It is difficult to imagine the landscape of American Orthodox life without the work of Rabbi Julius Berman. For more than sixty years, he occupied central positions of responsibility in American Jewish life, spanning legal, institutional, diplomatic, and philanthropic spheres, while remaining firmly anchored in Torah discipline. A bridge between the world of elite secular law and the internal life of Orthodox communal institutions, Rabbi Julius Berman passed away on December 30, 2025, at the age of ninety.
I had the privilege of knowing him my entire life and grew up with stories of his leadership, calm, and composure. He was a mentor to my father. Five years ago, during the COVID pandemic, I spent nearly a dozen hours in extended Zoom conversations with Rabbi Berman, recording his reflections on his life and extraordinary career.
The habits that would later define his leadership were formed early, under circumstances that offered neither ease nor assurance. Born in Dukst, Lithuania, near Vilna, in 1935, Yudl Berman arrived in the United States as a refugee at the age of four. After his parents settled in a modest apartment on Belden Street in Hartford, Connecticut, a friend of his mother remarked that a child named “Yudl Berman” would never succeed in America and urged that he adopt an English name. On their street stood the Julius Baggish Bakery; from it he took the name he would carry for the rest of his life.
In Hartford, Berman’s early promise was noticed by a slightly older neighbor who took the time to sit with him and learn. Decades later, Berman recalled himself as a “five- or six-year-old boy” newly arrived from war-torn Europe, living in a “small tenement in a large apartment house,” unfamiliar with the language and “knowing absolutely nobody in the city.” That neighbor, later Louis Feldman, the scholar of Greek and Latin at Yeshiva University, nevertheless “devoted some of [his] precious time” to the young refugee, sharing moments of learning and “teaching me some mind games.” Berman never spoke of the episode as an act of generosity. He spoke of it as a fact: that someone with no obligation had stopped, paid attention, and taken him seriously.
Just as formative were the models of lay leadership Berman encountered in those years, figures who, like Feldman, exercised authority through attention rather than position. In their lives, Torah study was not ancillary to communal responsibility but central to it. Foremost among them was Charles Batt, a businessman and the unpaid rabbi of the Young Israel of Hartford for twenty-five years. Berman later described him as a man “blessed with neither a captivating charisma nor an overpowering sense of rhetoric,” yet who, “by dint of personality, dedication and persistence, made an indelible impression on hundreds of families.” Rabbi Batt was fully engaged in building a business, but “his every spare moment was devoted to teaching Torah,” with no group “too small or too large to benefit from his time and attention.” For Berman, this was not an abstract lesson. It was a fact of daily life: leadership exercised through constancy rather than display, through regular study and personal responsibility, through what he would later call “the power of one person, the power of love and dedication, and the difference that one Jew can make.”
This is the key to understanding Rabbi Julius Berman’s life as a whole. Much of what he pursued thereafter, across law, and communal leadership, and a wide array of national institutions, can be read as a sustained effort to give institutional form to that model: leadership in which Torah study is not an accompaniment to authority but its source. From that point forward, the career of Julius Berman unfolded as a sequence of increasingly demanding efforts to translate that vision into durable structures. The arenas shifted and the scale expanded, but the governing conception of leadership did not change.
The outlines of Berman’s education and professional ascent have been widely noted in the obituaries published in recent weeks. After graduating from the first class of the Yeshiva of Hartford, his parents sent him to Brooklyn to live with relatives, where he attended Mesivta Torah Vodaas High School. He went on to Yeshiva College, and then pursued advanced study on two tracks, receiving semicha from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) in 1959 and a Juris Doctor from NYU Law School in 1960, graduating first in his class. That same year, he joined the law firm Kaye Scholer, where he would remain for his entire career. Torah and law were not alternatives in this path, but parallel obligations, each demanding discipline and sustained attention.
His most consequential public contribution during those years emerged through his leadership of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA). Founded in the mid-1960s at the insistence of Rabbi Moshe Sherer of Agudath Israel of America and soon established as an independent organization, COLPA arose at a moment when Orthodox Jews were still routinely told that Sabbath observance was incompatible with professional life and that their interests had no viable place in American public law. It quickly became something new in American Jewish life: a legal address that treated Orthodox religious claims not as exceptions to be tolerated, but as rights to be argued and secured within the American constitutional system. Under Berman’s presidency, COLPA assembled a national network of volunteer attorneys and public-affairs professionals, filed briefs, negotiated employer-wide agreements, and intervened directly with corporations, government agencies, and courts. It defended employees dismissed for refusing to work on the Sabbath, challenged discriminatory hiring practices, secured accommodations for religious dress, addressed Sabbath conflicts in civil service examinations and public institutions, and pressed the case that government aid to education could include yeshivot without violating church–state boundaries. These were not abstract victories or symbolic statements. Berman often recalled that his greatest satisfaction came not from court opinions or policy shifts, but from calling an individual who had lost a job for observing the Sabbath and telling him that the dismissal had been reversed. Law, as Berman practiced it, was neither ideology nor performance. It was relief delivered to a person, quietly, and in time to matter.
By the late 1970s, Berman’s professional responsibilities expanded further. Even as his communal obligations multiplied, he continued to carry demanding work at Kaye Scholer and took on the Toronto-based real estate firm Olympia & York as a client. He divided his days between Kaye Scholer and Olympia & York’s Park Avenue headquarters, later joining the firm’s New York-based senior executive team as executive vice president and chief legal officer. The world he entered was exacting and unsentimental, shaped by the Reichmann family’s long-horizon vision, insistence on legal and ethical precision, and aversion to flamboyance. At the time, they were among the most consequential Jewish philanthropists of their generation. It was an environment well suited to Berman’s temperament. Olympia & York was responsible for some of the largest development projects in New York, including Battery Park City and the World Financial Center. In such an environment, legal counsel was not expected to perform, but to hold. It required discipline, discretion, and structural exactitude. Berman was never the public face of these undertakings, but he was essential to the legal and institutional framework that allowed them to stand. For him, law was not an instrument of display, but infrastructure.
Over the late 1970s, through the 1980s and 1990s, and into the 2000s, Berman’s reach widened steadily, almost imperceptibly at first, until it encompassed nearly every major Orthodox and intercommunal institution in American Jewish life. He did not arrive everywhere at once. He was asked back. One board led to another; one interim responsibility hardened into permanence. By the time his name appeared on letterheads as president of the Orthodox Union; chairman of the OU Kashruth Commission; founder of the Toras HoRav Foundation and OU Press; president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA); chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; chairman of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), and then chairman emeritus; and trustee of Yeshiva University; alongside leadership roles at the Task Force on Missionaries and Cults of the New York Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC); the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC); the Jewish Agency for Israel; and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, the pattern was already established. These positions were not trophies accumulated but burdens entrusted, conferred again and again by institutions that, in moments of difficulty, turned to the same figure because they trusted his judgment to outlast the moment. In his final years of public leadership, as chairman and later president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, that trust was most visible in his stewardship of restitution as an ongoing obligation to the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors and to memory itself, rather than as a closed historical settlement.
Alongside his public responsibilities, Berman built a large and close-knit family with his wife Dorothy. He was a central presence not only for his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but also for nieces, nephews, and extended family members, who regularly sought his counsel. He also sustained a parallel life of regular Torah learning and tefillah that was neither symbolic nor ornamental. For more than three decades, he delivered a weekly Mishnah Berurah shiur at the Young Israel of Forest Hills, a commitment that persisted through professional travel, institutional upheaval, and the expanding demands of public leadership. The shiur was not conceived as a public platform or a showcase of erudition. It was steady and text-bound, shaped by the way he absorbed the approach of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik to hilchot Shabbat into the shiur’s flow. His friends and neighbors came to understand that this shiur was not something he did in addition to his other responsibilities; it was something around which those responsibilities were arranged.
The same instinct shaped his daily schedule in midtown Manhattan. For more than a half-century, he convened and sustained a daily minyan at the Kaye Scholer offices, drawing lawyers, staff, and visitors into a fixed rhythm of tefillah within an otherwise relentless professional environment. The minyan was neither announced nor formally institutionalized. It existed because he showed up, because he expected others to do the same, and because he rejected the idea that professional responsibility excused withdrawal from fixed religious obligation. Looking back on the minyan years later, Berman emphasized that it had never been conceived as a convenience or accommodation, but as a commitment that imposed structure on the workday rather than yielding to it. Prayer, he insisted, could not be fitted around professional life; it had to claim its place within it. What sustained the minyan was precisely this refusal to treat tefillah as optional or symbolic. It persisted because it demanded regularity, presence, and submission to a schedule not of one’s own making. As Rabbi Julius Berman wrote in his reflection marking the conclusion of the minyan’s first fifty years, “What began as a sporadic Mincha minyan developed into a daily event and, quite often, included Maariv as well,” while an informal Mishna lunch evolved into “a full-fledged advanced Talmud shiur,” delivered weekly by the RIETS rosh yeshiva and rosh kollel, Rabbi Michael Rosensweig.
The habits that ordered his own days were the same ones he brought to communal decision-making. It was in this same register, quietly and without ceremony, that his partnership with my father, Rabbi Raphael Butler, took shape in the early 1980s at NCSY and brought Yachad into the Jewish community under the leadership of educator Chana Zweiter. Their partnership in founding Yachad for individuals with developmental disabilities was not merely organizational, but expressive of a shared belief that the Jewish community’s responsibility extends most urgently to those often left at the margins of communal life. As his son Elie Berman recalled in his funeral eulogy, Rabbi Julius Berman immediately grasped what Yachad meant “not only to the children but to the family members of those children,” describing it as hatzalas nefashos. When the possibility of running Yachad on a trial basis was raised, Berman rejected the premise. “Rafi raised the possibility of the OU having this program on a trial basis,” Eli recalled, “but my father said, ‘If we do it, we do it right,’ and we commit to taking it on and fund the program for at least two years.” What followed was neither a pilot nor a gesture, but a binding institutional commitment. At the first Shabbaton, and ever since, Yachad represented not symbolic accommodation but full inclusion: Yachad participants were called to the Torah, shared the lectern for divrei Torah, and were addressed by name from the pulpit. Yachad would not be a subsidiary of NCSY, but a fully parallel division within the Orthodox Union, alongside NCSY, Synagogue Services, and OU Kosher. For Berman, this was not innovation for its own sake. It was the application of the same discipline he brought to learning, prayer, and governance: obligation assumed publicly and sustained, without display, over time.
That same discipline did not remain confined to internal institution-building. The behaviors that governed how Berman constructed programs also governed how he entered public crises. When the stakes moved from boardrooms and Shabbatonim to headlines and diplomatic pressure, his method did not change. Only the scale did. Orthodox readers of The Jewish Press, as well as those of more secular Jewish newspapers such as The Jewish Week and The Forward, encountered Rabbi Julius Berman over decades not merely as a subject of reportage, but as a recurring presence at moments of communal strain. He surfaced most visibly not when agreement came easily, but when it did not, when consensus frayed and the cost of division became tangible. Again and again, he stepped forward at moments when the Jewish community was tempted to speak past itself: during debates over Israel’s security, over the proper bounds of public disagreement, over the governance of shared institutions, and over the ethical obligations that accompany leadership exercised in public view.
The pattern first became unmistakable during the AWACS fight of 1981, when the Reagan administration assumed that American Jewish leadership would fracture over the proposed U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Instead, Berman worked quietly to impose a single, disciplined voice. In later years, when public campaigns threatened to weaken Israel’s diplomatic standing, he answered not with slogans or counter-mobilization, but with arguments that were carefully framed, legally precise, and attentive to consequence. And when Orthodox institutions or practices were caricatured or dismissed, he responded in the same register, not with counterattack, but with documentation, logic, and restraint, a pattern he would later name explicitly.
That pattern did not remain implicit. It became explicit when Berman chose to intervene in print himself, setting down in careful prose the limits he believed responsible disagreement could not cross. That approach was clearest in a 1998 essay, published in The Jewish Press, with the deliberately blunt title “Orthodox-Bashing – Is It Becoming an Addiction?” It appeared at a moment when internal Jewish argument had begun to slide; argument giving way to caricature, criticism giving way to something closer to contempt. Berman was careful to say what he was not opposing. Disagreement, he wrote, was not only inevitable but necessary. Communities that cannot argue cannot think. What concerned him was something else entirely. Increasingly, Orthodox life was no longer being challenged as a position to be answered, but treated as an object to be mocked. That shift mattered, he insisted, because it did real damage. It did not clarify policy, improve institutions, or advance a single constructive outcome. Instead, it weakened the already fragile mechanisms that allowed American Jewry to act together when it mattered most. Polemic became a substitute for responsibility. Worse still, he warned, communal structures built to protect the vulnerable were being used as leverage in ideological fights. To “hold hostage,” as he put it, institutions designed to sustain the poor and the dependent was not merely bad strategy. It was “patently immoral,” an act that violated “the very essence of the Jewish tradition of tzedakah.”
What distinguished Berman’s public interventions was not their heat but their method. He did not shout back. He documented. He parsed language and followed arguments to their consequences. Trained as a lawyer, he asked relentlessly what followed from what, separating assertion from result and rhetoric from effect. The aim was never to score points or win applause, but to restore proportion and discipline: to force a reckoning with what public speech actually does once it leaves the page. The pattern repeated. When statistics were deployed carelessly, he corrected them. When headlines distorted substance, he answered them. When disagreements turned personal, he stripped them back to principle. His interventions were rarely expansive and never incendiary. They were precise. They were restrained. And they carried weight because they refused the easiest currency of public life: applause. Berman understood something fundamental: that in moments of communal stress, power does not lie in who speaks the loudest, but in who speaks last, and is still believed. That discipline was not theoretical. It governed how he absorbed criticism, how he bore silence, and how he accepted costs that never appeared in print. As Elie Berman recalled at the funeral:
“My father also recognized that if you want to be in a leadership position you have to be able to take the criticism, including some very bad press. That was the price of admission. You needed to have thick skin but you also needed to listen to the criticism and to the extent changes were warranted to make those changes, and to the extent the criticism was unwarranted (and from my biased perspective it was predominately unwarranted) you needed to explain yourself in the press though there were times when for various reasons he was unable to truly defend himself, either because he didn’t want to throw someone else under the bus or the greater good of the organization prevented him from defending himself, in which case, he would just take one on the chin for the team. He would often say – well they spelled my name correctly so I can’t complain.”
This was not self-effacement. It was judgment. The willingness to absorb criticism, to remain silent when silence better served an institution, and to forgo public vindication for the sake of collective trust was itself an exercise of authority. It was for this reason that Berman came to be regarded as a “bar sechel,” someone who brought proportion and judgment to volatile situations, and who understood power not as something to be asserted, but as something to be exercised carefully and sparingly.
That voice was shaped by a consistent set of convictions, articulated over decades in letters, essays, speeches, and sermons. Berman believed that public disagreement carried consequences, especially when conducted through the media rather than within responsible institutional frameworks. In matters touching Israel’s security, he warned against what he called “the assumption of authority without responsibility,” the temptation of American Jewish organizations or intellectuals to air internal disputes in ways that would be read in Washington rather than Jerusalem. Unity, for him, was neither a slogan nor a sentimental appeal, but a strategic and moral discipline. Conflicting signals did not merely register diversity; they risked legitimizing policies that could endanger lives. This insistence on disciplined consensus explains both his effectiveness as chairman of the Conference of Presidents and his repeated willingness to disappoint ideological allies when restraint, rather than escalation, better served the Jewish people.
This principle shaped method as well as theory. During the debates surrounding President Reagan’s 1982 peace initiative, which was advanced without consultation with either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership, Berman convened an emergency session of the Conference of Presidents and spent hours mediating among the heads of thirty-seven Jewish organizations with sharply divergent views prior to walking into meeting Secretary of State George P. Shultz. “The groups at the extremes all had to give a little,” he later explained; “to get them to agree required considerable mediation.” When the Conference ultimately issued a unified statement opposing the proposal, administration officials were caught off guard. They had expected American Jewish leadership to be fragmented, “all over the lot,” and instead confronted a single address that could not be dismissed. For Berman, the episode confirmed a conviction he carried throughout his public life: that authority does not arise from volume or pressure, but from the disciplined construction of consensus. Without it, the Conference of Presidents would be reduced to just another voice, not an address the government was compelled to take seriously.
This understanding was widely shared by his colleagues. Even Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the longtime head of the Reform movement in America and a close personal friend of Berman’s despite their deep ideological disagreements, recognized that when Berman chaired a meeting he spoke not as a representative of the Orthodox Union but as the voice of the Conference of Presidents itself. By mutual understanding, Berman therefore refrained from advancing the Orthodox Union’s position on contested issues during his tenure as president of the Conference. For example, during the contentious debates of the 1980s over “Who Is a Jew?” – debates that unfolded in Israel but reverberated powerfully within North American Jewish life – Berman did not act as the Orthodox advocate within the body. That role was assumed by Rabbi Pinchas Stolper of the Orthodox Union, while Berman presided over deliberations aimed at producing a position that could credibly claim collective standing.
The same sensibility governed his handling of internal Orthodox controversies. Whether the issue was kosher certification, sloppy statistics, distorted headlines, or portrayals of rabbinic figures he believed crossed the line from criticism into caricature, Berman responded in the same register. He read closely, checked claims, and followed arguments to their consequences. He challenged positions he opposed without personalizing disputes, corrected errors without escalating tone. What mattered to him was never whether an argument could be won, but whether the manner in which it was conducted damaged institutions that would still have to function the next morning. Leadership, as he understood it, meant the ability to argue clearly and in a low key, to accept that reasonable people may differ, and still to preserve the conditions that made continued cooperation possible.
What unified these roles, legal, institutional, and diplomatic, was not strategy but discipline. Rabbi Berman’s public interventions, whether in print, in private meetings with Israeli leaders, or in conversations with American officials, were extensions of a single conception of leadership rooted in Torah. Speech, like authority, had to be governed. Disagreement was inevitable; disunity was not. Leadership, as he understood it, did not mean eliminating tension, but containing it within structures capable of sustaining continuity. That understanding explains why he was so often entrusted with roles that required judgment rather than charisma, mediation rather than mobilization.
Berman traced this posture directly to Torah study, and more specifically to the conception of leadership he absorbed from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, whom he served as a close disciple and trusted confidant. He gave it formal expression in a 1980 presidential address delivered under the auspices of the Orthodox Union, later published in Hebrew as “Communal Leadership in the Teachings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.” Drawing on the Rav’s reading of the verses describing Moses’ role, including the passage “For when they have a matter, it comes unto me… and I make known the statutes of G-d and His teachings,” Berman argued that Jewish leadership culminates not in administration or decision-making, but in formation.
Moses, he explained, embodies three intertwined forms of authority: attending to individual need, adjudicating disputes, and transmitting Torah. What unites these roles is not their function but their formative power. In the third mode especially, Moses appears not merely as judge or problem-solver, but as rabbi and teacher, one who over time establishes a community of disciples who themselves become leaders, yet never cease to be students. As Berman emphasized, “What [students] learn from the rabbi is far more than the printed text… What they learn is a way of life.”
Authority, in this framework, is legitimate only insofar as it is anchored in study that is regular, non-negotiable, and formative. Central to this vision was the Rav’s reading of Maimonides on Torah study, which Berman treated not as derashah but as directive. He emphasized the distinction between acquiring knowledge of Torah and establishing fixed times for its study: the first a relationship of “I and it,” the second of “I and You.” Once such an appointment is fixed, the Rav insisted, “neither suffering, nor hunger, nor public responsibility can serve as grounds for canceling it,” a demand addressed pointedly to Joshua son of Nun, Biblical Israel’s military leader, precisely because of the weight of his public obligations. For Berman, this teaching explained why authority cannot stand apart from disciplined study, and why leadership could never override the daily encounter with Torah.
Seen in this light, the sources of his authority lie not in office or achievement, but in his childhood in Hartford. Rabbi Julius Berman later articulated, in the language of the Rav, the primacy of fixed study, the quiet authority generated by disciplined habit, and the refusal to separate leadership from learning, principles he had first encountered in lived form in figures such as Rabbi Charles Batt, whose authority rested on constancy rather than office or rhetoric. Torah study, in this model, was not enrichment or inspiration, but obligation, woven into the rhythms of work, family, and communal responsibility. What Berman later sought to institutionalize on a national scale, the restoration of Torah to the daily agenda of professionals and laypeople alike, was precisely this model. He judged leadership not by visibility or acclaim, but by whether practices held when circumstances changed and personalities passed. With his death, American Orthodoxy lost not only a leader, but a way of exercising authority grounded in Torah learning, shaped by restraint, and carried with a willingness to assume responsibility without display.
Rabbi Julius Berman articulated this understanding with particular clarity in his 1980 presidential address to the Orthodox Union, a passage that continues to stand as both summation and charge:
If I were to summarize in a single sentence my feelings regarding the role of the OU, I would say that its task is to restore the Torah to the daily agenda of the layman – to make it a way of life not only for scholars and for those who are able to devote their days and nights to Torah study, but for you and for me, in every occupation and profession, to find time, on a daily basis, to study Torah. This is our appointed hour for an encounter with the Holy One, blessed be He.
When we focus on the matter of the Holocaust, it is possible to point to particular tragedies. For example, numbers are cited – six million Jews, among them one million children. The problem with numbers is that when one reduces human beings – sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters of flesh and blood – to numbers, one loses the entire emotional impression of the event. Certainly, we lost some great figures, and undoubtedly a number of great Torah institutions were destroyed by those butchers. And again, fortunately, these Torah institutions were rebuilt and restored in Israel, in America, and in other places. Slowly, yet surely, we are cultivating great scholars, roshei yeshivah, and bnei Torah. However, far more was destroyed in the Holocaust. We lost the baal ha’bayit – that old type of layman, a simple human being who would rise early every morning and run to the synagogue to pray, study a little, work all day, return home, and after having eaten his meal, would as a matter of course return to the study hall to learn another seder. This is what we lost in the Holocaust, and we are now approaching a point at which, in some measure, we may recover from this loss. This is the mission of the Orthodox Union; after all, are we not an organization of laymen?
We must reshape the model of the layman, and for this, I believe, there is only one path: to restore the Torah to the daily agenda of life.
The family asks those who may have stories and memories of Rabbi Berman to share them via email at RJBMemories@BermanGroup.com.