Longtime Margate rabbi, community activist Gordon L. Geller dies (2024)

Press staff reports

Rabbi Gordon L. Geller, a spiritual leader for more than three decades in Margate and a community activist, died Friday.

He was 85.

According to his obituary, Geller “led the Temple Emeth Shalom congregation in Margate, NJ for more than 30 wonderful years, joyfully celebrating and providing comfort to his community through countless life events, before later helping to establish the Shirat Hayam synagogue in Ventnor.”

Atlantic County Democratic Chair Michael Suleiman called Geller’s death “very sad. He was actually planning a meet-and-greet for us. Just spoke to him him two days ago.”

Geller’s obituary described him as a “staunch supporter of social justice and one who believed deeply in public service” and was a “tireless proponent of Jewish learning” who began teaching at what is now called Stockton University in 1988.

“I love teaching there,” he once said.

In his later years, Geller worked on a project to bring a Holocaust memorial to the Atlantic City Boardwalk. In April, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority extended $500,000 in community development funds for the memorial at Roosevelt Plaza, with the new agreement extending through April 2025.

Geller, who has been working for years to get the memorial built, expressed confidence that the organization would complete its fundraising this year.

“Certainly, it is significant for both our country and the world in terms or where we are now in this difficult time, the plea for universal tolerance,” he said. “We’re ready to go.”

In September 2017, Geller was recognized for his 50 years of ministry, including 30 at Temple Emeth Shalom reform synagogue, at a brunch at Shirat Hayam. Geller was the second of only two rabbis in the 65-year history of Temple Emeth Shalom, which merged in 2016 with the conservative Congregation Beth Judah in Ventnor to form Shirat Hayam.

Many Shirat Hayam congregants are snowbirds, he said after the merger, so the winter months are less active. Rabbis can take their vacations.

“We call it the season of scarce minons,” he said. “Our prime season is summer, when we can have three times as many people at our services. You cut your garment to the cloth. This is our neighborhood, and we adapt to the rhythm of the sea.”

During his tenure at Emeth Shalom, he chaired the Interfaith Area Clergy of Greater Atlantic City for 10 years and worked with Kaleem Shabazz of Atlantic City’s Masjid Muhammad mosque.

“There are many strong ties in our relationship,” Shabazz, also an Atlantic City councilman, said in 2017. “He has been a leader in interfaith activities and was one of the first leaders to embrace the Islamic community after 9/11. He has always been one to speak for inclusion and brotherhood.”

Important choices

Born Feb. 21, 1939, in Golda Meir’s hometown of Milwaukee, Geller experienced his first diversion during his formative years. Instead of becoming involved in the larger B’nai B’rith organization in his teens, he chose the smaller Young Judaea youth-led Zionist movement, in which he found Meir’s influence more appealing.

Geller was named after his great-grandfather, a rebbe in a small village in czarist Russia who mentored Menachem Schneershon, who became an influential Hasidic leader.

“I guess you can say I have a lot of pedigree,” he once said.

A second diversion took place in college when he decided he could be of better service as a rabbi than continuing his pursuit of psychiatry.

“Since I had such an interest in the human psyche, I decided I wanted to follow a more religious approach, which I have,” he recalled. “I found it very useful in my counseling.”

In addition to degrees in divinity, Geller had degrees in law and philosophy from Catholic University of America and biomedical psychology from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

Ordained in 1967, he served as an assistant rabbi in Long Island for a year and then for three years as a rabbi in Stony Brook, Long Island, where a new medical school was opening. “The dean asked me to come back and be a psychiatrist in an avant-garde class limited to 30 students,” he recalled.

He declined the offer in favor of pursuing an advance degree by completing his thesis on the history of the Jewish leader Rashi, whose commentary on the Talmud predicted the Crusades. He was invited to get his doctorate at Harvard in Jewish history and become a seminary teacher.

“Again I decided to stay on the pulpit rather than be a seminary professor,” he said.

He met his wife, Elaine, when they were at Stony Brook and living in the same apartment complex. Geller had a scarlet macaw as a pet.

“She passed by and said hello, but I didn’t impress her much, although I talked to the preacher about her and said, ‘I think I’m going to marry her.’”

He did, in 1971. They were married for 53 years and had three children — Clare, Eliot and Marc — and seven grandchildren: Maia, Talia, Oren, Isaac, Oliver, Sophie and Noa.

The move to Margate

Geller also served in Levittown and Upper Bucks County, Pennsylvania, before a three-year interim position in Mobile, Alabama, and was a U.S. Navy chaplain for three years in Biloxi, Mississippi.

He said that when he asked for a permanent placement, he landed in Margate.

In 2017, Ethel Levinson, an outreach coordinator for Shirat Hayam, spoke about Geller, with whom she had worked with for the previous six months.

“He is highly thought of and involved in all the right things,” Levinson said. “He cares about the world. He cares so darn much.”

Roth-Goldsteins' Memorial Chapel is handling the arrangements. Interment will be private. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Monday in the main sanctuary of Shirat Hayam Congregation (700 N. Swarthmore Ave. in Ventnor).

Press archives contributed to this report.