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Joseph Prouser

Rabbi Joseph H. Prouser is the spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey, in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. He has served on the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which adopted his rabbinic rulings on “The Obligation to Preserve Life and the Question of Post-Mortem Organ Donation” and “Compulsory Immunization in Jewish Day Schools.”  He has also served as the Rabbinical Assembly liaison to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and as a member of the Joint Beit Din (Rabbinic Court) of the Conservative Movement.  Rabbi Prouser was a Daniel Jeremy Silver Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies.  He has taught courses in Jewish Medical Ethics, Rabbinic Literature, and “The Impact of the Hebrew Bible on the American Founding Fathers” to rabbinical and cantorial students at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, New York. He is a frequent editorial contributor to the New Jersey Jewish Standard, and writes a weekly column, “Say Little, Do Much,” for New Orleans’ Crescent City Jewish News. Rabbi Prouser has taken an active role in the Boy Scouts of America and its allied National Eagle Scout Association, and serves the BSA as National Jewish Chaplain.

Essays

Just Remove this Death from Me: Rabbinic Responses to Vaccination

Contemporary rabbinic authorities have established this religious obligation as carrying scriptural authority – citing no fewer than five affirmative Commandments and three Biblical prohibitions.