SILVER, DANIEL JEREMY

SILVER, DANIEL JEREMY (1928–1989), U.S. Reform rabbi. Daniel Jeremy Silver was the son of abba hillel silver (1893–1963). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was educated at Harvard University, received his rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union College, and a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. His first pulpit was Congregation Beth Torah in Chicago. In 1956 he became the associate rabbi at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father had been in service since 1917. Upon his father's death in 1963, Silver became the senior rabbi, where he remained until his own death in 1989. Silver was an active participant in local Jewish and secular affairs. He was appointed to chair a committee of the Mayor's Commission on the Crisis in Welfare and served as vice president of the Cleveland Museum of Art; he taught Judaism at Cleveland State University and Case Western Reserve University, chaired the Congregational Plenum, and was active in the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland. Nationally, he held leadership roles in the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis and edited the movement's journal for ten years. He was the president of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and chaired its Academic Advisory Council. He wrote Maimonidean Criticism and Maimonidean Controversy, 1180–1240 (1965); A History of Judaism: Volume I, From Abraham to Maimonides (1974); Images of Moses (1982); and The Story of Scripture, published posthumously in 1990. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: MS. 4850 Daniel Jeremy Silver Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.; "Daniel J. Silver, 61, Rabbi and an Author," in: New York Times (December 21, 1989), p. 20. (Bezalel Gordon (2nd ed.)