Judah Nadich

In 1936, four years after graduating from City College of New York, Rabbi Nadich earned a master's degree in history from Columbia University and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

He was the Army's senior Jewish chaplain in Europe in April 1945 as advancing U.S. and British forces liberated Nazi concentration camps in Germany.

Eisenhower, the commander of Allied forces in Western Europe, named Rabbi Nadich to offer advice on how to cope with hundreds of thousands of displaced persons being kept in military custody in squalid conditions little better than the camps they had survived.

In a 1953 book, Eisenhower and the Jews, Rabbi Nadich wrote that he and others persuaded the Allied command to abandon a policy requiring the displaced to be returned to their home countries.

"[2] As President of the Rabbinical Assembly, in 1974, he called on the movement's Law Committee to "give careful consideration" to his proposal to admit ordained women, which eventually occurred in 1985.

Captain Judah Nadich (standing centre), a Rabbi with the American army, raises his glass as he offers the Kiddush prayer. To the left of Captain Nadich (originally from Baltimore, Maryland), hidden by his right arm, is Captain Gershon Levi, from Montreal, Canada, a Rabbi with the Canadian forces. He had previously offered the prayer over the bread. On the right of the photograph is Colonel Moses Strock from Boston, Massachusetts.