Sherwin Wine

01 / The Detroit story

The Detroit story

Sherwin Wine was born in Detroit in 1928 to Polish Jewish immigrants and grew up in the Conservative congregation Shaarey Zedek. After ordination as a Reform rabbi he served briefly as an assistant at Detroit's Temple Beth El, then in the army as a chaplain, and in 1959 helped launch a new Reform congregation across the river in Windsor. In 1963 a small group of families who had left Temple Beth El asked him to lead a new congregation in the northwestern suburbs. The group, eight families at first, met in Birmingham and then built its own home in Farmington Hills, and under Wine it dropped prayers to God in favor of celebrating Jewish culture, history and ethics. A 1964 Detroit Free Press headline, Suburban Rabbi: I Am an Atheist, made him nationally known and controversial. From the Birmingham Temple he founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969. He led the congregation until 2003 and died in a car accident in Morocco in 2007.

Highlights

1. Founded the Birmingham Temple, first Humanistic Jewish congregation, in 1963
2. Founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969
3. Named Humanist of the Year for 2003 by the American Humanist Association
4. Rabbi of the Birmingham Temple until his retirement in 2003