JTA — Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, policy planning for city and state governments and community surveys for 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 July in Jerusalem 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 was also one of the most prominent members of a cohort of Jewish social scientists who, from the 1980s through the 2000s, played a central role in setting the agenda for organized Jewish life. Philanthropists and nonprofit leaders sought their data and recommendations on hot-button issues like rising intermarriage, attachment to Israel, population trends and declining engagement with Jewish institutions.

In 1981, Ukeles joined the Jewish nonprofit world as senior planning officer of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (now UJA-Federation of New York). He led the charity’s first scientific study of the New York area’s Jewish population, and major studies on senior services and Jewish poverty.

Five years later, he went out on his own, launching Ukeles Associates, Inc., and for 28 years led consulting projects combining his experience in policy research, planning and management for a range of secular and Jewish nonprofits.

Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since immigrating in 2012, longtime friend and colleague Asher Ostrin predicted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and nonprofit board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry.

“Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students, and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear,” said Ostrin, an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

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, where he thrived academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team.

First class at Bar Ilan University, graduating 1959

After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed........

© The Times of Israel