The ReichenbachFamily Archive
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Builder of Reform Jewish youth life

Paul J. Reichenbach

Forty-four years in Reform Jewish youth leadership

Dolf’s son took the story he grew up with — escape, and a life rebuilt — and made it his life’s work: the camps and Israel journeys where Jewish teenagers discover they belong.

Paul is the son of Adolf “Dolf” Reichenbach and Susan “Subie” Ulmer Reichenbach. In the house he grew up in, Dolf’s escape from Nazi Germany was not distant history; it was the reason the family existed at all. Paul carried that knowledge into a working life among Jewish teenagers, and passed it in turn to his own children — Sara Reichenbach Manor, Joanna “Joey” Reichenbach Amichai and Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach.

Born in Boston and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Paul went to Kutz Camp in Warwick, New York, in the summer of 1969, when he was seventeen. The national teen leadership camp of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, as the Reform movement was then called, became a place he returned to again and again. There he met Judith Newman, who would become his wife, and friends he would keep for more than fifty years. In 1970 he moved to New York City to attend New York University and shared an apartment with his Kutz friend Loui Dobin. He loved the camp so completely that, in the deepest sense, he never left. In 1975 he joined the movement’s professional youth staff. From that point forward his work was the distance between one good summer and a whole Jewish life.

Sources

Records and testimony

  • Union for Reform Judaism records and press releases, 2002–2019
  • Steve Schafer Memorial: Paul Reichenbach, audiovisual recording published on YouTube
  • URJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy, ‘Celebrating Our 10th Summer’ and camp history
  • Brown & Brown Garden City, Camp Team Allies biography
  • Foundation for Jewish Camp impact reporting
  • Published recollections of camp colleagues and directors
  • Family account supplied by Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach, August 2026
  • Union for Reform Judaism, NFTY-EIE press release and fiftieth-anniversary resolution
  • URJ Heller High, program history
  • Temple Israel of Boston, congregational history of Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn
  • Henry Johnson, ‘Camp Zakelo & Long Lake Lodge,’ Maine Summer Camps, Winter 2019
  • The iCenter, ‘Israel Education in Practice,’ 2013
  • Ilana Schear, ‘How I Went from Participant to Professional,’ NFTY in Israel
  • Louis J. Dobin, ARZA Gala reflection honoring Paul Reichenbach
  • Paul J. Reichenbach, ‘Trust, Confidence, and Integrity: A Reflection on Camp and COVID-19,’ eJewishPhilanthropy, 30 April 2020
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From survival to Jewish life

Dolf escaped so that a future could exist. Paul spent his life building one.

A son of a refugee learns early that Jewish continuity is not a given. Paul’s answer was practical: camps, journeys to Israel, and the patient work of turning a busload of teenagers into a community.

Over four decades, the places he helped build were where thousands of young Jews first found that Judaism could be lived — in friendship, argument, song, responsibility, travel and shared purpose.

Temple Israel of Boston

The room he grew up in

It started in Boston. Paul grew up and was confirmed at Temple Israel, where the senior rabbi of his youth was Roland B. Gittelsohn.

Before Kutz, there was Camp Zakelo on Long Lake in Maine. Paul spent childhood summers there and loved it. Camp had already shown him how completely a summer away could shape a young person.

After Paul’s first summer at Kutz, Temple Israel’s senior rabbi, Roland B. Gittelsohn, opened the next door. In October 1969, Gittelsohn nominated seventeen-year-old Paul to attend the UAHC Biennial at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. “It changed my life!” Paul later said. After the Biennial, Gittelsohn asked him to deliver a sermon at Temple Israel. Paul has preserved a copy of the sermon.

Gittelsohn had been a Marine chaplain at Iwo Jima. He was a civil-rights activist, a proud Zionist, and later the founding president of the Association of Reform Zionists of America. Temple Israel remembers his pulpit as one that took on McCarthyism, civil rights, desegregation, the Vietnam War and Middle Eastern policy.

The account does not establish a single moment that set Paul’s course. But the Biennial, the invitation to preach, and the lives that followed make the connection plain: activism joined to Jewish responsibility, Zionism built into institutions, and the conviction that a voice is for using.

Temple Israel’s history of Rabbi Gittelsohn’s tenure Maine Summer Camps history of Camp Zakelo
Paul J. Reichenbach beneath the NFTY banner

NFTY · camp · Israel

Kutz, and everything after

Paul’s working assumption was simple and, in the 1970s, not universally shared: that a Jewish teenager’s identity is formed by what happens to them, not by what is explained to them, and that an institution’s job is to make the right things happen and then get out of the way.

The work grew outward from that first Kutz summer. He co-directed the NFTY Teen Leadership Camp there, part of the Reform movement’s youth organization, then took on its Israel and Europe programs beginning in 1978. In time he oversaw the whole camp system of the Union for Reform Judaism, as the UAHC had become. He spent a career braiding together three things most movements keep separate: the intensity of camp, the responsibility of youth leadership and the encounter with Israel.

Underneath all of it ran trust. Families were handing him their children, sometimes to programs thousands of miles from home. He answered with kindness and gentleness, with firmness, and with an almost obsessive attention to organization. He expected himself and his staff to be reachable at any hour — calm, prepared, careful.

The scale of a life’s work

Built one relationship at a time

The numbers are large. Each one was a teenager somebody trusted him with.

44years serving Reform Jewish youth
30,000+teenagers and young adults on Israel and Europe programs
12 → 18URJ camps during the system’s expansion
14,000+young people in a summer across the camp system at its height

Thresholds

He showed up

Not from an office. At the gate before the flight, on the camp road in July, in the room where a sixteen-year-old was deciding whether to go.

JFK Airport

Every cohort, seen off in person

His son Daniel remembers it plainly: Paul saw every NFTY-EIE cohort — the semester-long high-school program in Israel, now URJ Heller High — off from Kennedy Airport and met them again when they returned. So, often, did the East Coast teenagers leaving for the summer program then called NFTY L’dor V’dor. He was not there for the logistics. He was there because departure and return were the lesson: standing at the gate, he told them what the journey asked of them — toward Israel, toward the Jewish people, toward one another.

The summer circuit

Every camp, every summer

Then there was the circuit: every camp in the system, every summer. He met directors and staff, and always the oldest campers, who would find themselves listening to a case for spending a semester in Israel. Each year he also visited congregations across the country to speak with young people about camp, Israel programs and the value of taking part. His family watched the same habit at close range. He did not waste chances to inspire; he collected them.

Kutz Camp

Simply “P.J.R.”

At Kutz, across the generations, he is simply P.J.R. — three initials that need no explanation there, passed along the way camp hands everything down.

“Nestled in the Judean hills…”

Paul’s remembered opening, echoed in the URJ’s 2011 resolution for EIE at Kibbutz Tzuba

Ask anyone who heard him pitch EIE, and they will give you the opening before anything else. After the program moved from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion campus in Jerusalem to Kibbutz Tzuba, one phrase turned geography into an invitation. The URJ’s own fiftieth-anniversary resolution in 2011 used the same language for the Tzuba campus. Heller High has since moved to the Alexander Muss High School in Israel campus in Hod HaSharon, but the hills stay in the sentence.

A working memory

The details stayed with him

Everyone who knew Paul remarked on the reach of his memory.

His family remembers that he could recall flight schedules, dates, places and the names of senior rabbis around the country with startling ease. But it was more than recall. He could draw on those details in the moment — while speaking with a young person, making the next introduction, or arranging a complicated program — and turn a remembered fact into the next useful action.

That gift made the work feel personal at scale. A far-flung camp system, an airport departure, a congregational visit: people encountered someone who knew their context before they had finished explaining it.

Remembered by his family

These memories of Paul’s travel, relationships and working style are supplied by Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach.

A life in motion

The job, hour to hour, was talk: teaching, persuading, deciding, reassuring a parent, taking the next call.

Paul J. Reichenbach leading a youth session
Paul J. Reichenbach, early-career candid
Paul J. Reichenbach, student portrait
Paul J. Reichenbach with Loui Dobin

At work · at camp · with friends

The people and places that stayed with him

From a convention-hall microphone to a Kutz Camp tractor, these family photographs keep Paul’s work, humor and friendships in the same frame.

Paul J. Reichenbach at a URJ Biennial announcer booth
Paul J. Reichenbach giving a send-off talk at JFK
Paul J. Reichenbach with Rabbi Danny Freelander and Loui Dobin
Loui Dobin, Paul J. Reichenbach and Cantor Jeff Klepper
Paul J. Reichenbach with the Kutz Camp maintenance staff
Paul J. Reichenbach with the Kutz Camp maintenance staff, 1976 · color-adapted view

Colleagues and participants

In their words

The people who worked with him describe what sound like different men — a mentor, a boss, an airport orator, a voice on the telephone. They all turn out to be the same one.

“Paul was already a legend in our field.”

Aaron Selkow, camp director and colleague

“We listened to Paul Reichenbach tell us we were about to have the best summer of our life.”

Ilana Schear, NFTY in Israel participant and professional

“I can only describe the call as something from a Mission Impossible Movie.”

Greg Kellner, founding director of URJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy

His leadership was “critical to [the camp system’s] great success.”

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism

The connector

Every generation of his life in one room

Programs became real because Paul knew the person who could imagine each one, the person who could fund it, and the person who could run it — and introduced them.

Camp directors, donors, rabbis, educators, the movement’s North American leadership, the Israeli leaders of Progressive Judaism. His family remembers the breadth of it — ARZA, Netzer and the wider international Reform movement: the Zionist arm, the worldwide youth wing, the whole far-flung family of Progressive Judaism. The published record catches the same work at single moments: raising scholarship money for Israel study, supervising Israel education across the movement, honoring the educators who did it well, and tending the long friendship with Ike and Helaine Heller, whose generosity opened EIE to generations of students.

When ARZA honored Paul at a gala — alongside Rabbi Lawrence “Larry” Kroloff and the musician and educator Peri Smilow — his lifelong friend Louis J. Dobin, longtime director of Greene Family Camp, looked around and named what he saw: a reunion of people from every generation of Paul’s life, all of them still trying to change the world.

Paul on Israel education

“I cheerlead, encourage sharing of best practices, set expectations, build relationships, oversee materials and recognize excellence.”

The iCenter’s 2013 study described Paul as the national URJ leader making Israel education a priority across camps, Israel programs, the youth movement and college work.

Read the iCenter study
Paul J. Reichenbach addressing a gathering
Paul’s “Voice of God” card

The “voice of God”

Authority carried in a baritone

Colleagues know the voice. His family knows what stands behind it.

Daniel remembers what the staff and camp directors called his father: “the voice of God.” An affectionate joke about the baritone — and not entirely a joke, because his judgment carried weight to match. Paul asked people for the extra mile knowing he had already walked it.

At UAHC and URJ conventions and Biennials — the movement’s great national gatherings — he became the announcer, the voice rolling through crowded halls to introduce speakers, call out events, point thousands of people the right way. Many participants heard Paul long before they ever saw him.

Friends carried the joke into print, making him a stack of mock business cards for “The Voice of God.” Paul has kept one with him ever since.

The authority never rested on a title. It rested on being reachable, on remembering everything, on judgment earned the slow way — and on the certainty that a problem brought to Paul would be taken seriously. A convention hall, a departure gate, a quiet telephone call that redirected a colleague’s whole career: each one got the voice, at full strength.

Listen to Paul

A voice preserved

Here, Paul speaks for himself: a complete remembrance delivered for the memorial of Steve Schafer, running just under seven minutes. It holds what no photograph can — the baritone, the deliberate pacing, the presence and eloquence behind the nickname.

Published by the Steve Schafer Memorial in Jerusalem 2014 channel.

Watch the recording on YouTube
Accessible description of the recording

Paul delivers a sustained memorial address in a resonant baritone. He speaks deliberately, with the measured pacing of someone accustomed to holding a large room, yet the tone remains personal rather than ceremonial. The recording is included as evidence of the public voice, presence and eloquence that colleagues and family remember. A complete transcript is not yet available.

Away from the office

A good meal, properly ordered

As his family tells it: Paul loves camp, lifelong friends, Israel, The New York Times — and food, most visibly of all. He never misses the chance for a good meal, and he orders as if he owns the restaurant.

Almost everything is fair game

A proper dinner has courses: salad, appetizer, a special entrée and, of course, dessert. Whole fried fish in spicy garlic sauce, oysters, creamed spinach — all welcome at the table. Truffles, licorice and beer are not.

Comfort, never display

He likes nice things without being flashy about them. Economy seats and six-foot-three legs do not mix, so he mastered airline, hotel and credit-card points, became a United Airlines million-miler — and gives the winnings away: flights, upgrades and hotel stays for his family.

Julia Child to Iron Chef

Cooking shows are a lifelong pleasure — Julia Child first, and later, with a young Daniel beside him, Emeril Lagasse and Iron Chef. He loves food even when he is only looking at it. Also: films, the music of the 1960s, the color orange, and the softest pillow in the house.

Paul J. and Daniel Reichenbach

Father and son

The story passed forward

Paul gave Dolf’s story to his son Daniel — along with his grandfather’s name, and the responsibility of keeping the archive.

Paul married Judith Newman of Grand Rapids, Michigan, whom he had met at Kutz. They raised Sara Reichenbach Manor, Joanna “Joey” Reichenbach Amichai and Daniel in a family life that was never separable from congregations, camps, Israel and the work of memory.

This archive is part of what he handed on: a son listening to his father, going back to Halberstadt at his side, and laying the documents open so that belonging, persecution, survival and rebuilding can be read together.

Institutions change; programs shrink; what one generation builds, the next reorganizes. What Paul built was never on the organizational chart anyway. It is in camp friendships now decades old, in Jewish families, in careers of service, in attachments to Israel — and it keeps compounding, without him having to do anything more about it.

Read the public record

The career, as the institutions recorded it

The record below documents the career. The voice, and what it all meant, come from his family.

Celebrating the 10th SummerURJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy · career overview and 30,000-participant figureHistory of 6 Points Sci-TechPaul’s first-person recollection of the specialty-camp ideaURJ retirement announcementContemporary institutional appraisal of Paul’s leadershipReimagining youth travel to IsraelPaul on safety, access and the purpose of an Israel experienceBuilding more inclusive youth spacesPaul’s role in the URJ–Keshet partnershipA camp director remembersAaron Selkow on the call from Paul that changed his lifeSeeing EIE students off at Kennedy AirportA contemporary URJ report quotes Paul on their commitment and purposeFifty years of NFTY-EIEThe 2011 URJ resolution and its description of Kibbutz Tzuba in the Judean HillsFrom NFTY-EIE to URJ Heller HighThe program’s official history and present-day homeThe Heller family’s lasting impactPaul’s tribute to a donor relationship that opened Israel study to more studentsAn ARZA gatheringLouis J. Dobin remembers the gala honoring Paul and other Reform Zionist leadersTrust, Confidence, and IntegrityPaul’s first-person reflection on camp leadership, parental trust and the 2020 COVID-19 closure decision