“The Last of the Giants:” Rabbi Robert Marx, Chicago Civil Rights Legend, dies at 93

An obituary in his own words

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., center, with Rabbi Robert Marx to his left.

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Rabbi Robert Marx, asked to monitor a fair housing march on Chicago’s Southwest Side in 1966, watched Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers from a seat on the curb with his 12-year-old son.

People on the sidewalk started throwing rocks and hurling epithets at the marchers, he remembered years later. Something happened. I got up, my son and I holding hands, and we walked into the middle of the street and started marching with Dr. King. Something happened at that moment that said you can’t be an observer. You’ve got to be a participant.

You’ve got to go across the street.

Marx, a man who spent a lifetime going “across the street,” and encouraging others to do so, too, died Sunday in Saugatuck, Mich., after a heart attack. He was 93.

“He was the last of the giants,” said Gail Schechter, lead organizer of the Justice Project: The March Continues, the north suburban anti-discrimination organization.

Veteran civil rights activist John McKnight, an advisor to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and a mentor to community organizer Barack Obama, said Monday that Marx was to Chicago-area Jews what the late Monsignor Jack Egan was to Catholics -- a conscience and spur to action.

“Every religious group had a person who stood out in the search for justice and ecumenicalism, who was the most respected voice. These were the two who stood out for their denomination,” McKnight, founder and co-director of ​The Asset-Based Community Development Institute of Chicago, said. “They were both trying to pull their institutions forward ... in the civil rights movement.” 

Marx founded several Chicago area-based civic organizations, most notably, in 1964, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. He was the spiritual leader of Congregation Solel in Highland Park from 1973 to 1983 and, from 1983 to 2002, of Congregation Hakafa, which holds Friday night services in Winnetka, when safe.

Marx was with King in Selma as well as Chicago. 

When King came to the South Side, Marx was director of the Chicago Federation of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism). He wrote to his employers on Aug. 5, 1966, explaining why he was going back to Marquette Park to walk with King.

Some of you … will accuse me of helping to create violence. … I am not inciting violence, but rather it is those who prohibit free men from peacefully marching who do the inciting. And in the final analysis, perhaps it is better that I receive a scar from a rock thrown on a Friday afternoon, than for one million Negro children to bear the scars for a lifetime, knowing that they cannot live where they want to live or travel where they want to travel.

You may think that I am insensitive to the criticism that I know has been voiced on many occasions over my involvement in civil rights causes: why don’t I spend more time on Judaism? Why do I dissipate so much of my energy on a cause that is not ours? I am aware of these criticisms, and I am pained by them: for you see I feel that freedom is Judaism, that Passover is not 3,000 years old - that it is today and that we are part of it. I feel even more deeply that unless Jews -  Jews who are devoted to their faith and their synagogues, as I am devoted to my faith and my synagogue -- unless all of us are involved in the crucial issues of the world; Judaism will not exist in future generations for our children and our children’s children. And perhaps it ought not to exist.

Marx, Egan and McKnight were among those who, in the late 1960s, successfully fought for the rights of “contract buyers” of homes on Chicago’s West Side and elsewhere. These buyers, usually Black, were often grossly overcharged for home mortgages, and typically lost their homes and investments if they were late on a single payment.

Marx’ role in the fight was risky. He and his fellows were arrayed against mortgagers who were often Jewish. Funding of Marx’ organizations dried up. He and Egan were sued. One day, when Marx and other volunteers were moving evicted homeowners back into their house, armed guards opened fire.

“It got him shot at, and it got him run out of town,” said his friend, Rabbi Bruce Elder. 

In 1971, Marx took a promotion from the reform group which required he move to New York. He stayed there two years, then returned to Illinois, where he was hired at Solel.

His congregational work was informed by a personal tragedy: the death of his son David at 15. He formed a group for parents who had lost children. It was open to people of all faiths, but many people in the group wound up joining Hakafa, said Elder, who succeeded Marx as rabbi there in 2002.

Marx told Studs Terkel about David in an interview that was published in Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, Terkel’s 2001 book.

I believe that David is somewhere and that someday I will be united with my son. We will be together, and we will talk, and David will lay his hands on my forehead, as he once did when I had a headache, and he said, “I’m so sorry you have that headache. I’m so sorry ... ”

When I think about that, I don’t think about something abstract, because that defies all logic. I think of the concrete people I know, and of the possibilities for me someday being united with them in some way that transcends anything that I could possibly imagine.

I think the most beautiful things in my life are things I can’t prove. I can’t prove why I feel being a rabbi is important to me. I can’t prove why I believe in God.

Schechter, Marx and a few others brought together 30 area faith leaders for an ecumenical group after a 1999 shooting spree by a white supremecist killed two people, including Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong. Several others, all minorities, were wounded. 

Marx quickly wrote a statement that was never used, Schechter said, because some felt it inferred that “evil is okay if it happens somewhere else.” But she never threw it away. 

We thought violence was somewhere else. It is here. We thought evil was somewhere else. It is here. We always said, “Thank God things like that don’t happen here.” They do happen here. And we have to face the truth that somehow or other we still have a job to do. As long as there are guns to hurt our children, as long as there is hatred that fills our hearts, as long as there is the separation that leads us to be molded without a sense of justice and decency, then violence will hover even at our own doorstep. There is a job to be done. We have to teach. We have to believe. We have to act.

Harriet Rosenthal was a founding member of Hakafa, and said that hiring Marx was a key to the future of the new congregation.

“He was a very complex individual,” said Rosenthal, Deerfield’s mayor of 12 years.

“He was brilliant, he was 100% committed to social justice as part of being Jewish and also had the greatest smile and twinkle in his eye. He was one of the most charismatic people I have ever known. 

“Robert always had his goal in mind, and he was very skillful in getting you on board with what he wanted to get done.”

One of his first goals was adopting a sanctuary family, decades before that was in vogue. Marx often had a bit of a head start on such social justice projects at Hakafa, because the congregants purposely created a faith community with no bricks and mortar, so there never is a building fund to fret over when deciding whether to back a community priority.

Elder is following the tradition of an activist faith leader, including helping lead Hakafa opposition to U.S. immigration policy, which has included numerous (pre-Covid) missions to the border with Mexico.

Rabbi Robert Marx and the Rev. Jesse Jackson of Rainbow Push were friends for decades. Jackson often attended Congregation Hakafa Shabbat services the Fridays after Thanksgiving. In a press release, Jackson said, “We’ve lost our prophet. I met Rabbi Marx when we were together with Dr. King in 1965. He was the Jewish voice for justice, working closely with the Black community and Black churches.  We prayed together, sang together and marched together.  When Nazis marched in Skokie, we fought hate together. We have always been together. I love him so much. I miss him already.”

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One might expect a man like Marx would wind up in politics. It almost happened, he wrote in 2012.

One day I was asked to run for Congress. This was of course a mistake on the part of the somber committee that came to see me one Sunday afternoon. I toyed with the idea of going to Washington and charting our country’s destiny for about 24 hours. What happened was that I mentioned my political aspiration to a few members of Hakafa. One of them promptly proclaimed his deep affection for me, and simultaneously announced that if I ran for Congress he would immediately resign from the congregation. That did it! One tangible congregation member suddenly meant more to me than the prospect of saving the universe through my service in Congress. Besides, I would have lost. 

But he had political opinions, like these from 2013.

Instead of Blue against Grey, it is now Blue against Red. There was a moment in our history when our differences were what made us great. Today, our differences make us angry and petty and unforgiving. Here I am — suggesting a justice agenda for the Jewish community and simultaneously deploring the very bitterness that such an agenda invariably engenders. I am aware of the paradox. But I am also aware that the old agendas are dead. And that what is required is a new vision. 

Congregations cannot sustain themselves on an Israel diet, nor can they survive on meaningless calls for Jewish survival. Israel becomes increasingly remote from American Jews; its moral role as an occupying power is becoming difficult to justify. 

Years after Marx and his wife Ruth moved to Michigan, they continued to keep in touch with their Hakafa congregation. Marx held annual study sessions for members. Rosenthal said she talked on the phone with Marx every other week, and Elder kept in touch weekly. Marx had regular telephone and letter-writing relationships with several others.

Elder said he has learned an important lesson from Marx, his mentor: That people should be helped in the way they ask to be helped, and never told how to live.

In 2006, Techny’s Society of the Divine Word Catholic order gave Marx its annual BridgeBuilder Award for his ecumenical work. In presenting him with the award, Schechter said, “When I get down or frustrated, I recall what Rabbi Marx once said in a sermon, that “We are all works in progress” and that “God doesn’t ask why aren’t you like Moses” but “Why aren’t you your best self?” 

In his own speech, Marx said,

The easy part about marching in Selma, Ala. and even in Marquette Park was that we were able to deny ambiguity. We knew what we had to do. There was racism, there was hatred, there was a disease stalking our country, and we could be clear in our determination to cure that disease, to destroy that racism. But today, there is still racism. It is now economic and social. The name of the enemy is selfishness. It lies in economic disparity and indifference. It is to be found in continuing chaos in our health insurance system, as millions of families must go to a hospital emergency room for the little health care they receive. It is to be found in the guilt that all of us must share for our utter failure to conserve the natural resources of our universe. We can never be silent actors on the stage of life. Act as if the future of the world depends upon what you do today.

Marx was a founding board member of the formerly Schechter-led Interfaith Housing Center of the Northern Suburbs (later Open Communities) and also the 25-year-old organization now known as Interfaith Worker Justice.

“I adored Bob Marx,” IWF founder Kim Bobo said. “If there was a social justice issue that involved poor people, he was there. He brought incredible wisdom from the Talmud, and religion was never separate.” 

Bobo is now executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center, and Schechter now runs Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly (HOME) in Chicago. 

Marx often said that Jews occupied the “interstitial spaces” between groups, which made them vulnerable to attack, but also left them as handy go-betweens who are ethically required to bring groups together, because Jews are, for instance, not of the American majority and not Black, either.

Going back to medieval times, Marx wrote in his book The People in Between: The Paradox of Jewish Interstitiality that Jews have been 

… located between the parts of the social structure of western societies. Neither a part of the masses nor of the power structure, Jews were uniquely positioned so that they fulfilled certain vital yet dispensable functions … Interstitiality may be negative, or it may be positive. It may open a path to the gas chamber or it may lead to prophetic heights that enable the Jewish people to rise above parochialism or nationalism.

“He felt Jews are the people in between, based on the understanding that Jews are not the oppressors, and not the oppressed,” said Jane Ramsey, who worked for Marx’ Jewish Council on Urban Affairs from 1979 to 2012, the last 33 years as executive director.

“His concept was to align with the oppressed, not the oppressor, which is the strongest way to deal with antisemitism. And because it’s the right thing to do.

“He saw the wisdom in forming partnerships to work with the many communities fighting the depths of oppression: Police torture, immigrant rights, housing, voting rights, healthcare.”

Ramsey now teaches community organizing at the University of Chicago. 

As a spiritual leader, Marx tried to bring clarity to the ambiguity with which Jewish theology treats the concept of life after death. In 2001, he wrote,

I believe that we do exist after death, that we exist in some non-material form.

And I believe that those we love who preceded us in death try to reach out to us, try to touch our lives, try to protect us from our own foolishness and from the dangers that ensnare us. I believe that when we think of them, when we remember them, our task is to try and listen to what they are telling us.

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