Social Justice leader participated in the local Civil Rights Movement

Historic City News was notified that the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society is mourning the February 16th death of Al Vorspan, a giant in the movement for Social Justice among Reform Jews.  Vorspan, although not a rabbi himself, was arrested here in St. Augustine, along with 16 Rabbis, making for the largest mass arrest of Rabbis in U.S. history.

Early in the second week of June 1964, while the Civil Rights Act was being filibustered in the U.S. Senate, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. called for assistance in St. Augustine through his friend Rabbi Israel Dresner.  Vorspan and sixteen Rabbis answered the call.  While praying with African-Americans at the Monson Motor Lodge along St. Augustine’s bayfront, all were arrested on June 18, 1964 for “disturbing the peace”.

“We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” they wrote from their cell in the St. Johns County Jail.  “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”

Vorspan was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on February 12, 1924. He fought in the US Navy during World War II.  He was a founder of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and served as the longtime director of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Commission on Social Action.  He was the author of many books, well-known to Jewish students who came of age in the turbulent 1960s.