The Ira and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein Reconstructionist Archives of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) include the world’s largest collection of correspondence with Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, Ph.D. The archives house more than 10,000 items of correspondence between Kaplan and others dating from 1908 to 1976. Notable correspondents include David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Cyrus Adler, Louis Finkelstein and Salo Wittmayer Baron, to name a few.

In 2018, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the college and the Reconstructing Judaism Convention in Philadelphia, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, president of Reconstructing Judaism, proposed an exhibit focusing on Rabbi Kaplan’s correspondence. With archivist Erin Hess, she invited a committee of scholars to select noteworthy correspondence for inclusion in this exhibit—the first of its kind for the Reconstructionist Archives. The scholars on that committee were Eric Caplan, Reena Sigman Friedman, Deborah Dash Moore, Noam Pianko and Mel Scult.

With tens of thousands of letters to choose from, the committee members had no small task in front of them. Inspired by the convention theme, “Rooted and Relevant: Reconstructing Judaism in 2018,” they decided to focus on topics rooted in the earlier days of the Reconstructionist movement and that still reverberate today. The content of each letter spoke to the “root” of an issue—social justice, Jewish education, women’s roles, Zionism and Rabbi Kaplan as a person—and the scholars provided contextualization that addresses the relevance of these issues today.

We are grateful to our generous funders, without whom this exhibit would not be possible: The Olive Bridge Fund, which supports this exhibit and the archives’ larger project of making Kaplan’s correspondence accessible online; and the Save America’s Treasures initiative of the National Endowment of the Humanities, which supported the conservation and digitization of 7,000 items of Rabbi Kaplan’s correspondence.