Rabbi Sherwin Wine was born in Detroit, Michigan. His parents immigrated to the United States from part of the Russian Empire that is now in Poland. His father, whose name was originally Herschel Wengrowski, joined family members in Detroit in 1906. Wine’s mother, Tieblei Israelski, immigrated to Detroit in 1914. Wine attended Detroit public schools with almost completely Jewish student bodies. His religious upbringing was in Conservative Judaism, at Shaarey Zedek synagogue. His parents kept a kosher home and observed Shabbat.
Wine attended the University of Michigan, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree and later a Master of Arts degree, both in philosophy. As an undergraduate student he was most sympathetic to empiricism, particularly its then-current manifestation logical positivism. At the same time, he was attracted to the humanistic outlook of some faculty members.
Despite his movement away from theism, Wine decided to join the clergy rather than academia and in 1951 enrolled in the rabbinic program at Reform Judaism’s Hebrew Union College. Wine volunteered for service as a chaplain in the U.S. Army after his ordination as a rabbi and served as associate rabbi at the Reform Temple Beth El in Detroit for six months while awaiting induction. Wine began his service as an Army chaplain in January 1957 and was stationed in Korea. In November 1958, he returned to Temple Beth El in Detroit. In the fall of 1959, he joined a group in Windsor, Ontario just across the Detroit River in Canada to organize a new Reform congregation, also called Beth El.
In 1963, a disaffected group from Temple Beth El in Detroit contacted Wine and asked him to meet with them about forming a new Reform congregation in the northwestern suburbs of Detroit, where the members now lived. He began leading services for the new group, initially eight families, in September 1963 in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Working with members of this small group to develop language which reflected their true beliefs, Wine eventually made the decision to eliminate the word “God” from the services and instead to use new liturgy that extolled Jewish history, culture, and ethical values. This decision was to lay the foundation for the development of Humanistic Judaism as separate from Reform Judaism or any other existing Jewish stream.
The congregation, now known as the Birmingham Temple, purchased land in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and moved into a newly constructed building in 1971. Wine served as the rabbi of the Birmingham Temple until his retirement in 2003, at which time he began devoting most of his efforts to his work as Dean for North America and Provost of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism as well as to lecturing on a wide range of topics under the auspices of the Center for New Thinking, which he had founded in 1976. Sherwin Wine died in a car accident in Morocco in 2007, where he was vacationing with Richard McMains, his life partner of over 25 years.
Credit as: Leonard N. Simons Jewish Community Archives. Sherwin Wine Oral History Interview, Tuesday, June 21, 2005.
