Departures of note

Albert S. Axelrad served as Jewish chaplain at Brandeis University and director of its B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation from 1965 to 1999. Born in Brooklyn, he studied at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, earned a sociology degree from Columbia University, and was ordained as a Reform rabbi by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1965 before moving to Massachusetts. He died on September 18, 2026, at age 87. Axelrad worked to ensure that students from all Jewish streams could practice fully at Brandeis, hiring an Orthodox rabbi, providing space for an Orthodox minyan, and championing egalitarian prayer even as he himself attended non-egalitarian services. He cofounded the lay-led Havurat Shalom in Somerville, which became a model for the havurah movement, and created some of the first adult bar and bat mitzvah training programs in the 1970s. A committed political activist, he counseled students weighing conscientious objection during the Vietnam War, advocated divesting from apartheid South Africa, supported the two-state solution through the organization Breira, and campaigned for the freedom of Soviet Jews, traveling twice to meet refuseniks. He wrote 'Meditations of a Maverick Rabbi' in 1984 and 'Refusenik: Voices of Struggle and Hope' in 1985.