When Brooklyn native Baruch Lederman, then 23, came to Milwaukee to be a Bais Medrash (post-high school) student at the brand new Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study, he at first seemed like the only student.
“I was the first one to arrive” on opening day at the rented classrooms at the then Henry Clay School in Whitefish Bay, “and for the first hour or so I was the only one there,” said Lederman.
Indeed, it was a small school in 1980. Its student body numbered exactly 11 boys; there were three rabbis, a secular studies principal/advisor and some teachers from the Milwaukee Public Schools or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who were moonlighting or “filling in.”
The students lived in townhouses on Mohawk Ave. about a mile away — and one of the first students in the high school, Simcha Guttman, remembered that if you missed the ride to the school on a winter day, you had to walk.
A quarter of a century has passed and WITS will celebrate its 25th anniversary at its annual banquet on Sunday, June 5, 4:30 p.m., at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee.
It is today a very different place, as Lederman and Guttman, now both rabbis, acknowledge. It now has its own home on Lake Dr., acquired in 1984, complete with classrooms, synagogue and dormitories. It has 125 students in the high school and Beis Medrash programs; has eight full-time rabbis; and boasts more than 550 alumni in the U.S., Canada, Israel and elsewhere.
But these two rabbis themselves also symbolize the continuity of the place. Guttman is now a teacher where he was once a student; and while the classes are larger, the faculty is “still tight with the students” and “the high school boys look up to the Bais Medrash boys … that’s the same,” he said.
And Lederman, who is the rabbi of Congregation Kehillas Torah in San Diego, has sent his son Dovid to WITS for grades 11 and 12 (he will be one of this year’s graduates).
“When I was there, it was incredible how devoted the rabbis were to the students and the way the rabbis encouraged interaction between the Bais Medrash and the high school,” said Lederman. “That hasn’t changed. The soul of the school is still the same.”
Another graduate who now works there, alumni director Chaim Shapiro (high school class of 1989), said one of his “fondest memories” was of the onegs for the Sabbath held at the homes of the schools rabbinical leaders.
This not only helped compensate for students’ loneliness, but it allowed the students to “see how a family is supposed to interact” and so “solidified and reinforced” what they learned in their Jewish studies, Shapiro said.
In that and other ways, WITS became “an integral part of who I am as an adult,” said Shapiro. “It is a privilege to come back.”
Full-service community
The rabbis who founded WITS – Yehuda Cheplowitz, Avraham Rauch, Raphael Wachsman and M. Dov Harris (who now lives in Israel) — are all imports to the community from the Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in New York City, where they were all students together.
But their project was largely inspired by members of the Orthodox community here, specifically Rabbis Israel Feldman (of then-Congregation Agudas Achim), David Shapiro (of then Congregation Anshe Sfard) and Michel Twerski (of Congregation Beth Jehudah).
Twerski, the only still living member of this group, said in a telephone interview that during the late 1970s, these rabbis realized that Milwaukee Orthodox Jewry was declining because the city did not have the “all of the institutions that can serve the family. It’s not enough just to have a synagogue.”
Such a community also requires elementary and high schools, with separation of boys and girls, and a kollel for adult study, Twerski said. “So it was very clear,” he continued, that Milwaukee would have to become a “full-service community” or its Orthodox Jews would leave.
This desire fit with the interest that leaders of Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim had in “encouraging students to go beyond filling traditional positions” and go into other communities, said Cheplowitz during an interview at the school. “We were inspired with the vision.”
So Wachsman, whom Cheplowitz said was the one who suggested the idea of Milwaukee, and the others visited, met with local community leaders, and received support and encouragement. WITS was incorporated in August 1980 and opened that September.
Twerski said that WITS has indeed helped reverse the decline of Milwaukee Orthodox Jewry. Indeed, when asked to evaluate the 25-year record of the school, Twerski said, “‘Pleased’ is an understatement. I’m ecstatic about the contribution the yeshiva has made to the community. It’s a crown jewel for the community.”
Cheplowitz and Wachsman also said that WITS has achieved its “primary goal” and many of its “secondary goals.”
The first is creation of a “long-standing, viable, double-programmed [Jewish and secular studies] yeshiva based on excellence,” said Cheplowitz.
The second included pioneering and influencing the growth of the Orthodox community and Orthodox institutions, including the subsequent Yeshiva Elementary School, Torah Academy of Milwaukee for girls, the Milwaukee Kollel Center for Jewish Studies and the creation of Congregation Kehillat Torah in Glendale, which today is Anshe Sfard Kehillat Torah.
Yet as much as WITS does and offers, Cheplowitz and Wachsman would like to offer even more. They would like to be able to offer students more “options and electives” in both Jewish and general studies; to make the rabbinical staff more available to the general community as resources.
And while the school has an indoor exercise room, it really could use an indoor gym for sports and exercise on those cold Milwaukee winter days, the rabbis said.
The 25th anniversary banquet will honor Lorraine Hoffmann on behalf of the legacy of the Hoffman family. Her parents, Herta and Harri Hoffmann, were supporters of the school from its founding to their deaths (in 2001 and 1999, respectively); and Lorraine Hoffmann is active in WITS, Lake Park Synagogue and Hillel Academy and is a member of the national board of the Orthodox Union.
For more information about the banquet, call WITS, 414-963-9317.
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