by Mike Wagenheim in the Jewish News Syndicate
S. President Donald Trump named four rabbis to the 11-member religious leaders advisory board for the White House’s new Religious Liberty Commission.
The commission was established by executive order on May 1, and three advisory boards consisting of religious leaders, legal experts and lay advisors, respectively, were announced on May 16.
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“Americans need to be reacquainted with our nation’s superb experiment in religious freedom in order to preserve it against emerging threats,” Trump wrote in his executive order.
The new members of the religious leaders advisory board—Rabbis Mark Gottlieb, Yaakov Menken, Eitan Webb and Chaim Dovid Zwiebel—are all Orthodox.
Gottlieb serves as chief education officer of the Tikvah Fund and is the founding dean of the Tikvah Scholars Program. He formerly served as head of school at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and the principal of the Maimonides School in Brookline, Mass.
A trustee of the Hildebrand Project, Gottlieb serves on the editorial committee of Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought.
Menken is the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America. He is the founder and director of Project Genesis, which publishes several Jewish outreach and education websites. He also co-founded and edited an online journal dedicated to Orthodox Jewish thought and opinion.
Menken, who authored The Everything Torah Book, is a fellow of the Amud Aish Memorial Museum, focused on modern antisemitism.
Webb co-founded the Chabad House of Princeton in 2002 and has served as a Jewish chaplain at the Ivy League university since 2007. He also sits on the board of directors of the Chabad on Campus International Foundation and of the Sinai Scholars Society.
Zwiebel is the long-tenured executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, which serves as a leadership and policy umbrella organization for Haredi Jews in the United States. He previously worked at a law firm for three decades.
For the lay leaders advisory board, critics, including Jewish far-right commentator Laura Loomer, decried the Trump administration’s naming of Ismail Royer to the panel, calling it a “vetting crisis.”
Royer, born Randall Royer, pleaded guilty in 2004 to aiding and abetting the use of firearms and explosives after being indicted on terror-related charges, including conspiracy to wage war against the United States and providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist group that U.S. authorities later classified as a terrorist organization, The Washington Post reported following Royer’s release in 2017.
He served 13 years of a 20-year prison sentence.
Royer currently serves as director of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team for the Religious Freedom Institute.
Photo Credit: Ana Lanza on Unsplash.