For Immediate Release Contact: Barbara K. Laskin
March 18, 2004 Doug Stone
(651) 696-6203

Macalester to Honor Rabbi Bernard Solomon Raskas, April 1
Jewish Historian to talk about 350 Years of Jewish Life in America

St. Paul, Minn. - Macalester College is celebrating the career of Rabbi Bernard Solomon Raskas with a lecture by Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian for the National Museum of American Jewish History. Sarna's lecture, titled "On 350 Years of Jewish Life in America, 1654-2004," will be at 11:45 a.m., on Thursday, April 1, 2004, in the Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center, John B. Davis Lecture Hall, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, Minn. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Raskas has been a visiting distinguished professor of Religious Studies at Macalester since 1986 and was the college's first Jewish associate chaplain. Last spring, he assembled the exhibit "A Precious Legacy: The Ten Commandments in Ten Versions" which is now on permanent display in Macalester's DeWitt Wallace Library.

He served for 50 years as rabbi of Temple of Aaron Congregation in St. Paul where he is now Rabbi Emeritus and Laureate. Raskas also taught at the College of St. Catherine from 1965-1970.

A scholar, community leader and author of many books and more than 200 published articles on Judaism, Raskas is also the recipient of the Agus Award from the Rabbinical Assembly and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He was a member of President Jimmy Carter's Commission on the Holocaust which helped create the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

"In Jewish thought, humans are co-creators (shutafim) in the work of the world.... Jewish thinkers understood that all work must be honored.... If we do not have good plumbers as well as good philosophers, as the saying goes, then neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water..." -Rabbi Bernard Solomon Raskas, January 1995.

Macalester is a private liberal arts college with a full-time enrollment of 1,810 students. Macalester is nationally recognized for its commitment to academic excellence, internationalism, diversity and service to society.

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