Samuel Feuerstein, founder and first and only president of Torah Umesorah, the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools, died of heart failure Friday on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. He was 90 years old.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the world-famous Talmudic scholar, and Rabbi Leo Jung of New York, former rabbi of The Jewish Center of Manhattan, delivered the eulogies Sunday at services for Feuerstein which were held at the Maimonides School in Brookline, where he had served as president.
He also served as a vice president and Chairman of the Board of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. In the 1940s, Feuerstein led in the founding of the Torah Schools for Israel, which he helped develop into a network of schools serving 40,000 children.
Feuerstein was a founder of the Torah Academy in Lakewood, N.J., considered a leading school for graduate study in Jewish law. When he founded Torah Umesorah, there were only a handful of Hebrew day schools, mainly in New York City. At his death, there were more than 400 Hebrew primary and day high schools in the United States and Canada.
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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.
