Gifts and pledges totalling some $8 million — highlighted by a $1 million from Leonard Stem, chairman of the Board of Hartz Mountain Corp. — were announced at Yeshiva University’s 58th annual Chanukah dinner Sunday night.
The dinner, at the Waldorf Astoria, attended by more than 1,000 people, honored Ghity Stern, widow of Max Stem, noted philanthropist, founder of Hartz Mountain, and long-time vice chairman and member of the university’s Board of Trustees. Max Stern died last May. One of his first major gifts to the university resulted in the establishment of Stern College for Women, the nation’s first undergraduate liberal arts and sciences school for women under Jewish auspices.
The $1 million pledge from Leonard Stern will go toward turning a 50-year-old dream into a reality for the university. The funds will be used to build an athletic center on the university’s main center campus in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. The building will include a modern, regulation-sized gymnasium, something the University never has had.
The projected athletic center will be the first major construction on the university’s Washington Heights campus since 1970. By planning this center, the university reaffirms its commitment to Washington Heights and to the development of the campus and the neighborhood that surrounds it, Dr. Norman Lamm, president of the university, said.
OTHER PROJECTS ANNOUNCED
At the dinner, Lamm announced other projects to honor the memory of Max Stern, Including the following:
$3.75 million from the Max Stern Foundation will fund the largest single scholarship program ever established at the university, the Max Stern Scholars Program. It will offer financial assistance to exceptionally gifted high school students who wish to attend the undergraduate colleges — Yeshiva College for men and Stern College for women.
* The Board of Trustees of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, an affiliate of the university, has renamed the seminary’s community service arm the Max Stern Division of Communal Services.
* Many gifts of $100,000 or more were made to the university to endow the Division of Communal Services and other projects. The gifts were inspired by Ludwig Jesselson, chairman of the university’s Century Campaign; Ludwig Bravmann, dinner Special Gifts chairman; and Herbert Tenzer, chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees.
Another announcement at the dinner was a major contribution by Hermann Merkin, president of Merkin and Company, Inc., a member of the Yeshiva University Board of Trustees, board member of both the university’s Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and co-chairman of its $100 million Century Campaign.
In recognition of Merkin’s contribution, the university will rename its Teachers Institute for Men as the Isaac Breuer College of Hebraic Studies in honor of Merkin’s late father-in-law, Isaac Breuer, an intellectual leader of German Jewry, an attorney, and a founder of the Poalei Agudat Israel, of which be became president. Born in Hungary in 1883, Breuer was brought to Germany as a child. In 1936, he left Nazi Germany and settled in Jerusalem. He died in 1946.
Proceeds from the dinner went towards the university’s Century Campaign, an effort initiated in 1979 to raise $100 million to commemorate the university’s centennial in 1986.
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