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BE’ER HAGOLAH INSTITUTES
Teaching People How
To Be Good Americans
By Nina Boxer
 HEN
two businessmen meet, they normally ask each other how much money
they’ve made. But when Lev Leviev and Ronald Lauder
meet, they ask each other how many schools they’ve opened.
The competition was evident at the Be’er
Hagolah Institutes 25th anniversary dinner at the Plaza
Hotel where the two business tycoons tried to top each other with
their progress reports.
Both men are involved in building Jewish day
schools.
Lauder, a former ambassador to
Austria, and a scion of the Estee Lauder cosmetics family, has
used his fortune to set up new Jewish schools all over eastern
Europe.
“After I opened 15 schools and 10
kindergartens,” Lauder said, “I told Leviev how proud I was
about the 10,000 children we have. He told me about his 70 schools
and 50 kindergartens with 125,000 children in the former Soviet Union.”
Leviev, a native of Uzbekistan
who now lives in Israel as reputedly the largest private diamond manufacturer in the
world, took exception to Lauder’s statistics. “I have more
than 100 schools, not 70,” Leviev declared.
As the Be’er Hagolah campus is based
exclusively in Brooklyn, where it serves 850 Russian students, Leviev decided to
establish a day school in Queens.
With the guidance of Be’er Hagolah’s dean
Rabbi Avner German and executive director Pearl Kaufman,
Leviev opened his first school for Russian kids in
Queens
two years ago. It now has 400 students.
At its dinner, Be’er Hagolah vice president
Richard Hirsch and emcee Hillel Gross honored
German, Leviev and wife Olga, and one of the institute’s
founders, diamond merchant Alexander Hasenfeld and wife Zissy.
Of the 424 dinner guests almost half were
German’s former students of the after-school Hebrew classes he
used to have at Bnai Israel Synagogue in East New York. After the Jewish community dispersed from the neighborhood,
German’s students grew up to become successful, including Lloyd
Blankfeim who is today president and CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive chairman
of the Presidents Conference, introduced a surprise guest at the
dinner – Natan Sharansky, who came from Washington,
D.C., where the Israeli Minister-without-Portfolio, responsible for
Diaspora affairs, paid his respects at the Ronald Reagan
memorial service.
In recounting the freedom of Jews from
communist tyranny, Sharansky said it is now important to win the
battle for the Jewish soul.
He illustrated with a story about Richard
Perle who worked for the late Sen. Henry Jackson.
“Why are you in the office today?” the
senator asked. “Isn’t it a Jewish holiday?”
“We don’t celebrate,” Perle answered.
“No, my dear boy,” the senator said.
“If you want to be a good American you have to be a good Jew.”
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