'Person of great righteousness’: Jewish community notes the significance of Justice Ginsburg’s death on eve of Rosh Hashanah

(Tom Brenner/Getty Images)

HOUSTON – Condolences are pouring in for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who spent more than a quarter of a century on the bench of the nation’s highest court.

Honored as a feminist icon, a champion of truth and the second woman to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg was also the first Jewish woman to hold the position.

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Ginsburg died Friday evening, at the age of 87, surrounded by family in her home in Washington D.C., due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. Her death coincided with the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a High Holiday that commemorates the Jewish New Year.

She was nominated to the nation’s highest bench in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. In her Rose Garden nomination ceremony, Clinton lauded Ginsburg for standing with the “the outsider in society … telling them that they have a place in our legal system, by giving them a sense that the Constitution and the laws protect all the American people, not simply the powerful.”

Ginsburg attributed that outsider perspective to her Jewish roots, pointing often to her heritage as a building block of her perspective on the bench, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

Among messages honoring and remembering Justice Ginsburg, the Jewish community also noted the significance of the date of her death in Judaism. They wrote that according to Jewish tradition, one who dies on the High Holiday is considered a “Tzadik," a title given in Judaism to people considered righteous.

See what some mourners wrote below: