Background

Nehemia Polen was born circa the 1930s.

Education

Nehemia Polen studied at Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Bachelor of Science. He also earned a Master of Education at Northeastern University and a Doctor of Philosophy at Boston University in 1983.

Career

An ordained rabbi and an educator, Nehemia Polen is considered a leading expert on Hasidism and Jewish mysticism and thought. Ordained at the Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore, he served as a congregational rabbi for twenty-three years before entering the field of education. Now, he directs Hebrew College's Hasidic Text Institute in addition to his teaching duties. Polen also was a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

At Boston University, Polen studied and served as a teaching fellow for Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. While studying with Wiesel, Polen began work on his second book, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. A well-known Hasidic educator, Shapira taught in the Warsaw Ghetto and compiled a manuscript of his teachings in the ghetto between 1939 to 1942. The work was buried at Shapira's death in 1943, along with a note that should it be found, that manuscript must be delivered to Israel. After World War II, the manuscript was discovered, sent to Israel, and published in Hebrew as Eish Kodesh, or Holy Fire. The work achieves historical importance as the last work published by a Hasidic leader before the Holocaust. In his writings, Shapira ponders the purpose of Evil. He searches for spiritual and mystical responses to the suffering and despair around him as the ghetto's Jews suffer under Nazi genocide.

Polen indulged in Malkah Shapiro's writings (1894-1971) when he was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in the late 1990s. The daughter of a noted Hasidic rabbi of Kozienice, Poland, Shapiro's memoirs examines women's spirituality during early twentieth-century pre-war Poland. Polen's research led to his translation of Shapiro's writings from the Hebrew and their publication as The Rebbe's Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Childhood. Shapiro's autobiography focuses on her adolescence from age eleven to her marriage at age fourteen, and her curiosity about tradition, Hasidic spirituality, and Kabbalah.

Achievements

• Nehemia Polen is best known as a writer and educator. As a writer, his work, The Rebbe's Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Childhood by Malkah Shapiro, was praised by critics and won the National Jewish Book Award in 2002. Additionally, Polen became a Harvard University Daniel Jeremy Silver fellow in 1994 and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1998-1999.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Holy Fire

    (The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Sh...)

    1994
  • The Rebbe's Daughter

    (Shapiro's tale, translated and presented in Rabbi Polen's...)

    2002
  • A Blessing for the Sun 1981

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Lawrence Kushner: "Polen's Orthodox rabbinic education qualifies Polen to accomplish more than a mere historian. He intuits that through the life teaching of Rabbi Shapira, he can teach us of a long-lost way to understand what seems to be gratuitous evil."