LATROBE, PA—Saint Vincent College and its School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will host the first annual Rabbi Jason Edelstein Lecture for Catholic-Jewish Dialogue on Thursday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. The lecture will be held in the Verostko Center for the Arts, located on the second floor of the Dale P. Latimer Library on the College’s campus.

Rabbi Jamie Gibson, M.H.L., will present “New Horizons in Catholic-Jewish Dialogue: Beyond Acceptance.” Rabbi Gibson teaches courses on Judaism and Catholic-Jewish Dialogue at Saint Vincent and is the first person to hold the Rabbi Jason Edelstein Endowed Chair in Catholic-Jewish Dialogue.

Named in honor of the late Rabbi Edelstein, a longtime faculty member in the Saint Vincent College Department of Theology, the Rabbi Jason Edelstein Endowed Chair in Catholic-Jewish Dialogue was established in 2015 to advance a mission of Saint Vincent College as expressed in Nostra Aetate, the incipit of the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council,”: “Since Christianity and Jews have such a common spiritual heritage, this Second Vatican Council wishes to encourage and further mutual understanding and appreciation.”

The lecture is free and open to the public; no prior registration is required.

ABOUT RABBI EDELSTEIN*

Rabbi Edelstein taught courses to largely Roman Catholic students at Saint Vincent College on Jewish theology and history, the Holocaust and Catholic-Jewish dialogue. For more than two decades, he also made use of his training as a clinical psychologist and his decades of service as a rabbi to train Saint Vincent seminarians in pastoral counseling.

In 1968, Rabbi Edelstein came to Saint Vincent at the invitation of Father Campion Gavaler, O.S.B., who was chair of the Department of Theology. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council and its emphasis on healing relationships between Catholics and Jews, Saint Vincent hosted a major conference on interfaith dialogue. Father Campion, building on that momentum, hired Rabbi Edelstein to teach a course on Catholic-Jewish dialogue at the College. The result of this was a commitment to mutual enrichment between Rabbi Edelstein and the students of Saint Vincent, where both came to know their respective faiths in a different and brighter light.

ABOUT RABBI GIBSON

Rabbi Jamie Gibson, M.H.L., served as the rabbi at Temple Sinai in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh for 32 years. Rabbi Gibson is a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem as well as a Rabbinic Fellow of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. In addition to leading the congregation of more than 700 families, Rabbi Gibson also became a leader in building interfaith and interracial ties throughout the religious communities of the Pittsburgh region. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Rabbi Gibson earned a master’s degree from Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, studying at its programs in Jerusalem and Cincinnati.

*Text originally appeared in an article written by Dr. Christopher McMahon, Professor of Theology at SVC, honoring Rabbi Edelstein, published on Sept. 4, 2021.