BOULDER, Colo. (AP) – Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, has died in his Boulder, Colorado, home. He was 89.
Rivkah Walton of the Alliance for Jewish Renewal says Schachter-Shalomi died Thursday morning in his sleep after a long illness.
Schachter-Shalomi started the renewal movement in the early 1960s as a way to use contemporary religious and political scholarship to re-examine Judaism after the Holocaust.
Walton says the nondenominational movement includes 45 affiliated congregations and dozens of others not officially affiliated.
Schachter-Shalomi was born in Poland and raised in Vienna. His family fled during the Holocaust and ended up in New York.