Word: finkelstein
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...faculty. White-maned Dr. Solomon Schechter, the seminary's president, took special pains with the shy scholar. Walking with him on the street one day, Dr. Schechter stopped at a newsstand to read the latest World Series scores. "Can you play baseball?" he asked. "No," admitted Finkelstein. "Remember this," said the old man. "Unless you can play baseball, you'll never get to be a rabbi in America...
...Scholar Finkelstein got the point and never forgot it - though he never played a game of baseball (or went to a dance, or had a date with a girl in his student days). He took enough interest in the outside world to get himself elected president of his class in its final year. In 1922 he married the sister-in-law of a faculty member, handsome Carmel Bentwich. He has three children: Hadassah, 28: now married to a mathematician and living in Connecticut; Ezra, 24, in his second year at Columbia University's School of International Affairs, and Emunah...
After graduating from the seminary, Finkelstein took a small congregation in The Bronx, where he stayed for twelve years. When he was midway in this work, the seminary's next president, Cyrus Adler, persuaded him to join the faculty "for a year or two." He stayed for 15 years, and when Adler died, 44-year-old Louis Finkelstein succeeded...
Shift of Center. The seminary he was called to lead was neither the oldest nor the biggest in the U.S.* It was founded in 1887, with eight students and three teachers, then met in a small Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. When Louis Finkelstein took over in 1940, it had a set of handsome, six-story Georgian buildings on Manhattan's academy-studded Morningside Heights - and perhaps the most distinguished faculty of rabbinical teachers in the English language. By the standards of 1940, it was turning out a fair number of graduates: eight or ten young rabbis a year, an equal...
...read the news from Europe, Louis Finkelstein saw a double challenge: 1) thanks to Hitler's campaign against Jewish learning, the seminaries of Central and Eastern Europe (e.g., Berlin, Breslau, Vienna) were being wiped out of existence, and 2) the massacre of 6,000,000 European Jews was leaving U.S. Jewry, by simple default, the central Jewish community in the world. Jewish Theological Seminary has grown to meet those challenges as swiftly as possible. It now has 1,000 students enrolled in its four-year courses...