75th Anniversary Book

The Ramaz School: Honoring Tradition, Empowering the Future

©2012 | 9"×12" Full Color | 128pp.

Forward by Elie Wiesel

EDITORIAL BOARD: RABBI JOSHUA S. BAKST, CARYL ENGLANDER, JUDITH H. FAGIN, JEFFREY GUROCK, EDITH HONIG, ESTHER KREMER, MARA LASSNER, SETH LIPSKY, RABBI HASKEL LOOKSTEIN, JUDI RESNICK, KENNETH ROCHLIN, LEORA TANENBAUM

The Ramaz School offers a superior coed Modern Orthodox education to students from preschool through twelfth grade. Integrating secular studies within a yeshiva day school curriculum, Ramaz embraces Torah and Israel together with the finest values and traditions of American and Western civilization. Students meet the challenges of rigorous scholarship, but they also learn lessons that cannot be taught on a blackboard or SMARTboard: the importance of menschlichkeit (treating others with respect and dignity), chesed (performing acts of kindness toward others), and social activism.

This book, issued to commemorate the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary, tells the story of Ramaz from its very beginning.

• In 1937, Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein founded the "Ramaz Academy" in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, naming it for Rabbi Moses Zevulun Margolies (the "RaMaZ"), spiritual leader of Congregation Kehillath Jeshurun.
• In its first year, the school had six students—including its future principal, Haskel Lookstein—and two teachers, with classes meeting in the KJ social hall.
• Seventy-five years later, Ramaz has over a thousand students and three hundred faculty and staff in three buildings. It is known as one of the pre-eminent and most influential Modern Orthodox day schools in the country.

Today’s students learn Judaic and General Studies subjects that previous generations mastered, but through twenty-first century lenses and with contemporary pedagogical approaches. Ramaz embodies all that is great about Modern Orthodoxy: honoring tradition while simultaneously empowering the future.