Page created by: Tom Knechtel

Robert Karl Baruch was born to Karl and Gertrude Baruch on November 15, 1944. He and his younger brother Michael were raised in St. Louis, Providence and Kansas City. Bob fell in love with classical music early, began playing clarinet in high school and went on to get his first degree in music from Kansas University. He decided to forego the life of a musician in favor of becoming a rabbi and got his rabbinical degree from Hebrew Union College in 1971. Bob met his wife Monica in Rochester, where he had his first job as a rabbi. Later, he and Monica moved to Rio, so that he could take up a position as rabbi at a temple there. In order to do this, he learned Portuguese in a month. Bob’s love of languages allowed him to also become fluent in Hebrew and German. Subsequently, Bob served as rabbi at Temple Micah in Washington DC from 1978 to 1983. In 1983, he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple and pursued a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He completed his PhD thesis on the Israeli poet Dan Pagis in 1994. Bob had a brief brush with Hollywood in 1996 when he played the rabbi at the end of the movie, “The Birdcage.” Bob loved to tell about his one acting lesson from Nathan Lane, who was given the task by Mike Nichols of helping Bob to say his line – “Mazel tov!” – in a slightly less rabbinical fashion: “Rabbi, we want just a hint of mint.”

In 1992, Bob and Barry Cohen went to China to bring home their daughter, Suzanne. Suzie remained the love of Bob’s life, the source of tremendous pride and happiness. He went on to become a beloved teacher at the Milken School, where he was awarded the Tzadik Award for righteousness by the students several times. In the years after he retired, there were many occasions when he ran into old students whose affection for Rabbi Bob was abundantly evident. (He said that could be startling, as when “Rabbi Bob!!” would ring out from the showers in the gym he went to.)

In 1998, he met Tom Knechtel, whom he married in 2013. Tom says: “It was a vast gift to have this wonderful, wise, kind, tender, loving man in my life for the last twenty years.” After he retired from teaching, Bob was involved with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, where the depth of his learning was greatly admired by his colleagues. He returned to his clarinet, and his later life was filled with Torah study, music, books, friends, Suzie and her husband Joe, and the arrival of his two grandsons, Avery and Beckett.

Bob was diagnosed with Parkinsons around 2011. During the subsequent years, he worked hard to understand the disease, to help support others who had it, and to keep himself healthy. His bravery was a model to all who knew him; he never used Parkinsons as a reason why he could not do something. He died on May 20, 2018.