Born Buenos Aires, September 7, 1930. Died Monroe Township, New Jersey, January 25, 2009, aged 78.
April 2, 2009 11:38The only Progressive rabbi to become a papal knight — under Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 — Rabbi Leon Klenicki combined a belief in better interfaith relations with a facility for straight talking.
The son of immigrants from Poland to Argentina, he studied at Buenos Aires University, winning a scholarship to Hebrew Union College, Cincinatti, the centre of American Reform Judaism. He was ordained in 1967 and also graduated from Cincinatti University.
He developed Reform Judaism in Latin America, producing prayer books and a Haggadah in Spanish. In 1968 he addressed the first South American gathering of Catholic and Jewish leaders in Bogota, Colombia.
In 1973 he moved to New York as director of Jewish-Catholic relations for the Anti-Defamation League. From 1984 until retiring in 2001 he was its director of interfaith relations.
He wrote a booklet for Jewish readers on the development of Christianity, and adapted a Haggadah for Christians to understand Jesus’s Seder. He also quizzed Pope John Paul II on his 1987 meeting with the controversial Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim.
He served on the 1997 commission of enquiry into Nazi activity in Argentina. In retirement, he gave a summer course on liturgy at Cambridge University.
Divorced from his first wife, he is survived by their son, daughter and a grandson, and his second wife.