Irving J. Rosenbaum (1921–2005)

Irving J. Rosenbaum was born to a Jewish family in Omaha, Nebraska. At age 16, he moved to Chicago, Illinois to attend the University of Chicago and Hebrew Theological College in Skokie. After graduating from both institutions in the early 1940s and being ordained, Rabbi Rosenbaum was named national director of the Department of Interreligious Cooperation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 1946. To help educate Christians about Judaism, he produced a film and an accompanying book entitled Your Neighbor Celebrates: The Jewish Holidays (with Rabbi Arthur Gilbert and Oscar Tarcov, 1947), the first but not the last time he turned to different forms of media as educational tools. In 1960, he was named the first executive director of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. There he produced educational television shows to teach children about religion and offer Hebrew language lessons to adults. Later, he taught himself computer programming and founded the Davka Corp. in 1981, which made Hebrew and Judaic software and video games. He was a longtime member of the board of the Jewish Federation of Chicago, where he spearheaded courses on Jewish history for Jewish leaders. In 1976, he published The Holocaust and Halakhah, a book about how Judaism was practiced in Nazi concentration camps. It was based on the doctoral dissertation he wrote to earn his PhD from Hebrew Theological College the previous year.