Albert S. Axelrad

Albert Sidney Axelrad, the Reform rabbi who shaped Jewish life at Brandeis University for more than three decades, died on 18 September 2026. He was 87. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported his death on 23 September, recalling a chaplain and Hillel director whose pluralism, social-justice activism and gift for listening left a lasting mark on generations of students, many of whom became rabbis themselves.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 22 October 1938, Axelrad attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Columbia University. In 1965 he received rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, then moved to Massachusetts to become Jewish chaplain and executive director of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation at Brandeis. He remained in that role until 1999, a tenure colleagues later described as defining what a campus Hillel director could be.

At Brandeis he insisted that students and faculty from every Jewish stream receive the support to live full Jewish lives. He hired an Orthodox rabbi and made space for that minyan even while remaining committed to egalitarian prayer. In 1968 he helped found Havurat Shalom in Somerville, a lay-led independent congregation that became a model for the havurah movement. In the early 1970s he arranged the first adult bar and bat mitzvah training for university community members who had missed the ceremony in youth, a practice that spread across North American synagogues. He also introduced an annual Jewish Arts Festival that other Hillels adopted.

Activism ran through his rabbinate. As a member of the Jewish Peace Fellowship he counseled students weighing conscientious objection during the Vietnam War and later called himself a "pacifoid" rather than a pacifist. He joined hunger strikes and advocacy for divestment from apartheid South Africa, worked with Breira for a two-state approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and made Brandeis a hub of the Soviet Jewry movement. He traveled twice to the Soviet Union to meet refuseniks and published Refusenik: Voices of Struggle and Hope after his first visit. His books also include Meditations of a Maverick Rabbi and Call to Conscience: Jews, Judaism, and Conscientious Objection.

After retiring from Brandeis in 1999 he became founding director of the Center for Spiritual Life and an adjunct professor of religion at Emerson College in Boston, and served as a part-time chaplain at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. He and his wife Berta raised their children in Massachusetts; Berta died in December 2024 after 63 years of marriage. Axelrad is survived by four children and several grandchildren. Former students remembered him as a bridge-builder and a mensch whose open door and moral example still guide their work.