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.