As Jewish communal professionals turn Jack Ukeles’s visions and methods into reality, his legacy lives on.

Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, creating policy planning for city and state governments as well as major Jewish organizations around the world, Jack Ukeles had one consistent goal: to blend research, data and strategic problem-solving with idealism in making the world a better place.

Ukeles, who died in Jerusalem July 22 at the age of 88, was widely and deeply admired as well for his integrity, wisdom and compassion on both a personal and professional level.

“He taught, he inspired, he challenged,” observed Asher Ostrin, an executive of the global Jewish humanitarian Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who worked closely with Ukeles for many years. “He didn’t think for you, he thought with you.”

Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since making aliyah in 2012, Ostrin described his friend and colleague as a communal hero who “translated visions into a course of action.” He noted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry. “Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students,” Ostrin said, “and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear.”

Those values were shaped growing up in a religious Zionist home, aware of the trauma his parents endured in Eastern Europe before settling in New York. Ukeles’s mother wanted a first-rate Jewish education for her only son, and after visiting a number of yeshivas, moved the family from The Bronx to Brooklyn so he could attend the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He thrived there academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team. During his high school years, Ukeles was also active in Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth movement. After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed to integrating modern scholarship and traditional Jewish learning, he applied and was accepted in 1955 to Bar-Ilan University’s first class.

“My father was proud to be a member of that first class, and as a student........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)