Levi Olan

After retiring in 1970, Olan devoted more time to scholarship. He was a visiting professor at Leo Baeck College in London, and continued teaching at SMU as well as other Dallas area universities. He produced three books during his retirement: Judaism and Immortality; Maturity in an Immature World, a compilation of his radio sermons; and Prophetic Faith and the Secular Age.

Olan served on the University of Texas Board of Regents from 1963 to 1969, and served as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis from 1967 to 1969. The sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas was rededicated as the Olan Sanctuary in 1990.

Olan was also one of the few white members of the Dallas County United Poll Tax Committee, which opposed the $1.75 poll tax as a vestige of post-Reconstruction Era racism. On January 4, 1963, Olan joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a poll tax rally at the Fair Park Auditorium.

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Olan used his sermons and radio broadcasts to accuse the city of complicity due to the popular stream of vitriol aimed at Kennedy prior to his visit. He was appointed to serve on the Citizens Memorial to JFK Committee, which raised funds for a memorial that was finally constructed in 1970.

Olan was a charter member of the Dallas branch of the ACLU. He fought against a campaign to ban suspected communist artists’ works from the Dallas Museum of Art—a campaign that succeeded for an eight-month period in 1955. As a founding member of the Friends of the Dallas Public Library, he fought for the library to go ahead with plans to place an abstract sculpture in the lobby of its new building in 1955 despite public suspicion of the sculpture’s artistic and political meaning. He even fought for the name “Friends of the Dallas Public Library” against a member who accused it of sounding too communist.

At Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, Olan continued the scholarly pursuits he had begun at Harvard. As visiting professor of contemporary Judaism, he spent every morning at Perkins. His favorite haunt was the library; when a new one was built in 1951, he was its first—and became its most prolific—patron. At his carrell during the mornings, and afterward at a neighborhood lunch spot, he became a valued source of counsel and discussion in the fields of academia, politics, and culture, befriending the likes of Neiman Marcus president Stanley Marcus, theologians Albert Outler and Schubert Ogden, soon-to-be federal judge Irving Goldberg, soon-to-be civil rights leader Zan Wesley Holmes Jr., and his best friend, Perkins library director Decherd Turner.

Olan also spoke out against the Red Scare. He was one of the few members of the Southern Methodist University and Dallas communities to publicly criticize SMU English Department chair John O. Beaty when he published the anti-communist, anti-Semitic The Iron Curtain Over America in 1951. The administration of university president Umphrey Lee refused to rebuke Beaty. Gradually, however, a movement against Beaty grew, until, in 1954, the faculty condemned him, a new university president confronted him, and his political activities waned.

Olan was one of the few whites who publicly opposed racism in Dallas during the 1950s. Some of his earliest radio broadcasts expressed his shock at segregation, his endorsement of federal public housing for Dallas, and his conviction that racism was against the teachings of the Bible. Olan delivered guest sermons at Good Street Baptist Church, and became a friend and ally to the pastors there. He joined Dallas Citizens for Peaceful Integration, and advocated for school integration when Dallas defied the Supreme Court-mandated desegregation of public schools in 1954. In 1967, he convinced African American leaders to unite behind a single African American school board candidate, who won and served on the board for a decade. Because of these activities, he received hate mail, his house was vandalized, and Temple Emanu-El received a bomb threat.

In 1948, David Lefkowitz was retiring as rabbi of Dallas’ Reform Temple Emanu-El, the largest synagogue in Dallas and the second largest in Texas. The search committee was looking for an experienced rabbi who could be a liberal leader in the predominantly conservative city. Boston rabbi and best-selling author Joshua Liebman suggested Olan.

Olan completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1925, and was ordained as a rabbi by HUC in 1929.

At first, Olan was uninterested in a rabbinical career, preferring philosophy, history, or law. From 1921 to 1923, he attended the University of Rochester, where he was inspired by historian Lawrence Packard to become a history teacher, and where his exposure to the theory of evolution distanced him from his Orthodox upbringing. While playing basketball at the Unitarian Church one day, he was approached by the minister, who convinced him to talk to a Reform rabbi. The rabbi suggested Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, which appealed to Olan because his friend Regner was there, and because its free tuition, room and board would allow him to leave home.

Upon his ordination, Olan became rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1920 as a Modern Orthodox synagogue, it gradually adopted Reform practices and, under Olan’s leadership, affiliated with the Reform movement in 1937.

Levi Arthur Olan (March 22, 1903 – October 17, 1984) was an American Reform Jewish rabbi, liberal social activist, author, and professor. Born in Ukraine in 1903, he grew up in Rochester, New York and was ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1929. He served as rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Worcester, Massachusetts from 1929 to 1948, and Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas from 1948 to his retirement in 1970. Olan was one of the most prominent liberal voices in Dallas, which was a predominantly conservative city. His views on poverty, war, civil rights, civil liberties and other topics were disseminated largely through his popular program on WFAA radio, and earned him the moniker, “the conscience of Dallas.” He also had a longstanding visiting professorship at Southern Methodist University and published numerous works on Judaism, process theology, and contemporary social issues.

Olan was born Lemel Olanovsky in 1903, near Cherkasy, Ukraine. His family fled pogroms for the United States—Olan and his mother joining his father in Rochester, New York when he was three. Olan stated in an interview that his father "shortened the family name to Olan at the suggestion of an immigration officer at Ellis Island." They settled in a Jewish neighborhood, where Olan’s father began working as a peddlar, eventually opening a grocery and dry goods store. The family was observant and Yiddish speaking; Olan's father was treasurer at a Lubavitch synagogue.