Episode Details

Join America's Roundtable radio co-hosts Natasha Srdoc and Joel Anand Samy with Rabbi Eliot H. Pearlson who serves at the Temple Menorah in Miami Beach, Florida.

America's Roundtable conversation with Rabbi Eliot Pearlson includes the following key topics:

1. Is “American exceptionalism” fading?

2. The agenda to re-write America’s unique role in advancing freedom and the rule of law.

3. Socialism in Latin America and lessons for America’s citizens.

4. How October 7, 2023 changed Israel. The call to free Americans and Israeli hostages still held captive in Gaza. The significance of remembrance.

5. The future of the Abraham Accords.

6. Is Biden’s new executive order targeting Israeli citizens and politicians ⏤ a departure of US support for the Jewish state?

Brief biography | Rabbit Eliot H. Pearlson

In 1989, Rabbi Eliot H. Pearlson succeeded Rabbi Meyer Abramowitz ז”ל, who had served Temple Menorah since its founding in 1949. Rabbi Pearlson was no stranger to Temple Menorah, having served as our Director of Education before leaving for a pulpit in Asheville, North Carolina.

Born in upstate New York, he is the youngest of eight children. His parents, Sylvia and Ben ז”ל were farmers near Buffalo until moving to Miami Beach in 1963, where they entered the Hotel and Hospitality industry.

Within months of assuming his duties, Rabbi Pearlson followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, affirming the well-deserved notoriety of Temple Menorah by opening the institution to hundreds of Russian Jews escaping from the Soviet Union. Along with the survivors of the Holocaust and the refugees of Castro’s Cuba, another generation of Jewish refugees were guaranteed a spiritual home and place to worship.

Education

Rabbi Pearlson’s Jewish education is varied and diverse. Although serving in a Traditional synagogue, Rabbi Pearlson has studied in “Litvishe” Yeshiva programs such as the Greater Miami Mesifta, The Talmudic University , Lubavitch Yeshiva-Tomchei Tmimim, and Yeshiva University. In addition to his religious studies, Rabbi Pearlson has undergraduate degrees in Jewish Studies and Biochemistry, a Masters Degree in Rabbinic Literature, and graduate studies in Microbiology at the University of Florida. He was granted his Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) degree in Community Leadership by The Florida Center for Theological Studies in 2010. Rabbi Pearlson received Orthodox Rabbinic Ordination at the Diaspora Yeshiva on Mt. Zion-Jerusalem.

Community

Among Rabbi Pearlson’s community outreach efforts has been the ‘adoption’ of an African American Church. ln addition to a pulpit exchange with its minister, Temple Menorah also sponsored its Afternoon Computer Lab for Children at Risk. As a Jewish activist, Rabbi Pearlson has been arrested defending Jewish causes in Auschwitz-Birkenau, New York City and Miami—as his supporters note: “Arrested, but never convicted.”

Further reading:

Is America Exceptional? By Norman Podhoretz | Author, My Love Affair with America

Brief excerpt: "We have excelled by following our Founding Fathers in directing our energies, as our Constitution exhorts us to do, to the preservation of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, as well as to the pursuit of happiness tacitly understood by the Declaration of Independence to require prosperity as a precondition. (In his original draft of the Declaration, of course, Jefferson used the word “property” instead of “pursuit of happiness.”) By remaining faithful in principle—and to a considerable extent in practice—to the ideas by which the Founders hoped to accomplish these ends, we and our forebears have fashioned a country in which more liberty and mor