Oct 12, 2004 -- Joseph Wilf of Hillside, NJ, chief executive officer of Garden Homes Management, a Union, NJ-based real estate development, building, and management firm, has been elected vice chairman of the board of trustees of Yeshiva University (YU). Mr. Wilf, a Holocaust survivor, became involved in the university’s leadership in 1990, when he joined the board of its Sy Syms School of Business. Three years later, he was elected a trustee of the university. Mr. Wilf and his family are among New Jersey’s most prominent leaders and supporters of Jewish education and other Jewish causes. In 1990, he and his bother, the late Harry Wilf, endowed a major need-based scholarship fund for students at Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women, YU’s undergraduate colleges of liberal arts and sciences for men and women. He and his nephew, Leonard A. Wilf, subsequently endowed a second major scholarship fund for distinguished undergraduate scholars, and, in 2002, the family made a gift to rename the university’s main campus in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan the Wilf Campus. The Wilf Family Foundation, which Mr. Wilf founded, supports United Way, St. Barnabas Medical Center, Elizabeth General Medical Center, The American Cancer Society, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Shaare Zedek Hospital, and Schneider Children’s Hospital in Israel. Among numerous communal affiliations, Mr. Wilf is a leader of the American Society of Yad Vashem, UJA-Federation, State of Israel Bonds, and the Jewish National Fund. He is a board member and past president of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey and of the Jewish Educational Center; founder and board member of the Central New Jersey Home for the Aged; board member of Jewish Family Services of Central New Jersey; and former treasurer of the Jewish Horizon. He is also active in the leadership of the Jewish Agency, Kean University, The Jewish Museum in New York City, and the Joint Distribution Committee. Mr. Wilf is a founder of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Kean University Holocaust Resource Center, and North American president of the March of the Living. For his philanthropic and humanitarian endeavors, Mr. Wilf was awarded honorary doctoral degrees from Yeshiva University and the Rabbinical College of America and received the Louis Brandeis Humanitarian Award of the Zionist Organization of America and the David Ben Gurion Peace Medal of State of Israel Bonds. He and his wife, Elizabeth (Susie), have two sons: Zygmunt and Mark, and eight grandchildren.