2008 Woodie Awards
From its beginnings in 1956, Yeshiva University featured one of the finest yeshivot for students with little or no background in Judaic studies - The James Striar School ("JSS") of General Jewish Studies. JSS owed most of its success to R. Moshe Besdin, the long-time director of JSS, one of the finest and, sadly unacknowledged, mechanchim [educators] in the United States.
In September of 1961, I left St. Louis, Missouri for my freshman year at Yeshiva College. I had just graduated from a public high school with over 2000 students, but less then a minyan of Shomer Shabbat peers. The 1,000 mile, five hour DC-9 plane ride was short in comparison to the culture gap between University City High School and Yeshiva College.
"The text, gentlemen, the text" was a constant refrain in the Chumash class of R. Moshe Besdin, the rabbi who opened up the world of serious Torah commentary to me over 40 years ago. Having attended public schools in Mt. Vernon, New York, my background in Judaic studies was fairly primitive. At the encouragement of my shul rabbi, I came to the newly established JSP (Jewish Studies Program) at Yeshiva, which was geared for non-day school students. I really did not know what to expect to find there.
In 1956, Yeshiva University created a program for students who lacked sufficient background in Jewish studies. Dr. Samuel Belkin, then president of Yeshiva for over a decade, was convinced that there was an educational gap within the American Jewish community and he sought to develop an intensive program of Jewish education on the college level for students with limited Jewish backgrounds.
As a student in Yeshiva College, I never wondered if Starbucks is kosher, though the question often faces me now as the rabbi at the Hillel at NYU. I never drank coffee as an untucked YC undergrad, let alone saw the forbidden décor of a coffeehouse. In fact, Yeshiva's campus stands two-thirds of a mile from the nearest Starbucks, further than any other college in New York City.
It was the task that ultimately one day would have to come and as unpleasant and uncomfortable as it was it would have to be done. With the passing of my dear father, R. Yehuda ben Yosef Pessah, zt"l, my mother asked of me to come to her apartment to glean through his two large portfolios and a large leather briefcase which contained his important documents that he had saved when we left Greece after the Holocaust and from our arrival to the United States.
My immediate family's involvement with Yeshiva began in the 1920s and ended in the 1980s. It is a story of idealism, achievement, love, and heartbreak. I share it with the Yeshiva community for the sake of memory, and telling the truth, and healing. This essay is dedicated to all the people, remembered and forgotten, who literally gave their lives for the idea that Yeshiva, however imperfectly, represents.
It was June 24, 1963, the day I was to take the last of my qualifying examinations for Rabbinical ordination, one day after my wedding, and two days after I had been informed that the Talmud class I had been promised to teach in MTA (Manhattan Yeshiva University High School) had been cancelled due to a lower-than-expected enrollment.