Remembering a One-of-a-Kind Life Devoted to Jewish Education https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2020/04/remembering-a-one-of-a-kind-life-devoted-to-jewish-education/

April 28, 2020 | Menachem Butler
About the author:

A lawyer, political scientist, newspaper columnist, and former adviser to New York City mayor John Lindsay, Marvin Schick—who died last week at the age of eighty-five—was best known for his lifelong devotion to the establishment and maintenance of Jewish educational institutions in both the U.S. and Israel. Menachem Butler reflects on Schick’s legacy:

Marvin became a lifelong believer of the importance of a strong Jewish educational system across every denomination—he was particularly pained when non-Orthodox schools shuttered—and served as an early and lone voice [encouraging] philanthropists to place Jewish education high on the communal agenda. As senior adviser to the Avi Chai Foundation, he conducted many pathbreaking studies on Jewish education, and his innovative “Census of Jewish Day Schools in the United States” remains the best source of information about Jewish education over the past generation,

[Schick’s] philosophy of Jewish education [was] that children and their education must never be discarded and that everything must be done to create a more lasting and sustained Jewish community. In Marvin’s earlier years of Jewish communal service, he was active in nearly every major and minor Orthodox Jewish organization—proudly being the only activist in both the (ḥaredi) Agudath Israel and the (Modern Orthodox) Orthodox Union organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Others saw [his participation in both] as a conflict; he saw it as a fusion. [Likewise], he established organizations that worked across communal boundaries and would fight for the individual Jew however he needed to be helped.

Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/marvin-schick-obituary