Funeral services were held at Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue today for Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein, senior rabbi of the century-old Orthodox congregation, who died Friday in Miami Beach, Fla. at the age of 76. Lookstein had been president of the Synagogue Council of America and served as president and later Chancellor of Bar Illan University in Israel. He was also a professor of homiletics and rabbinics at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in New York.
Lookstein was the dean of the Orthodox rabbinate in America, a leader of Mizrachi, the religious Zionist organization, a past president of the Rabbinical Council of America and of the New York Board of Rabbis. He was also for many years a leader in the Rabbinical Council of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the American Zionist Council, the Commission on Jewish Chaplaincy of the National Jewish Welfare Board and the Gustav Wurzweiler Foundation of the World Council on Jewish Education.
Born in Russia, Lookstein was educated at City College and Columbia University in New York and at Yeshiva University. He was ordained in 1926 and served as assistant rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun under his grandfather, the late Rabbi Moses S. Margolies. He assumed the pulpit on the death of Margolies in 1936.
As a leading Jewish educator, Lookstein was a founder and principal of the Hebrew Teachers Training School for Girls, now the Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. He also founded the Ramaz School, a leading Jewish day school in Manhattan.
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