Rabbi David Rosen has been director of AJC's Interreligious Affairs
department since 2001. Based in Israel, he also heads the Heilbrunn
Institute for International Interreligious Understanding.
Rabbi Rosen has a distinguished career in interreligious affairs. From
1975 to 1979, he was the Senior Rabbi of the largest Jewish congregation
in South Africa and rabbinic judge on the Ecclesiastical Court (Beth
Din). He was also founder/chairman of the Inter-Faith Forum, the Council
of Jews, Christians and Muslims.
From 1979 to 1985, Rabbi Rosen was chief rabbi of Ireland, where he
founded, together with the Christian Primates of Ireland, the Irish
Council of Christians and Jews. He was a member of the Academic Council
as well as a lecturer at the Irish School of Ecumenics. He returned
to Israel in 1985 to take up the appointment of Dean at the Sapir Center
for Jewish Education and Culture in the Old City of Jerusalem and subsequently
became Professor of Jewish Studies at the Jerusalem Center for Near
Eastern Studies.
At that time, he also served as the Anti-Defamation League's director
of Interfaith Relations in Israel and as the ADL's co-liaison to the
Vatican. In 1997, he was appointed to the position of director of ADL's
Israel office.
Rabbi Rosen is a founder of the Interreligious Coordinating Council
in Israel, which includes some 70 organizations in Israel involved in
interfaith relations. He is a member of the Permanent Bilateral Commission
of the State of Israel and the Holy See, which negotiated the normalization
of relations between the two, as well as a a member of the Israeli Chief
Rabbinate's delegation for interreligious dialogue. He is also a member
of the International Jewish Committee for Inter-Religious Consultations,
which represents organized World Jewry in its relations with other world
religious bodies.
Rabbi Rosen is president of the World Conference of Religion for Peace
(WCRP), the all-encompassing world interfaith body - incorporating 15
religions in over 50 countries - and is a charter member of the International
Advisory Committee of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions
(CPWR). He is honorary president of the International Council of Christians
and Jews (ICCJ), the umbrella organization for more than 30 national
bodies promoting Christian-Jewish relations; the ICCJ's Abrahamic Forum
promotes dialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews). He is also
a charter member of the World Economic Forum's C-100, a council of 100
leaders formed for the purpose of improving relations and cooperation
between the Muslim and Western worlds.