Yeshiva University High School For Boys - Elchanite Yearbook (New York, NY)

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jiw ZlICl'6ZTlLTC TWENTY YEARS TALMUDICAL ACADEMY by DR. SHELLEY R. SAFIR P' ODAY, on historic Washington Heights, where the American Revolutionary Army battled for free- dom against the forces of King George the Third of England, there stands the new Yeshiva College build- ing, an edifice which for magnificence of construction and completeness of equipment will be hard to surpass anywhere in this country. When one contrasts our present home on Am- sterdam Avenue, between 186th and 187th Streets, with the succession of small, shabby, delapidated, old-fash- ioned, poorly equipped and ill-suited buildings which housed the Yeshiva on Canal, Pike, Henry, and Mont- gomery Streets, and finally on East Broadway, one cannot help seeing in it the expression of the developed rna- terial and spiritual strength of the immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe whose courage and devotion to an ideal made this possible. There are several Jewish Institu- tions of higher learning in America which can boast of imposing plants, with fine college buildings, splendid libraries , and comprehensive equip- ment. But these schools are devoted to Jewish studies exclusively. The student reports to them for part of the day, at least, for instruction in the specifically Jewish subjects of study. During the remaining hours of the day, he attends a regularly constituted high school or college in which he obtains his secular educa- tion. In the Yeshiva, however, the pupil obtains both types of training and culture, secular as Well as Jew- ish, under one and the same auspices, and in the spirit of traditional Juda- ism. The foundation, spiritual if not actual, of our institution was laid in the Eighteen-Eighties, after the flood- tide of Russo-Jewish immigration to America had set in. From Russia, Poland, and Lithuania there came to this country an element of Jewry who looked upon the study of the Torah as the highest and noblest pur- suit in man's life. Their first concerib next to that of earning some kind of livelihood, was the education of their children in the traditional manner of their forebears. Out of this urge there grew up, some fifty years ago Q1885Don the lower East Side of New York, the Machzike Yeshivath Etz Chaim, the first Jewish parochial school in America. This school, or- ganized without pretension to peda- gogic theories or systems, was de- voted to the teaching of the Hebrew language and the Hebrew Law CBible and Talrnudj, and also to the study of the English language and related studies. Ten years later C18969f another handful of Eastern European Jews founded the Yeshivath Rabbenu Yitz- chok Elchanan and incorporated it the following year as the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. This institution, conceived in the spirit, if not in the flesh, of east European Yeshivath, was dedicated to the study of the Talmud and the Torah Lish-

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In Grateful Appreciation of His Untiring Efforts for the Good of the Student Body, We, Hereby, Dedfioate This Anniversary Issue of THE ELCHANITE to Our Friend cmd Principal DR. SHELLEY R. SAFIR

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the clclzanitc six moh , learning for the sake of learn- ing. Young men, mostly grown-ups, who already possessed a good knowl- edge of the Talmud and Talmudic Literature and who desired to con- tinue their studies either in prepara- tion for the Rabbinate or just for the sake of increasing the knowledge acquired in European Yeshivath, con- stituted the first students of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. As the institution grew and became better known in American Jewish life, it began to attract younger stu- dents, boys between the ages of four- teen to twenty, who came from so- called Americanized-Jewish homes. Most of these boys, being of high school age, were required by law to attend schools where courses in secu- lar subjects would constitute the main program of studies. Confronted with the alternative of either losing these students or organizing a private parochial high school where high school studies would be pursued along- side of, and under the same roof as, the Hebrew studies, those far-sighted and zealous East European Jews ap- plied for a charter and founded in September, 1916, the first, and up to the present time, the only complete secular high school under Jewish auspices and control in America. The first students of this new high schoolJcalled the Talmudical Academy, came from the Yeshiva Etz Chaim which, during the previous year' 419153, had become merged with the' Y. R. I. E. under the pretentious name of the Rabbinical College of America - later abandoned for the present name, the Rabbi 'Isaac Elcha- nan Theological Seminary. Rabbi Dr. Bernard Revel, who, although a young man at that time, was already widely known in Jewish circlesas an out- standing scholar and authority on Jewish learning, became the first pres- ident of the reorganized institution. Together with the late Dr. Solomon T. H. Hurwitz, he founded and organ- ized the Talmudical Academy, the high school department of the R. -I. E. T. S. Two years later, when Dr. Hurwitz, co-founder and first prin- cipal of the T. A., passed away after a short illness, the present incumbent, then a teacher of biology in the city high schools and also in the T. A., was called uponktao -E-ead the Yeshiva's high school, a pg-which he has held uninterruptedly up to the present time. Soon after his appointment, the new principal found it necessary to reor- ganize the office routine and the ad- ministration, bringing them more in line with the practices prevailing in the modern up-to-date high schools. He also felt obliged to make changes in the teaching staff, retaining a few of the better instructors and engag- ing some of the strongest and best qualified teachers in the high school system in New York. Improvements and additions to the equipment and teaching facilities soon brought the school up to the standards required by the State Education Department. Learning of the high scholastic stand- ards and the excellence of the teach- ing staff of the new school, students from all over the city became inter- ested and came to register in it. From a school of some thirty odd students in 1917, the T, A. grew rapidly in numbers until in 1931 its registration exceeded four hundred. New courses were added and additional depart- ments of study were developed, there-