Rabbi Israel Seymour “Sy” Dresner, a champion for civil rights known as “the most arrested rabbi in America,” was born on April 22, 1929, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He became an activist at the young age of thirteen, when he joined the Labor Zionist youth movement known as Habonim Dror, turning into one of its leaders in his later teen years. His first arrest came in 1947, when Dresner was detained during a demonstration outside the British Empire Building in New York City against Britain’s blockading of a ship of Holocaust survivors from docking in Palestine. Dresner earned his B.A. from Brooklyn College and M.A. from the University of Chicago in international relations. After spending two years in the U.S. Army, Dresner was ordained in 1957. The following year, he was installed as the full-time rabbi of Temple Sha’arey Shalom in Springfield, New Jersey. In both his early political actions and in those after he became a rabbi, Dresner grounded his activism in his Jewish heritage and faith, and the conviction that all global struggles for freedom were interconnected.

According to Dresner’s obituary in the Jewish Standard, “for Rabbi Dresner, being Jewish was much more than standing behind a pulpit. His Jewishness was wrapped in justice.” In a 2000 interview for Jewish News, Dresner specifically cited his Jewish faith, and particularly the Torah’s commandment to “never discriminate against the stranger,” as the motivation for his activism, saying he was on the side of any population suffering from discrimination. This spurred Dresner to become involved in rights struggles in the United States and abroad. After witnessing King’s work on the Montgomery bus boycott, Dresner was convinced that nonviolent tactics were a “brilliant” way to create change in America and put his personal and religious beliefs into action. In an interview for “The American Experience,” Dresner recounted how Congress of Racial Equality executive director James Farmer personally invited him to join the first interfaith clergy ride of the 1961 Freedom Rides. After witnessing media coverage of the first rides, and with the success of the Montgomery bus boycott in mind, Dresner was eager to contribute. In June, while trying to integrate an airport restaurant in Tallahassee, Florida, Dresner and nine other clergymen riders—known as the “Tallahassee Ten”—were arrested and convicted for unlawful assembly.

Dresner and King first met in 1962 during the Albany Movement, when Dresner and Reverend Ralph Lord Roy, pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in New York City, were granted permission to visit King and Abernathy in the Albany city jail. According to Dresner’s obituary in the New York Times, he and King met by “shaking hands through the bars” of King’s jail cell. Dresner and King conversed while fellow prisoners loudly sang freedom songs to prevent the guards from overhearing. Dresner remained in Albany after the jailhouse visit, meeting again with King and other campaign leaders, and was later one of seventy-five clergymen arrested as part of the nation’s largest mass arrest of religious leaders. King later preached to the Temple Sha’arey Shalom congregation in 1963 and 1966, and the two men remained in close contact, with King calling on Dresner to drum up rabbinical support during specific campaigns.

Dresner et al. v. Tallahassee, Dresner’s appeal on his 1961 arrest, was eventually taken up by the Supreme Court but returned to the lower courts, which affirmed the initial ruling. Rather than pay the bail fee, Dresner and the other nine clergymen were jailed for four days in August 1964. King lauded the willingness of Dresner and the other freedom riders to serve jail time. In a 5 August 1964 telegram to Dresner, King wrote, “Your heroism is the nonviolent movement’s moral witness to a world that has seen too little of the spirit and purpose of the prophets and deciples. Today it is your valient act that touches the conscience of Americans of good will.”

In June 1964, while he attended the annual convention for the Conference of American Rabbis, an urgent telegram to Dresner from King interrupted the proceedings. In the telegram, which the audience greeted with a standing ovation after its reading, King described ongoing racial tensions in St. Augustine, Florida, and asked the rabbis to “join me in a prophetic witness against the social evils of our time.” Seventeen rabbis, including Dresner, left the conference immediately and boarded a bus to Florida. There, Dresner led the rabbis in a pray-in at the segregated Monson Motor Lodge, as Southern Christian Leadership Conference activists engaged in a swim-in in the motel’s pool. The lodge owner’s violent reaction to the demonstrations drew a crowd of spectators and local media coverage to the scene, which devolved into a riotous spectacle. As tensions boiled over, Dresner and the other demonstrators were detained in the largest-scale arrest of rabbis on record.

After their arrest, Dresner and the other sixteen rabbis penned a 19 June 1964 open letter titled “Why We Went.” They wrote: “We came because we realized that injustice in St. Augustine, as anywhere else, diminishes the humanities of each of us.” Connecting the horrors of the Holocaust with the United States civil rights movement, they further stated, “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria. 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.” As discussed in his “American Experience” interview, Dresner personally felt compelled to act due to his perception of the similarities between the American public’s tendency to avert their eyes away from the black struggle and the broad European apathy toward the treatment of Jewish persons in the 1930s and 1940s.

King would once again call on Dresner’s ability to organize rabbis and clergymen of other denominations in the wake of the violent 7 March 1965 “Bloody Sunday” attack by police on demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Two days later, Dresner accompanied King and more than two thousand participants in a march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At King’s request, Dresner delivered a benediction while the protesters knelt on the bridge and prayed. To avoid confronting state troopers and violating a court order, the marchers then turned around and returned to Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church.

Dresner’s view of the civil rights movement as part of the larger global freedom struggle spurred his broadening activism. He supported the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union and was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. In his later life, Dresner became especially active in the Israeli peace movement and served as president of the Education Fund for Israeli Civil Rights (later known as Partners for Progressive Israel), backing a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In an interview with New York WCBS-TV, he said, “I want to be remembered as somebody who not only tried to keep the Jewish faith but to invoke the Jewish doctrine from the Talmud, which is called ‘tikkun olam,’ repairing the world, and I hope that I made a little bit of a contribution to making the world a little better place.”

To honor their father’s legacy, Dresner’s children are currently producing a documentary about Dresner and his relationship with King called “The Rabbi and the Reverend,” set to be released in 2023.