Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, along with Ali Abu Awwad and Shaul Judelman, cofounded Roots/Shorashim/Judur, a joint Palestinian-Israeli grassroots peacemaking initiative dedicated to understanding nonviolence and transformation, where he currently remains director of international relations. An Orthodox rabbi, he also serves as the Executive Director and Community Rabbinic Scholar for the Jewish Studies Initiative of North Texas and as coordinator for Faiths in Conversation, a framework for Muslim-Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue which he found in 2012. A biography regarding his speaking engagements writes, “In these two capacities, he (Schlesinger) teaches adult education classes on Judaism and spearheads interfaith projects throughout the greater Dallas area. He is also a member of the Rabbinical Council of America and the International Rabbinic Fellowship, as well as Beit Hillel (an Israeli rabbinical association dedicated to influencing a more inclusive, Halakha-observant Judaism). He is a Rabbis Without Borders Fellow, and was honored in 2013 and again in 2014 as the Memnosyne Institute Interfaith Scholar.
Personal biography
After growing up in New York, Schlesinger moved to Israel at the age of 20, served in the Israeli Defense Forces, and completed a BA through Empire State College, the open university of New York State. He has invested a great deal in strengthening his own Jewish education, having studied over ten years in Israeli Yeshivot, primarily at Yeshivat Har Etzion, and in an M.A. program of Jewish Philosophy at Hebrew University.
The first part of his professional career was dedicated to teaching Jewish studies in various colleges and seminaries in the Jerusalem area, and well as in different frameworks in Florida and Texas. Schlesinger's personal website details his various engagements in Jewish education over the years: “From 1998 to 2000 he served as a fellow in the Judaic Fellows Program of Boca Raton, Florida. In 2005 Rabbi Schlesinger came to Dallas, Texas to serve as the head of the Community Kollel, and he spent eight years serving the Dallas Jewish community. When the Community Kollel folded in 2010, he founded the Jewish Studies Initiative of North Texas to continue the educational work he had been doing in the larger Jewish community of Dallas."
He and his Israeli-born wife Ayala live in Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion. They have four grown children and seven grandchildren.
Interfaith work
Ten years ago in Dallas, Schlesinger began his work in cultivating interfaith dialogue and connections across faith and cultural backgrounds. He served as a speaker for a local organization called Connecting our Faiths and later spearheaded the founding Faiths in Conversation, a framework for Jewish-Christian-Muslim theological dialogue. His website notes, “The experience of these trialogues inspired him to attempt to meet Muslims and Christians back in the Holy Land." Activities involving inter-religious exchange play a significant role in the efforts of Roots to forge connections between Israelis, a majority Jewish population, and Palestinians, a majority Muslim population.
Personal transformation, journeying toward the other
Schlesinger, an Orthodox rabbi and teacher, is also a self-described “passionate Zionist settler." He moved to the West Bank in 1983 “out a deep sense of the fact that Jewish destiny has come to a deep consummation, and I wanted to be part of the Jewish destiny…In front of my eyes, I saw the fulfillment of 2,000 years of Jewish dreams and hopes, and the resilience of a people, after so much destruction. I saw the triumph of the spirit, the fulfillment and consummation of our people, and I saw tremendous justice in it. I saw the triumph of the human spirit. I saw justice all around me". His website notes that he had never “met a Palestinian as an equal until he returned to Gush Etzion from Dallas” a few years ago."