He is a past vice-president of the Rabbinical Council of America and former editor of Tradition: The Journal of Orthodox Jewish thought published by the RCA.
[4] Emanuel is the eldest of three sons born to Rabbi Joseph H. Feldman,[5] a native of Warsaw and scion of a rabbinical family.
[2] Joseph Feldman served as a rabbi in Manchester, New Hampshire in the 1930s, but left that post to assume the helm of Baltimore's Franklin Street Synagogue so his sons could attend a Hebrew day school.
While other Orthodox synagogues in Atlanta were moving away from Orthodoxy, Rabbi and Rebbetzin Feldman tried to nurture Torah observance among their constituents.
[2] The fact that this young Jewish couple — he an expert tennis player and she a well-dressed, former fashion designer — still observed what people thought of as outdated mitzvot intrigued and attracted new congregants.
It was only in the 1960s that a small group of congregants bought houses near the synagogue so they could walk to it on Shabbat and Yom Tov, and began sending their children to the Hebrew Academy of Atlanta, a day school which Feldman helped establish in 1954.
When board members dragged their feet about reinstalling it, Feldman put his young rabbinate on the line and threatened to quit if it they didn't bring it back.
In 2001 he published a book of essays on rabbinic and synagogue life[4] entitled The Shul Without a Clock: Second thoughts from a rabbi's notebook (Mesorah Publications Ltd.).
He serves as editor-in-chief of the landmark Ariel Chumash project, which began publishing its new English translation of Rashi, Targum Onkelos and other commentaries in 1997.