In 1950, when the merger of Hebrew Union College (founded in Cincinnati in 1875) and the Jewish Institute of Religion (founded in New York City in 1922) was formally signed, it clearly stipulated that their campuses in Cincinnati and New York would be permanently maintained. This agreement was not ambiguous. Not even a little bit.
Permanently maintained, as in “for all time.”
But in 2022, nearly 150 years after the founding of HUC, HUC-JIR’s Board of Governors voted to change the charter from “permanently maintaining the Cincinnati campus” to closing it and keeping open its New York, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem campuses, the latter two of which were opened in 1954 and 1963, respectively.
But the mother ship? Sent to rot in dry dock.
Now that the ordination of the last rabbis to be educated at the Cincinnati campus has passed, the campus sits eerily still…though whimpers from the peerless academic resources there used by students, scholars, and researchers across the world can be heard in the hearts of those who are most cognizant of their preeminence. The academic assets of the College-Institute’s two remaining U.S. campuses on the east and west coasts cannot be compared to those that exist in Cincinnati.
section of the HUC-JIR 1950 charter which stipulates that the Cincinnati and New York campuses shall be “permanently maintained.
The world-renowned Klau Library, one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of Judaica and Hebraica in the United States and Israel, has ceased to inhale. No new books, scholarly papers, periodicals, or rare volumes arrive anymore. No rabbinical students enter its doors to study the unsurpassed wealth of wisdom it holds.
The American Jewish Archives, the largest free-standing structure of its kind with its 60 million documents that convey the history of the American Jewish experience, waits for word of its fate too, while the consequential stories and momentous histories held in its expansive repositories remain, for the most part, unspeaking.
The Skirball Museum — the first formally established Jewish museum in the United States — still houses its rich collection of Jewish art, artifacts, and cultural history, with exhibitions highlighting the American Jewish experience. Though now, these treasures linger mostly in darkness.
Before HUC-JIR’s Board of Governors voted to shut down the Cincinnati campus, there were some rumblings from the College-Institute that if the Cincinnati campus was closed for the education of rabbinical students, it would become a research/study center, the site of scholarly conferences and other like events. Even this scenario has become uncertain at this moment.
On its face, HUC-JIR’s closure of the Cincinnati campus defies all reason and suspends belief. And not just because of the unthinkable abandonment of the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives, and the Skirball Museum. But because it also means that HUC-JIR’s Board of Governors deliberately chose to locate its campuses on the coasts, in astounding indifference to the well-documented, critical, and growing shortage of rabbis across the nation. Did the Board not realize that access to rabbis is felt much more acutely in the Midwest, South, the Mountain West, and other remote areas in North America? Areas the Cincinnati campus historically supported.
The Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office warned Hebrew Union College against closing the Cincinnati campus in letters sent to HUC-JIR in December 2020 and in April 2022. The AG wrote that closing the Cincinnati campus would violate the interests of those who gave charitable gifts to HUC over the years to support a permanent rabbinical school in Cincinnati, Ohio. Closing the campus disregarded the intent of its benefactors, the letters said, and violated the Ohio Charitable Trust Act.
Since the HUC-JIR merger over 75 years ago, when private donors, charitable foundations, and other funders directed their gifts to support the Cincinnati campus and its programs, it was with utmost confidence that their directives would be honored in perpetuity. Yet it appears they were not.
New York Times Article from June 17, 1948
In April 2026, the Ohio Attorney General sued HUC-JIR to enforce the charitable trust obligations that bind HUC’s Cincinnati assets to the State of Ohio and their underlying charitable mission. The AG also alleges that the college has acted improperly by diverting restricted donations intended for the Cincinnati campus to its other locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem.
The lawsuit by the Ohio AG was the right course of action. In the end, HUC-JIR’s Board of Governors and staff leadership closed the Cincinnati campus and, according to the AG, may have treated the donors’ gifts directed for the Cincinnati campus like a house deed. They accepted these gifts and then moved the house to another lot. This is nothing less than an unconscionable — and likely illegal—breach of trust.
AG Yost’s lawsuit is asking the court to prohibit the sale of the Cincinnati campus and to block the transfer of restricted donations from being used out of state. Additionally, the suit seeks a full accounting of the college’s Ohio-based assets and a court order directing those assets to support a permanent rabbinical school campus in Cincinnati.
G-d willing, the doors of the venerable Cincinnati campus will open again for the education of liberal rabbis here in America’s historic cradle of rabbinic training. But this time, it may be under the leadership of the newly constituted, future-focused College for Contemporary Judaism, which will serve the Midwest, South, and Mountain West — areas already starving for rabbinic leadership.
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, upon his move from New York to Cincinnati in 1854 to become rabbi of Beth K.K. B’nai Jeshurun Congregation (now Isaac M. Wise Temple), proclaimed the following: “I shall go to Cincinnati, and give Judaism a new and powerful impetus.” That he did by opening the Hebrew Union College in 1875.
Today, we can joyfully celebrate the 151-year tradition of educating rabbis in Cincinnati — knowing that another “new and powerful impetus” is on the way.