Changemaker 25: Israel S. Dresner

Today's changemaker is Israel Seymour Dresner, who was born in 1929 in New York City. Dresner was a Reform rabbi at Temple Beth Tikvah in Wayne, New Jersey, who played a significant role as a freedom fighter in the Civil Rights Movement. 

He combated racial segregation alongside his close friend Martin Luther King Jr. and was dubbed ‘the most arrested rabbi in America.’ In 1947, at the age of eighteen, Dresner was arrested outside the British Empire Building in Manhattan in a protest against Britain’s decision to prevent the landing of a ship transferring the Holocaust survivors in British-controlled Palestine. He was a veteran of political protests and during the 1960s in particular, Dresner was arrested quite often. In 1961, he met Martin Luther King Jr. in a prison in Albany, Georgia, where they were both behind bars for fighting segregation.

Dresner remained active in his fight for civil rights, which would see him get arrested for the last time in 1980 in relation to protesting outside the South African consulate in New York City during a protest against the apartheid occurring in South Africa at the time.

In his later life, he retired as a rabbi in 1996. Dresner was honored for his civil rights activism by US President Barack Obama at the White House on the evening before the 50th anniversary commemoration of the March on Washington in 2013. 

Photo credit: Frank E. Noel/Florida State Archives

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