Erwin fell ill one day with a strep throat. This was before penicillin and death came within a few days. I shall never forget the funeral and the sight of Harrison breaking down on the pulpit and weeping openly, as a father would for a lost son.
In addition to his interest in the young leaders of his Sunday School, there were those years in the early twenties when he led a group called "The Hashomrim" at the old Y. M. H. A., the predecessor of the J. C. C. A., which occupied a beautiful old residence at Delmar and Grand Avenues. I was a member along with Sachar and a dozen others of our age. The meetings would be held in the evening, once a month, and would begin with a modest dinner. One of the members would then read a paper on the scheduled subject, and a general discussion with Harrison as moderator would follow. He would then close the meeting with his own commentary which, though extemporaneous, was always so stimulating in thought and expressed in such beauty of language as to leave us awe-stricken. Often, after the meeting was over, some of us would accompany him to his car, and I can still hear the snow crunching under our shoes one wintry night, straining not to miss a word he uttered. For, as Sachar also points out, he was "even more impressive as a conversationalist than as a preacher. Few could match his endless flow of wit, bubbling in cascades of sparkling prose. "With all this, he also had a sense of humor and a gift of telling a story with a cockney or Irish accent worthy of a professional comedian."
But, I suppose, there was still another reason for Harrison's seeking the companionship of young people. He never seemed to lose an eagerness to enjoy life as a young person would, physically as well as mentally. He not only preached but strove in every way to practice the joy of living. His almost daily bicycling, despite his near-sightedness that made him a familiar but hazardous object to be carefully avoided on the streets of St. Louis; the mountain climbing that I understand he used to do in his 30's and 40's; his frequent travels abroad and especially the cycling he did with me during the summer of 1924 when he was 59 years old and we biked and push-biked our way from Naples to Milan and across the Alps by way of the Little St. Bernard Pass, and the following summer when we pedaled down the Rhone to the Mediterranean, then to Lourdes, where he spent hours observing and making notes on the parades and the rituals that attended the "miracle healings" at the famous grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. Before his return to St. Louis he had, I am sure, a wealth of materials for his future sermons.
Three years later, on his return from another European trip, this time for health reasons, a tragic accident took his life in a New York subway and ended my friendship with the most unforgettable man I have ever known.
Written by Israel Treiman (1901-1993) for Temple Israel's commemorative booklet titled HISTORY OF TEMPLE ISRAEL 1886-1986...One Hundred Years in the Life of the Congregation 5647-5747.
Reprinted with Permission
___________________________
Scroll down this page and just below the final photo on the right, click on the access link to reveal more photos. Double-click on any photo image to enlarge it and to reveal any captions, or attributions by scrolling to the bottom of the photo.
_________________________
The rabbi featured on this Find A Grave page is one of many included in a "Virtual Cemetery" of rabbis who've passed but who served on St. Louis pulpits during their rabbinate. The complete "Virtual Cemetery" list can be found at SAINT LOUIS RABBIS. Questions about this "Virtual Cemetery" project may be directed to:
Steven Weinreich
Email: [email protected]
