Special to the Ledger

Rabbi Herbert N. Brockman

NEW HAVEN — Rabbi Herbert N. Brockman, spiritual leader of Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden, will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Human Letters degree from Albertus Magnus College at the New Haven school’s commencement exercises on Sunday, May 18. Brockman will receive the degree in recognition of his efforts as a passionate advocate of social justice and interfaith cooperation for nearly three decades.

A native of Youngstown, Ohio, Brockman was raised in an Orthodox home, the son of Rabbi Harold Brockman, who was ordained in his native Riga, Latvia, and lived on a kibbutz in Palestine in the ’20s. He served as an Orthodox rabbi in Youngstown. Brockman first served a 1,700-family congregation in Baltimore while completing his PhD at the Ecumenical Institute of St. Mary’s Seminary & University, and then taught at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., where he led Congregation Keneseth Israel, and at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, before taking over the pulpit at Mishkan Israel 28 years ago.

Brockman and his congregants are involved in many interfaith and tikkun olam activities. Mishkan Israel is a member of Abraham’s Tent, an annual winter program of Interfaith Cooperative Ministries that shelters homeless men for a week at a time in greater New Haven houses of worship. In addition, under Brockman’s leadership, 21 years ago Mishkan Israel established the Peah Agricultural Project, a small farm on the synagogue property that provides thousands of pounds of vegetables every summer for local soup kitchens. Members studied Mishna Peah, which outlines Jewish agricultural laws, and discussed the mitzvah of feeding the poor. “The idea is to understand that we’re not just doing it because we’re nice people, but because we’re Jews,” Brockman told the Ledger in 2011.

Brockman is also a William Sloan Coffin-Joan Forsberg Fellow in Urban Theology at Yale Divinity School (YDS). He is a lecturer at YDS, teaching two courses for the Office of Supervised Ministries. In 2001, he was on sabbatical at Gregorian University at the Vatican. He serves on the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Hartford Seminary and St. Raphael’s Foundation. He is also co-president of the Interfaith Cooperative Ministries in New Haven.

“Rabbi Brockman is a unique human being and especially a unique rabbi,” former Mishkan Israel president Bobbi Friedman of North Haven told the Ledger in 2011, upon the occasion of Brockman’s 25th anniversary with the Reform congregation. “His outreach to the interfaith community is extraordinary, and at the same time he remains absolutely true to the very core of Judaism and his rabbinical duties. There has never been an instant where I do not feel that his responsibility as a rabbi and his place as a learned Jew in the world have not been foremost. He imparts that mission both to his congregation and to the larger community, and with an ease that is as natural to him as anything else might be.”