HIU Mourns the Loss of Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, Former Trustee and Faculty Member

The HIU community was deeply saddened to learn of the loss of Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, who served as a Trustee and taught at HIU (then Hartford Seminary) for many years.

Rabbi Fuchs, 80, passed away on July 26. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, July 30, at Congregation Beth Israel, West Hartford, CT, where Rabbi Fuchs was the senior rabbi from 1997-2012 and held the title of Rabbi Emeritus. The service will be livestreamed.

After "retiring," Rabbi Fuchs served as President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, traveling to more than 65 communities around the world to teach about progressive Jewish values. He also spent time in Germany teaching about the Holocaust, then served for six years as rabbi of Bat Yam Temple of the Islands on Sanibel Island, Florida.

In 2014, Rabbi Fuchs published a book for which HIU President Emerita Heidi Hadsell wrote the forward. The book, What's in It for Me? Finding Ourselves in Biblical Narratives, sought to find a middle ground between those who take biblical narratives as literal truth and those who dismiss them.

President Emerita Hadsell wrote in the forward: “[Rabbi] Fuchs links the meaning of the texts to our concrete, contemporary lives, and shows us that each of us [believer or not] can, indeed, be who we are called to be."

Rabbi Fuchs had degrees from Hamilton College and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in addition to a Doctor of Ministry degree from Vanderbilt University.

He is survived by his wife, Victoria "Vickie" Fuchs; sons Rabbi Leo Fuchs and Benjamin Fuchs; daughter Sarah Fuchs Downie; and 10 grandchildren.