Rabbi Andrew Baker

Rabbi Andrew Baker joined AJC in 1979 and is now director of International Jewish Affairs. A leading expert on anti-Semitism in Europe and on challenges facing Jewish communities, including Holocaust restitution issues, he travels around the world to deepen and expand the extensive network of relationships between AJC and Jewish communities worldwide.

From 1992 until 2000, Rabbi Baker served as director of European affairs and was instrumental in developing and implementing programs to promote tolerance in the newly emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. In 2003, he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work in German-Jewish relations. He is a vice-president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Jewish umbrella organization that has worked on restitution issues for half a century. He is a member of government commissions in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia that address the claims of Holocaust victims, and is a member of the National Historical Commission of Lithuania. He helped the Romanian Government establish a national commission chaired by Elie Wiesel to examine the history of the Holocaust in that country, and serves as one of its founding members.

Rabbi Baker was a member of the official U.S. government delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's first conference on anti-Semitism, held in Vienna in June 2003. He was also actively involved in the second conference on anti-Semitism, in Berlin last April. He has spoken on the subject of Jewish property restitution, anti-Semitism, and related issues at the U.S. State Department, the House Banking Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Helsinki Commission, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

A native of Worcester, Mass., Rabbi Baker received a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University and a master's degree and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. He is a past president of the Interfaith Conference of Washington and a former commissioner on the District of Columbia Human Rights Commission. He was the only non-congregational rabbi to serve as president of the Washington Board of Rabbis. He is married and has four children.