Memorial services will be held tomorrow at the Washington Jewish Community Center for Daniel Leivick, the Center’s director of Judaic Studies and israel Programs since his retirement five years ago a logistics expert at the Department of Defense. He died unexpectedly Tuesday of a heart attack at the age of 57.
Leivick, son of the famous Yiddish poet and dramatist, H. Leivick, for whom a poet’s house is named in Tel Aviv, was a test pilot in World War II and continued his service in the Defense Department afterwards. When he retired as chief of the logistics division of the Air Force, he was presented with a citation which referred to him as “a distinguished humanist in the national security dialogue.”
Leivick, who had devoted his spare time while at the Pentagon and later full time to Jewish and Yiddish culture, was highly regarded in the Jewish community for what Robert Weiner, the Center’s executive director, said was his “unique contribution to our center and our community because of his knowledge, his dedication and his humanism.”
At the World Yiddish Conference recently in Jerusalem, Leivick represented the center and the Washington Jewish community. He was a board member of the American Habonim Association, the Labor Zionist Alliance, and the Sholom Aleichem Institute, and a member of the national advisory panel of the American Jewish Committee, YIVO, the Washington JCC and the American Economic Association.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
