REVEL, BERNARD (1885–1940), a rabbinic scholar, was the organizer of American Jewish Orthodoxy. Born in Pren, a suburb of Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, where his father was the community rabbi, Revel later studied in the Telz yeshivah and was ordained in Kaunas at the age of sixteen. Immigrating to the United States in 1906, Revel received his master of arts degree from New York University in 1909; three years later he completed a Ph.D. at Dropsie College with a thesis entitled "The Karaite Halakhah and Its Relation to Sadducean, Samaritan, and Philonian Halakhah."

Revel first worked in the Oklahoma-based petroleum company of his wife's family, but in 1915 he accepted the presidency of New York's newly merged Yeshivat Etz Chaim and Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Under its auspices, Revel then opened the Talmudical Academy, the first such yeshivah high school in the United States. He also reorganized the rabbinical...