Rabbi Elijah Schochet will be Congregation Bet Shalom’s scholar-in-residence Oct. 23 and 24. He will speak on “The Value of a Jewish Life,” exploring both superficial and deep reasons behind anti-Semitism, at the Shabbat evening service on Friday, Oct. 23 at 5:30 p.m. At the Oct. 24 Shabbat service at 9:30 a.m., he’ll discuss “The Value of a Human Life,” probing questions of medical ethics.
Schochet is the author of seven books on Jewish thought and the lives of great Jewish figures, including “Amalek: The Enemy Within,” “The Hasidic Movement and the Gaon of Vilna” and “Saul Lieberman: the Man and his Work.” He served as the rabbi of Congregation Beth Kodesh, later renamed Shomrei Torah, in Los Angeles from 1960-1999. He has been an adjunct professor of rabbinical literature at American Jewish University for more than 40 years and professor of rabbinic studies at the Academy for Jewish Religion-California since its founding in 2000. He is also a licensed marriage and child counselor in California.
Schochet is the son of Rabbi Jacob Schochet, who taught at the Los Angeles Yeshiva, and the grandson of Rabbi Chaim Zvi Rubenstein, founder of the Hebrew Theological College of Chicago. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1955 and was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1960. In 1967, he received his doctorate in rabbinic literature from JTS.
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