Allan Nadler

Allan L. Nadler (born May 8, 1954 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

Nadler was educated at McGill and Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1988.

Nadler was initially ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Rabbi Aryeh Leib Baron (1911–2011) of Yeshiva Merkaz ha-Talmud in Montreal, and received a second ordination from Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Tennenbaum of the Orthodox Rabbinical Court of Justice in Boston. He studied Talmud and Rabbinical Codes for two years in the Rabbinical Program at Jews' College in London, England, and also studied privately for many years with Montreal's Chief Rabbi Pinchas Hirschsprung. During the period 1984 - 1992, Nadler became Rabbi of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal, Quebec, Canada's oldest and largest traditional Jewish congregation. Nadler was the first Orthodox-ordained rabbi at this formerly Conservative congregation, which left the Conservative Movement during his tenure. After resigning from that congregation, he served as Director of Research of the YIVO Institute in New York City (1992–1999), which includes the world's largest Yiddish Archives and Library.

While at YIVO, Nadler led international Jewish efforts to repatriate libraries, archives and Torah scrolls in Lithuania that had been plundered and confiscated by the Nazis, and later held by Soviet authorities. His direct negotiations with then-President of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, led to the release, to the New York City offices of YIVO for reproduction and cataloguing, of archives that had belonged to YIVO in pre-war Vilna (today, Vilnius, Lithuania), after extensive international coverage of the story.

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