Israel S. Dresner, a New Jersey rabbi who ventured into the Deep South in the 1960s to champion civil rights, befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and was jailed multiple times for demonstrating against racial segregation, died on Jan. 13 in Wayne, NJ. He was 92.

By the time Rabbi Dresner joined the civil rights movement, he was already a veteran of political protests, having been arrested at 18 in 1947 outside the British Empire Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan in a protest against Britain’s refusal to let the Exodus, a ship loaded with Holocaust survivors, land in British-controlled Palestine, an incident that inspired the novel of the same name by Leon Uris in 1958 and a subsequent film.

Rabbi Dresner was in his mid-20s when, in 1954, he enrolled at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform rabbinical seminary in Manhattan. He was ordained in 1961.

Rabbi Dresner was an early supporter of Soviet Jewry, opposed the war in Vietnam, and supported the rights of the poor, women, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, disabled people, and gay men and lesbians.

Last month, in an interviews with WCBS-TV in New York, Rabbi Dresner said, “I want to be remembered as somebody who not only tried to keep the Jewish faith but also invoked the Jewish doctrine from the Talmud, which is called ‘tikkun olam’ — repairing the world — and I hope that I made a little bit of a contribution to making the world a little better place.”