Life
Berkovits received his rabbinical training first under Rabbi Akiva Glasner, son of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner, the Dor Revi'i, including semicha, and then at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin as a disciple of Rabbi Yechiel Weinberg, the great master of Jewish law in that generation, and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berlin. He served in the rabbinate in Berlin (1934–39), in Leeds, England (1940–46), in Sydney, Australia (1946–50), and in Boston (1950–58). In 1958 he became chairman of the department of Jewish philosophy of the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie. At the age of 67, he and his family immigrated to Israel in 1976 where he taught and lectured until his death in 1992.
Berkovits wrote 19 books in English, Hebrew, and German, and lectured extensively in those languages. His writings deal with basic issues of faith, spirituality and law in the creative dialogue between religion and modernity, with an emphasis on halakha in the State of Israel and on halakha relating to marriage and women. His thought is in essence a philosophy of morality and history for contemporary society.
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