Daniel Greer A Former Woodrow Wilson Scholarship Winner

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Daniel Greer
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Daniel Greer A Former Woodrow Wilson Scholarship
Winner

• During his senior year at Princeton, Daniel Greer
  was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. He
  decided to use the scholarship grant to study
  Talmud with Rav YosefDov Soloveitchik at Yeshiva
  University.
• In the great pre-World War Il yesh/vos in Eastern
  Europe, Yiddish was the language of Talmudic
  study. In Rav Soloveitchik's classes, it remained
  so. For two to three hours or more three times
  each week, the Rav (as Rav Soloveitchlk was
  called) lectured brilliantly and steadily in the
  Yiddish language, speaking rapidly with a strong
  Jewish-Lithuanian accent. The Rav had been
  teaching this way for at least two decades by the
  time Daniel Greer arrived.

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• Daniel Greer, the son of an American born father
  and a Jewish-Egyptian mother, spoke no Yiddish.
  On the first day of the semester, Rav
  Soloveitchik demonstrated particular interest in
  this new student from Princeton, and asked to
  speak with him after the lecture was over. upon
  hearing that Greer understood not one word of
  Yiddish, the Rav, after pacing up and back the
  hallway for a while, assured Daniel Greer that it
  would be '0k'.

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• Unsure of what that meant, Daniel Greer returned
  the next day, and to his and to everyone else's
  surprise, Rav Soloveitchik lectured in English,
  and so it continued for the remainder of the
  Ravs sparkling career.
• In addition to lecturing at Yeshiva university
  and at the Moriah Synagogue in Manhattan, Rav
  Yosef Dov Sotoveitchik gave 'shiur in different
  venues in his home town of Roxbury, just outside
  Boston. One of his weekly classes was given, in
  Yiddish, on Saturday nights after the conclusion
  Of Shabbos.

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• In 1962, at a weekend convention of the Yavneh
  Student Organization, two of the founding
  members, Daniel Greer and Israel Wohlgelernter
  approached Rabbi Soloveitchik with the request
  that on that particular Saturday night, the class
  be given in English to accommodate the more than
  one-hundred students who were attending the
  Convention. Rav Soloveitchik acquiesced. This
  weekly class soon became the popular meeting
  place for Jewish university students in the
  Boston area as it was now delivered in English
  thanks to Wohlgelernter and Greer.

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About Daniel

• Daniel Greer is born in New York City. He is the
  founder of the Yeshiva of New Haven. He has
  completed his education at the Princeton
  University Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy. He
  was the first Deputy Commissioner of Ports and
  Terminals of New York City in the late 1960s.
• Source http//rabbidanielgreer.strikingly.com/blo
  g/daniel-greer-a-former-woodrow-wilson-scholarship
  -winner

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Thank You