Rabbi Jules Harlow, 92, Dies; Helped Redefine Conservative Jewish Prayer

Rabbi Jules Harlow, a liturgist who brought a poet’s sensibility and a musician’s cadence to the style of prayer in Conservative Judaism for much of the second half of the 20th Century, died on Feb. 12. He was 92.

His wife, Navah Harlow, said the cause was aspiration pneumonia. She did not say where he died.

For a time, Rabbi Harlow’s major works — prayer books for daily, Sabbath, festival and High Holy Days use — became the standards for worship in Conservative synagogues in North America. Several of his books sold well over 100,000 copies each, according to the Rabbinical Assembly, which published them.

Conservative Judaism, which occupies a middle ground between the more liberal Reform and the more traditional Orthodox, was the largest movement in American Judaism until Reform surpassed it in the 1990s.

Though Hebrew is the language of Jewish prayer, Rabbi Harlow aspired to make the prayer book accessible to those who did not speak the language. He did this through elegant, if not always literal, translations into English that often captured the rhyme and meter of the original texts.

At a funeral service for Rabbi Harlow in Manhattan on Feb. 14, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, called him “the resident poet of the Conservative movement.”

Jewish liturgy, Rabbi Schorsch noted, is often “burdened with an excess of words.” Rabbi Harlow wrote and translated prayers and excised more than a few.