Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, leader of Har Zion

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe was best known for two things: leading one of the region's most influential synagogues, Har Zion Temple, and his contributions in the fields of medical ethics and caregiving. Rabbi Wolpe, 81, of Center City, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse.

In 1969, Rabbi Wolpe became the third rabbi to the lead the Conservative synagogue, which was then in Wynnefield. Four years later, he oversaw Har Zion's move to Penn Valley to accommodate young families in the suburbs. Before retiring in 1999, Rabbi Wolpe presided over a groundbreaking for the synagogue's religious-education wing. By then, the 77-year-old congregation numbered 1,500 families.

"He had flaws, but they were remarkably few. He was a good and great man," said his son David, who is also a rabbi. His strengths as an administrator were his ideas and his way with people, he said.

Rabbi Wolpe's interest in medical ethics dates to the early 1960s, when, as a rabbi at Beth El Temple in Harrisburg, he was asked to join an interfaith commission formed to establish guidelines for determining who could use the limited number of dialysis machines in the area.

He tried to decline the appointment, his son said, but was persuaded after being told that if clerics like him, who were seeking to follow God's law, did not make the decisions, they would be left to doctors.

In later years, Rabbi Wolpe's interest in the challenge of caregiving was personal.

In 1986, his wife, Elaine, had two brain aneurysms. She had great difficulty walking and speaking. Though she later improved, "the first few years, her communication was severely limited," David Wolpe said, "and my father was very patient and caring."

"From that he had a second career" as a nationally prominent medical and bioethicist, said former Philadelphia Magazine editor Stephen Fried, author of The New Rabbi, a book about the search for Rabbi Wolpe's successor. His caring for his wife also helped move him "from being very intellectual to more personally sharing and humanistic," Fried said.

In 1996, during a monthly meeting of the Well Spouse Foundation, Rabbi Wolpe told a reporter that he understood the anonymity of spousal caregivers.

Referring to the Bible and to ordinary life, he said, "no one deals with Mrs. Job. Chronic illness is not like other illnesses, because it has no clearly delineated periods."

Rabbi Wolpe encouraged medical schools to teach students about caregiving and lectured on the subject at several hospitals, and in 1998 he taught a course on the subject at the Medical College of Pennsylvania.

His tenure as Har Zion's leader went through changes as well.

Rabbi Wolpe "came from a period of formal sermonizing in America, and he had a very beautiful, compelling, incredibly seductive voice, as if he was reciting Shakespeare," Fried said.

But as the rabbi grew older and had grandchildren, he and his services became more relaxed and informal, especially with children in the sanctuary, Fried said.

After he retired from Har Zion, Rabbi Wolpe joined Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Center City, Fried's synagogue.

"He was something of a misbehaving congregant" who, during a sermon, would talk to the people around him about interesting points the rabbi made, Fried said. "He got to be the congregant he wanted to be."

For the next decade, Rabbi Wolpe kept up a busy schedule lecturing and writing, until becoming ill in October.

He served from 1997 to 2002 as director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religion and Social Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and from 1996 to 1999 was chairman of the advisory committee of the Bioethics Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a senior fellow at the time of his death.

Rabbi Wolpe was a member of the Advisory Committee of the Families and Health Care Project of the United Hospital Fund as well as a consultant to AOL's "Ask the Rabbi" Web site.

He also wrote a chapter for Always on Call: When Illness Turns Families Into Caregivers, published by the United Hospital Fund in 2000.

Rabbi Wolpe grew up in Boston and earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's degree in 1951 in Renaissance history from New York University. He earned a master's degree in 1953 in Hebrew letters and a doctor of divinity degree in 1978 from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

After he was ordained in 1953, he served as a Navy chaplain for two years in Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was then a rabbi at Synagogue Emanu-El in Charleston, S.C., before moving to Harrisburg in 1958.

Rabbi Wolpe was 11 when his father died. Because of this, he was determined to be a very involved parent to his four sons, David Wolpe said.

His son Steve said: "Being a father was paramount to him."

In addition to his wife of 54 years and sons David and Steve, Rabbi Wolpe is survived by sons Daniel and Paul and eight grandchildren.

A funeral will be at 1 p.m. today at Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, where shiva will begin at 7 p.m. Burial will be private.

Donations may be made to Har Zion Temple, 1500 Hagys Ford Rd., Penn Valley, Pa. 19072.