Theodore Mann, lawyer and influential voice on Jewish affairs, dies at 92

Theodore R. Mann, a lawyer and activist who worked on landmark First Amendment cases, led Major American Jewish Organizations and became an early and outspoken advocate for a two-state solution in the Middle East, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was 92.

The cause was COVID-19, said his daughter Julie Mann. He had been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus that can cause the illness about two weeks earlier, she said.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Mann co-founded a law firm in Philadelphia, where he specialized in complex commercial litigation while taking pro bono cases through the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Jewish Congress. Four years into his legal career, he handled the early phases of a 1963 Supreme Court case, Abington School District v. Schempp, in which the justices ruled 8 to 1 that school-sponsored Bible readings were unconstitutional.