Yeshiva University Students Wear Two Hats: Yarmulke and Mortarboard

On a typical morning at the turn of the century, 15-year-old Mayer Susskind would hurry from his Manhattan tenement to the Rabbi Elchanan Theological Seminary.

School days began at 8 a.m. with prayers in Hebrew, followed by more than eight hours of Talmudic study in Yiddish. In the evening were hours of classes in English, taught by a public school teacher.

Torah U’Mada : Hebrew words meaning Holy Scriptures and secular knowledge. This was the leitmotif that emerged from that Lower East Side school founded by newly arrived Orthodox Jewish immigrants.

This unusual blend of worldly and religious scholarship survives 100 years later at Yeshiva University, a thoroughly modern institution with 7,000 students and 1,300 faculty, where medicine, social work, law and liberal arts coexist with intensive Jewish studies.

Celebrates Centennial

The school began a yearlong centennial celebration Sept. 18, with Education Secretary William J. Bennett addressing a convocation. Also this month, the U.S. Postal Service is issuing a stamp in honor of Bernard Revel, the university’s first president.

What has emerged over a century is a college where undergraduate students tackle a demanding double course load: half conventional, half Jewish studies. The school even has a basketball team, named the “Maccabees” after ancient Jewish warriors, that posted a winning record the last two seasons.

“The graduate of Yeshiva should demonstrate that he can be a participant in general life, but also have a proud Jewish heritage, and to do so with tolerance. That’s no mean achievement,” said Yeshiva President Norman Lamm.

Yeshiva did not become a college until 1928. But it traces its roots to several Manhattan parochial schools, including the Elchanan seminary. The oldest, Yeshiva Etz Chaim, was founded in 1886.

A Different Dream

When Jews immigrated to America, Lamm said, “Confusion reigned. The great theme was to Americanize, to abandon your culture, change your name, drop Yiddish, change your nose if necessary. It was the melting pot in action. The people in this school determined that they were not going to go along with that dream.”

Susskind, now a spry 95-year-old, is believed to be one of Yeshiva’s oldest living alumni. He attended Elchanan a year after immigrating from what was then Austria-Hungary.

Comparing that tiny school for penniless immigrants who barely spoke English to the modern Yeshiva campus now occupying several city blocks in upper Manhattan is “like a little stream to the ocean,” he told a fellow visitor to the school recently.

Today, most students come from parochial high schools in the big Eastern cities, Los Angeles and Canada. Non-Jewish undergraduates are rare.

Two Goals

“By coming to Yeshiva, you make a statement that you want to be an Orthodox Jew, but also live in the world,” said Steven Cohen, a 24-year-old rabbinical student from Hamilton, Ontario, who studied economics here as an undergraduate.

Yeshiva’s graduate schools, including the prestigious Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Wurzweiler School of Social Work, draw more ethnically diverse student bodies because religious studies aren’t required.

But the trappings of Jewish orthodoxy are everywhere at the undergraduate college. Every doorpost has a mezuza, a tiny scroll containing passages from Deuteronomy. Virtually all men wear a yarmulke, or skullcap, a sign of reverence.

And there’s no talk of ending the religiously inspired segregation of men’s and women’s colleges. Male undergraduates attend Yeshiva College uptown; women go to Stern College in mid-town Manhattan. They date, of course, but not until sundown Saturday, when the Jewish Sabbath is over. Often, students hop on the subway to Bernstein’s on Essex Street, a landmark kosher delicatessen in lower Manhattan.

Ties to Israel

Israel is the No. 1 political concern of most students. Thousands of alumni spend time in Israel, and many emigrate. Lamm said he encourages them to be a moderating influence on Israeli politics.

On a trip this summer to Israel, Lamm urged 1,000 Yeshiva alumni who have settled there to set an example for the extreme religious right, while opposing left-wing Israelis whose disputes have grown increasingly violent.

“By their very existence, our alumni are a reproach to the extremists,” Lamm said. “Psychologists, authors, doctors, lawyers, teachers who are observant Jews show it is possible to have this combination. That shows up both the right and the left.”

To most outsiders, Yeshiva may be best known for recent events it would probably prefer to forget.

Some Tough Years

In 1979, the university nearly went broke, the result of overexpansion, rising fuel costs and the abrupt shrinkage of federal aid to higher education. By 1980, Yeshiva was $60 million in debt, with an operating budget of $140 million.

Late one evening in March, 1980, Lamm found himself in the downtown office of his school’s lawyers, ready to put his signature to bankruptcy papers for Yeshiva.

“I was writing it with tears,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it. We woke up (then-New York Gov.) Hugh Carey, and he persuaded the banks to talk with us.”

With Carey’s help, the banks agreed to forgive nearly half the school’s debt and restructure the rest, and Yeshiva was back in the black in 17 months with the help of active fund-raising.

Growth and Adversity

But in the meantime, Yeshiva faculty members had grown so disgruntled over lagging pay and the university’s refusal to recognize their right to bargain collectively that they took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The resulting 1980 National Labor Relations Board vs. Yeshiva University ruling, which held that professors are managerial employees with no inherent right to bargain collectively, is regarded as one of the most important decisions affecting higher education in recent years.

In the summer of 1983, Yeshiva made tragic headlines when its students became targets of apparently anti-Semitic sniper attacks in which one woman was killed and four other people were injured. The shootings remain unsolved.

After a century of growth and adversity, Lamm feels Yeshiva is still one of America’s most misunderstood universities.

“We’re seen as either another Brandeis University or basically a rabbinical school with pretensions to being something more,” he said. “We are an American university and a Jewish university. We are both.”