Asher Wade

In 2004, Wade completed a professional doctoral degree in clinical psychology through Southern California University for Professional Studies. Today Wade lives in Jerusalem with their six children where he lectures at yeshivas and seminaries, teaches at Touro College and has a private practice in clinical psychology.

While living in America, they were contacted by Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore. This meeting, chaired by Herman N. Neuberger, led to him and his family being sent in 1988 to Jerusalem where he learned for a number of years at Yeshiva Ohr Somayach. Wade was ordained as a rabbi in December 1992 and worked at The Heritage House in the Old City of Jerusalem, Ohr Somayach as well as Aish HaTorah for many years.

Several months later, Wade obtained the support of a younger professor, who apparently had no qualms with their conversion to Judaism. Although he was forced to drop his prior research studies as a condition for this support, Wade happily began research in a fully Jewish topic, Samson Raphael Hirsch and the Orthodox-Reform Debate. About two years later, having undertaken expensive research trips to New York, as well as having written up his first rough-draft, his second supervisor mysteriously withdrew his support of his doctoral program, which left Wade with two dissertations written but disallowed from taking the oral exams for completion. The Wades eventually converted to orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt-am-Main in May, 1983 and, shortly thereafter, moved to the United States.

As an ordained Methodist minister, Wade and his wife were moved by the articles in a Sunday morning newspaper commemorating the 40th anniversary of Kristallnacht. At that time, he was attending the University of Hamburg in Germany working towards his doctorate in metaphysics and relativity.