Philip Hiat, 95; rabbi forged bonds with other faiths
NEW YORK — When Rabbi Philip Hiat was installed in January 1967 as the spiritual leader at Mount Neboh Synagogue, a small Reform temple on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a Roman Catholic priest and a Protestant minister took part in the proceedings.
The minister, the Rev. Dan M. Potter, said in his remarks that “broad areas of social action based on the moral, ethical, and social ideals held in common between Christians and Jews have been neglected seriously.”
Potter, underscoring the need to address that neglect, turned to Rabbi Hiat and added, “We know you will place high on your agenda continued interfaith involvement.”
Rabbi Hiat heeded that call, forging bonds with followers of other religions in what would be a hallmark of his career as a scholar and clergyman in the decades that followed.
“This was a man who only wanted to bring people together,” Philip E. Miller, librarian emeritus at the Klau Library of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and a close collaborator of Hiat’s, said via e-mail.
Perhaps the most prominent example of that desire was the 1987 book “A Visual Testimony: Judaica From the Vatican Library,” which Rabbi Hiat edited. There was also a companion exhibition that, like the book, was assembled with the help of Miller and others. The exhibition toured the US for two years and put dozens of Jewish manuscripts on public display for the first time.
Rabbi Hiat’s hope, he wrote in the book’s acknowledgments, was that widely sharing the Vatican’s collection of literary and historical materials related to Judaism would “enable both Catholics and Jews to understand their unique relationship through the ages.”
The manuscripts in the book and exhibition were among about 800 the Vatican had gathered over the years from collections donated by wealthy families and from some cities’ libraries. The works that were featured included a Hebrew translation of a medical encyclopedia completed in 1254 by a doctor and Talmudic scholar working from a text by a Christian surgeon; a book of 13thcentury Hebrew riddles; and a 15th-century copy of the Mishneh Torah, a Jewish legal code written by Maimonides.
Access to the manuscripts — produced in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain from the eighth to the 18th centuries, illustrated in sumptuous reds, greens, and golds — had previously been mostly limited to scholars.
Rabbi Hiat, who undertook a similar venture several years earlier by bringing the show “Fragments of Greatness: Judaica From Poland” to the US, approached Catholic officials in 1984 about sharing the works publicly. Happily, he found them receptive to the idea, and after several trips to the Vatican and a scouring of the library vaults led by Miller and Michael Signer, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, the project was complete.
Rabbi Hiat died Sept. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95. The death was confirmed by his family.
Reviewers praised the “Visual Testimony” exhibition. A Globe critic called the collection “breathtaking.” The show, The New York Times said in its coverage, “not only offers a development of thought within Judaism, but presents as well a millennium of cultural and intellectual exchange between Christians and Jews.”
Philip Hiat was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 10, 1926, and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of three children in an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Samuel, an immigrant from Russia, was a tailor. His mother, Anna (Plisner) Hiat, an office manager at a printing company, was born in Austria.
Philip attended public school, graduated from Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side and joined the Army after turning 18. Assigned to a combat regiment, he served in the Pacific theater during World War II.
Returning home, he enrolled at Yeshiva University and graduated in 1948. That same year he married Sylvia Tischler, whom he had met in a Hebrew school playgroup when he was 5.
In addition to his wife, a religious educator, Rabbi Hiat’s survivors include his son, Herschel Hiat; two daughters, Merryl H. Tisch, chair of the State University of New York’s board of trustees, and Susan Tisch; six grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.
After earning his undergraduate degree, Rabbi Hiat attended the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He graduated and was ordained as a rabbi in 1953.
Following his ordination, he held executive positions with the New York Board of Rabbis and the Synagogue Council of America before taking the helm at Mount Neboh.
In 1968, early in his tenure as rabbi there, Mount Neboh hosted a ceremony in which Bishop Fulton J. Sheen received a brotherhood award. It was the first time a Catholic prelate in the New York Archdiocese had addressed worshippers from a Jewish pulpit on the Hebrew Sabbath, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.