RABBI MEYER H. MAY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Rabbi Meyer H. May is the Executive Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance, having joined the Center in 1978, its second year.
As Executive Director for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi May has traveled throughout the world meeting with heads of state and leading government officials, as well as some of the most prominent corporate leaders and philanthropists of our time.
As the head of the development office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi May directs the Center’s capital expansion campaigns and its annual $35 million international fund-raising campaigns. He is currently guiding the $275 million campaign to develop the Center for Human Dignity: Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem.
He supervises the Center’s regional offices and all Simon Wiesenthal Center special events, coordinates major gift fund-raising with the Center’s membership development and telemarketing campaigns, and supervises its planned giving program. Rabbi May also guides the Center’s successful legislative effort, which to date, has resulted in more than $95 million in Federal, State and City appropriations. He is currently focusing on the Center’s long-term endowment and on further capitalizing the Center’s Moriah Films Division.
Rabbi May is currently the President of the Rabbinical Council of California and serves on a number of non-profit boards; among them Artscroll’s Mesorah Heritage Foundation, Canadian Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Yeshiva University High Schools of Los Angeles and the Young Israel of Hancock Park in Los Angeles.
Born in 1952 and raised on the East Coast, Rabbi May graduated in 1976 from Nova University with an M.S. in guidance and counseling. He was ordained in New York in 1977 by the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University and took two years of doctoral courses at the School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles, (UCLA).
Rabbi May is married to the former Shulamith Filler, herself a girl’s high school dean; have six married children, as well as one child at home and twenty grandchildren.
Link to profile of Rabbi May in Lifestyles, Spring 2009
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