Bernard Revel (1885-1940), Talmudic scholar and educator, directed the Rabbi Isaac Elchanon Theological Seminary from its shaky beginnings to become the renown Yeshiva University with a comprehensive program of Judaic studies integrated with modern scholarship.

Bernard Dov Revel was born in 1885 in Kovno (now in Lithuanian S.S.R.), a center of traditional Jewish learning, the son of the second marriage of the scholar Nahum Shraga Revel of Pren (a son from the first marriage was Nelson Glueck, dean of the Reform Jewish seminary, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion). As a youth he gained the reputation of a scholar and was influenced by the Musar movement, which offered an ethical and talmudic system of study to counteract the inroads of modernity among traditional Jews. Many of the innovations which Revel brought to the Rabbi Isaac Elchanon Theological Seminary in New York were inspired by that movement...