As Rabbi Mark G. Loeb neared retirement last year, members of Beth El Congregation were given the opportunity to write letters describing what he had meant to them, a way in which he had come to their aid or a moment in which he had touched their lives.
The request drew hundreds of responses.
"It was just astonishing to him, the things that people remembered and the things that he had done that he didn't remember himself," said Rabbi Steven Schwartz, who succeeded Rabbi Loeb as senior rabbi at the state's largest Jewish congregation. "I think in those bound volumes, he really had a sense of the kind of impact he had."
Rabbi Loeb, spiritual leader of the Pikesville congregation for 28 years, died suddenly Wednesday evening in Milan, Italy, where he was serving a congregation as an interim rabbi. Further details were not available. He was 65.
Known both within and beyond the local Jewish community for a powerful and wide-ranging intellect, Rabbi Loeb was deeply engaged in public affairs, from activism for civil rights in the 1960s to service on the gubernatorial commission last year that recommended the abolition of the death penalty. He was national president of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, chaired the board of Baltimore Hebrew University and promoted interfaith dialogue as a co-founder of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies.
"Rabbi Loeb's life and good works were an inspiration both to his own congregation, and to our entire state," Gov. Martin O'Malley said Thursday. "He spent his time on this Earth living the timeless Talmudic notion that 'the highest form of wisdom is kindness,' always standing up for our most vulnerable citizens, always fighting for social justice, always pursuing Tikkun Olam, repair of the world."
Friends remembered his love of culture, travel and food, his immersion in current events, and his interest in other people.
"I think about how kind and how wonderful and how sensitive and how brilliant he is, and how much he meant to me and my family," said Richard Kline, a Parkville dentist who shared an apartment with Rabbi Loeb in the 1970s when both were students in New York and remained close when both came to Baltimore after their studies. "I love him very much."
