Dec 10, 2003 -- Neither a rabbi nor a rabbinic scholar, the new president of Yeshiva University brings to the job 15 years of experience working with students and a broad vision. Richard Joel’s life has been one of refrains, beginning in a typical 1950’s suburban home in Yonkers, New York. Polish-born Avery Joel played Yiddish songs on the mandolin, while his only child, Richard, played “Hava Nagila” on the accordion. When Annette, Richard’s mother, joined in, the family would roll up the rug to dance. An intense youngster with deep-set hazel eyes and dark eyebrows, Richard was also close to the cantor of his synagogue and, as a member of the choir, saw God expressed through song and prayer. Life’s melody was interrupted when Joel’s father died suddenly. Though his father’s death may have cost him his adolescence, he brought the celebratory legacy of his early years to building Hillel and now to Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, Yeshiva University. In 2002, Joel, 53, was elected the fourth president of the university: Rabbi Norman Lamm, Ph.D., who held that office for 27 years, will remain university chancellor and the seminary’s rosh yeshiva, chief rabbinical authority. For the first time in its 116-year history, YU will have two leaders. There was a jarring controversy surrounding Joel’s selection, since he is neither rabbi nor rabbinic scholar. Strident opposition, generated by the splitting of the positions, marked his recruitment. After he was elected, he says, those who opposed him—some extremely observant Yeshiva rabbis and a handful of students—felt “marginalized and betrayed,” and urged him to withdraw. However, since his investiture, Joel says, “all of the senior faculty have been exceedingly gracious and welcoming.” To some, Joel seemed an obvious choice. During his 15 years as president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life and international director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, he earned a reputation as a master fund-raiser and visionary. He is known for unmatched personal and administrative capabilities. Renaissance was the byword of Joel’s Hillel tenure. The campus organization became the major source of students for birthright israel trips, which has sent more than 11,000 18- to 26-year-olds to Israel. Twenty-two new Hillel facilities were built throughout North America, 27 in the former Soviet Union and 2 in Latin America. And Joel was at the helm when the Council of Jewish Federations—precursor to the United Jewish Communities—endorsed Hillel as the central umbrella organization on campus, able to deliver federation services to the students, and raised the annual operating budget from $14 million in 1988 to $51 million in 2002. His pluralism and philosophy of engagement led Hillel to “[maximize] the number of Jews doing Jewish with other Jews,” he says. Joel’s pluralism was matter of concern for his opponents at YU, even though he was also a leader and first elected president of the thriving Modern Orthodox Kemp Mill Synagogue in Silver Spring, Maryland. “People who knew me at Hillel knew I wasn’t walking away from my commitment to Orthodoxy,” Joel says. “I was embracing others.” Stephen Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., says, “Joel’s investiture is paralleled by the appointment of a noncleric [John J. DeGioia] at Georgetown University. What we see here is a pattern of change in American education, a cognizance that university presidents are not only symbolic. They have actual jobs to do, and most institutions are going to go for the best they can get. “These are daunting times for higher education,” he continues, “and merit will be redefined. Richard has visited more universities and has acquired skills it takes most university presidents some years to learn.” This isn’t the first time Joel has moved on from a job where he had distinguished himself. When Joel accepted the Hillel job, he left a successful law career. At the time, his good friend, Daniel C. Kurtzer, now United States ambassador to Israel, said that Joel couldn’t resist the challenge to shape the thinking of the American Jewish community and to potentially reach every Jewish student on campus. Now, at YU, Joel will again have the opportunity to create a new role. And again students will be his focus. Rabbi William Rudolph of Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, Maryland, worked with Joel for eight years as Hillel’s former associate international director. According to Rudolph, “He empowered and engaged students who had never been involved.” Though Joel only attended Yeshiva’s high school for boys, he says that YU shaped his life. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from New York University, but was professor and associate dean at Yeshiva’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and was director of the university alumni affairs. He was also an assistant district attorney and deputy chief of the Appeals Bureau in the Bronx. Joel and his wife, Esther, have six children—all Yeshiva products. Their eldest daughter, Penny, 26, graduated from Stern College for Women; Avery, 23, who is to be married this year, graduated from Yeshiva and attends its Gruss Institute in Israel. Ariella, 21, graduated from Stern last June. Another son, Noam, 18, is studying in Israel. Nachum, 15, attends YU high school and Kira, 13, is at Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy. The family hopes to recreate the warm and welcoming home they maintained in Silver Spring in their new house in Riverdale, New York. Rudoph speaks glowingly of Esther Joel, an educational psychologist, who “completes [her husband], grounds him and makes his Shabbos table possible. And each of his children is a gem.” As Joel sat in the Silver Spring home just prior to assuming his new position, he spoke of Yeshiva as a shaping institution in the twentieth century. “YU says that the traditional Jew can be true to Jewish tradition but can use that tradition to fuel participation in the greater world and contextualize secular achievement.” YU includes the university-affiliated Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, Stern College and a network of schools including the undergraduate Sy Syms School of Business and the graduate schools of law and medicine. It has an annual budget of $470 million and an endowment of $900 million. But the university has weathered tough times in the past. “Norman Lamm faced bankruptcy and a $70 million debt,” Joel asserts. “He has handed me an institution of material and intellectual health and said, ‘While I was busy doing all this I didn’t yet get to this.’ Times create new opportunities. So I don’t think the issue here is healing. I think the issue is renewing the vision.” Joel is focused on the future. The university, he points out, is a complex institution. Its schools are not all Orthodox, some are not even Jewish. But Joel has a dream of creating a unified vision. As his first appointment, Joel named longtime friend Hillel Davis to the new position of vice president for university life. Davis stresses that his goal is to enhance the student’s university experience, to work at behavior they can model, to help them feel more at home and to feel ownership of the educational process. Davis has already met with undergraduate resident assistants in an effort to make strengthening community interaction outside of the classroom a priority. Even before his investiture on September 21, Joel was setting a new tone. Michael Jesselson, a member of YU’s board of trustees, says that “at Stern College for Women, at the beginning of the term, Richard was down there greeting new students and eating in the cafeteria. Students already feel the difference.” Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the Jewish Life Network, has worked closely with Joel. Greenberg believes that Joel’s “mentschlichkeit, respect for people and inclusiveness will be reflected in the administrative tone, the student procedures and the relationships he succeeds in forging throughout the institution.” A primary task for YU in all its institutions, Joel says, is to inspire students to use their knowledge and values to change the world through decency and nobility. “I would love Yeshiva to model an institute for Jewish professionalism,” he says ambitiously, “[to] emphasize both professionalism and Jewish values, where people could learn Torah and learn also to hone their business management, social work and Jewish educational skills, using the great resources of the rabbinical and professional faculty that we have.” Another priority is academic excellence. Joel would like more full-time faculty able to do more research, publish more and involve students in faculty research. “The YU press should be enlivened,” he says. The university should be a laboratory for leaders, he says, where students can engage in service projects, participate in educational institutions and attend seminars and Shabbatonim in the summer. What really turned me on to the path I was lucky to take in life,” Joel notes, “was when I was an adviser at YU’s Torah leadership seminar and I saw the unbelievable sense of fulfillment I had when I could help bring joy and purpose and Torah to others. I would like that to happen with our undergraduate, rabbinical and graduate schools of education.” Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, who proposed Joel for the job and encouraged him to take it, says, “There’s no better place to be at this moment than YU. If you strengthen traditional Jewry, you strengthen all of Jewry.” Joel understands this, and his mission for YU goes beyond the campus. Communities around the country should feel they are part of the YU universe, he asserts, through student recruitment, distance learning and high school kollelim (Talmud study programs), faculty travel and the debate on where Orthodoxy stands. Toward this goal, last July Joel brought together a group of Orthodox rabbis and leaders of the Rabbinical Council of America, the informal rabbinical arm of YU. His purpose was to listen to communal rabbis’ voices—both about YU and their sense of community needs from YU. Rabbi Kenneth Hain, leader of Congregation Beth Sholom in Lawrence, New York, and a former president of the RCA, describes the meeting as an icebreaker. “Joel affirmed his belief that YU doesn’t just belong to the administration, the faculty and students,” Hain says, “but to the whole community, including synagogues, federations and UJA’s. “YU is a gateway institution for non-Orthodox to connect to the Orthodox world,” continues Hain, “and it’s a gateway for its graduates to go out and impact the world in their fields. What Richard confirmed is that YU feels that communal service is not just a stepchild of what YU is about, it’s an integral part of its mission, strengthening Jewish life beyond the confines of the institution by sending out emissaries to satellite institutions. To hear that from Richard was inspiring.” The refrains that run through Joel’s life are a microcosm of the Yeshiva universe he hopes to create. “It’s amazing,” Rudolph says. “At the Shabbat table, the Joels sing their zmirot in six-part harmony.”

©Hadassh Magazine - Helen Mintz Belitsky