Director of Hillel to assume presidency of Yeshiva U.

NEW YORK -- Students from Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life gathered one night during the recent General Assembly of the Jewish federation system and confronted Richard Joel.

The students peppered the president and international director of Hillel with criticism that events during the United Jewish Communities' annual gathering had condescended to them.

Joel -- who had delivered speeches, participated in panels and spent days working the summit halls -- listened intently. He expressed sympathy for the students and asked them how they would have done things differently.

For Neil Moss, chairman of Hillel's board of directors and a longtime colleague, Joel's reaction was "warm and engaging" -- typical for a corporate chief who also plays accordion, dances and sings into the wee hours at summer Hillel retreats.

"Sometimes I joke with him that he's an overgrown camp counselor," Moss says. "He's the guy who loses his voice."

Joel's voice now will resonate in a much wider arena: On Dec. 5, Joel, 52, was named president of Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of modern Orthodoxy.

His mission, Joel says, will be "to move along an institution whose job is to inspire and educate and give opportunities to a generation of young people, who will in fact lead Orthodoxy and Jewish life and the world at a time when there is a darkness of values."

He will make the transition from Hillel to Yeshiva by spring 2003, Joel says.

Joel's election capped a controversial two-year search that reflected the debate over whether to allow someone other than a Torah scholar to head the world's largest Orthodox university.

For the first time in its 116 years, Y.U. officials named neither a rabbi nor a Torah scholar, but a charismatic, popular modern Orthodox figure widely regarded for his management and fund-raising skills.

"I think he'll take an excellent institution and take it to all kinds of places we haven't dreamed about," says Barry Shrage, president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston.

Shrage, who also is a member of the modern Orthodox movement, predicts Joel is "going to continue to develop a vision for modern Orthodoxy that can be communicated within the community and outside of it."

For his part, Joel insists he's setting his sights strictly on the world of Yeshiva, where he once was dean of the Cardozo School of Law. He has a daughter at the school's Stern College for women and a son at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, or RIETS.

"With real humility, I've accepted the presidency of Y.U. No one has offered me the leadership of the Orthodox world," he says.

Many who have worked with Joel say they're confident he'll succeed.

In part, they point to Joel's professional skills and his 14-year track record at Hillel: He took an organization of campus religious chapters loosely tied to B'nai B'rith and on the brink of financial collapse, and transformed it into a high-profile, well-funded, corporate-style entity, they say.

"He took an organization that was considered dorky and turned it around into a place kids want to be," says Lynn Schusterman, president of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, which has donated a good portion of Hillel's $46 million annual budget.

The search for a new Y.U. head was so fraught with tension that it was only in the two days preceding the Dec. 5 vote that the boards of trustees for the university and RIETS appeared ready to back Joel.

Even then, it came only after Joel met with the trustees at length, face to face.

In the end, Y.U. officials arrived at an arrangement that some called surprising: Joel was named president of Yeshiva and chief executive officer of RIETS, while Y.U.'s outgoing President Norman Lamm, a highly regarded Torah scholar, will become rosh yeshiva, or head of RIETS, and university chancellor.

Yeshiva, a top-ranked university with five locations in New York -- including RIETS, medical and law schools, affiliated health-care centers and high schools -- has become a "variegated" entity, according to Julius Berman, president of the RIETS board.

In light of its "complex" character, Berman says, Yeshiva "requires that much more leadership."

The institution will remain committed to the motto "Torah U'madda" -- Torah and science -- indicating a synthesis of Jewish and general studies, Berman says.