Rabbi Bernard Lander, who died Feb. 1 at the age of 94, was a soft-spoken gentleman who looked more like a synagogue candyman than a relentless builder and scholar.
But indeed, Lander founded and presided over Touro College for nearly its entire existence, and over the course of four decades turned what was a private dream into an international academic institution.
In building the college, his mission was as much about sustaining Jewish tradition as it was with providing education.
Lander started as a rabbi in Baltimore at 22 after receiving his rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University. While serving as a rabbi, Lander commuted to his native New York to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Columbia University.
In the ensuing years, he was appointed to several government posts, including serving as a consultant to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, while simultaneously serving as a professor at Columbia and then Hunter College.
Touro wasn’t Lander’s first experience creating academic programs. In 1955, Lander was hired by Yeshiva University to establish some of the school’s graduate programs, which he did until he left in 1971 to start his own college.
Touro, which was modeled in part on the small Catholic colleges interspersed throughout New York, was Lander’s way of enabling tradition-minded Jews to acquire a college education without having to go through the secularizing and depersonalized university machine.
“I saw this as a new kind of religious-oriented college,” Lander once said. “Touro’s philosophy and mission was first to rebuild Jewish life and, separately, to serve the larger society — each in its own setting.”
Touro College was born in an old 50,000-square-foot building on 44th Street in Manhattan that was donated by the federal government. Today, the college has around 17,500 students enrolled in its various colleges and divisions, and has campuses in the New York area, Berlin, Jerusalem, Moscow, Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Fla.
The college also operates as Touro University on Mare Island, next to Vallejo in San Pablo Bay, with a satellite campus in Henderson, Nev.
Touro bills itself as a “Jewish-sponsored institution” that was “established primarily to enrich the Jewish heritage and to serve the larger American community.” Its student population is said to be mostly Jewish, though the college does not keep official statistics.
Even as he entered his ninth decade, Lander hardly slowed down. He went to Touro nearly every day to conduct university business. Associates said that Lander often was the first one into the office and the last to leave, and that as he grew older his working pace seemed to accelerate.
One of Lander’s close friends, Menachem Genack, the rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox Union’s kashrut division, once noted that his “stamina outpaces people well younger than him.”
“Touro is a dream he actualized almost singlehandedly,” Genack said, calling Lander a real dreamer and a builder. “He’s a very, very special person. He’s not an academic in some ivory tower. He’s an academic who’s built an ivory tower.”