The Shalom Center: A Brief History, 1983 to 2006

The Shalom Center was founded in 1983 as a division of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, then a member of the RRC faculty, who became its director, and Ira Silverman, alav hashalom, then president of RRC.

Its original mission was to address the raging nuclear arms race from a Jewish perspective. It addressed this question as the danger of a planetary ecological disaster (the "Flood of Fire," in Jewish tradition) rather than an ordinary war-peace question.

Beginning in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the diminution of the nuclear arms race, The Shalom Center refocused on other planetary ecological dangers. Waskow developed both a theology and practice of eco-Judaism and wrote several books on those questions, while The Shalom Center went forward with these issues.

From 1978 on, Waskow's interests in tikkun olam had gone hand in hand with his work on spiritual/ liturgical / ceremonial concerns. The journal he founded, New Menorah, became the journal of the P'nai Or Religious Fellowship, and simultaneously, the concerns of P'nai Or for liturgical and spiritual creativity increasingly addressed tikkun olam.

In 1993, The Shalom Center merged with P'nai Or to create ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, intending to unify the spiritual and tikkun-olam concerns.

In the late '90s, The Shalom Center began addressing issues of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking (which Waskow as an individual had addressed since 1969). In 2002, with a US invasion of Iraq looming, The Shalom Center began investing a great portion of its energy in opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

By 2004, The Shalom Center's energies had crystallized around these concerns: the Iraq war and its by-products, especially including the emergence of torture as a tool of US policy and of top-down, unaccountable presidential power; "Beyond Oil," an effort to address the dangers American addiction to over-use of oil poses to the planet through the climate crisis of global scorching and other dangers; the creating of deeper connections among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim teachings and communities in Abrahamic mode; an interfaith effort to identify and encourage the use and marketing of "Sacred Foods"; peacemaking in the broader Middle East; gay rights, especially in marriage and other sacred contexts; and immigrants' rights.

In September 2005, The Shalom Center became once again an independent 501c3 tax-exempt religious institution with its own board. (For a list of Bioard members, see elsewhere on this website.)

The present staff is made up of Rabbi Arthur Waskow as Rabbinic Director, Russ Agdern as national organizer of the Beyond Oil campaign, and Nick Alpers as Project Coordinator .