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Yeshiva University, a private university in New York City, with six campuses in New York and one in Israel, was founded in 1886. It is a research university ranked as 45th in the US among national universities by U.S. News & World Report in 2012. ==Foundation and early growth== The Etz Chaim Yeshiva, a cheder-style elementary school, was founded on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1886. Prior to its founding, Jewish education in the United States had been limited to supplemental and synagogue affiliated schools. Etz Chaim ("The Tree of Life," a reference to the Torah from the Biblical Book of Proverbs, and a common name for yeshivas and synagogues) was the first yeshiva in America; that is, the first full-time, independent Jewish school focusing on the study of the Talmud. The primary impetus for its establishment was the influx of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe that began in the 1880s; the school was established along the lines of the Eastern European yeshivas, which themselves had begun to be established in the early 19th Century. However, the New York school, unlike its European counterparts, also offered some secular education, including classes in English. These were very limited at first, but eventually (partially due to New York State law) became a full co-curriculum, something almost unprecedented in the history of Jewish education. The graduates of Etz Chaim had no place in the United States to continue their formal Jewish education after they completed elementary school, and some began studying Talmud with Rabbi Moses Matlin in his Lower East Side apartment. Soon, in 1896, this group formally became an advanced yeshiva, covering high school years and beyond. Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, the chief rabbi of Kovno (later the capital of Lithuania), and widely considered the leading rabbi of Eastern Europe at the time, died in that year, and the yeshiva was named in his honor, as Yeshivat Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan ("The Yeshiva of our Rabbi, Isaac Elchanan"). A year after it was founded, the yeshiva was formally chartered by New York State in 1897 as the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, which is known to this day by its acronym, RIETS. The first class of three rabbis was ordained in 1903. Despite its name, RIETS began as a traditional Lithuanian yeshiva, not a rabbinical seminary, with classes focusing only on the traditional subjects of Talmud and Jewish law. However, many of the students desired careers as rabbis, and found themselves in competition with the graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary, at that time still seen as an Orthodox school (it would later become the flagship institution of the Conservative movement), which, while not stressing the traditional subjects, taught its students practical rabbinics, homiletics, and related subjects, making them more attractive to synagogues seeking rabbis. The students of RIETS struck several times in the mid-1900s, demanding these subjects be taught. The board of directors eventually acceded to their requests, and RIETS continues, to this day, to have the somewhat unique position of being both a traditional yeshiva, preparing its students for the traditional Orthodox semikha (ordination) by teaching a full curriculum of Talmud and Codes of Law, as well as a rabbinical seminary, teaching various practical rabbinics courses. Rabbinical students may also take courses, depending on their intended field of practice, leading to degrees in Jewish studies, Jewish education, or pastoral social work at other schools of Yeshiva University, while others, including those who intend to teach, focus more intensely on the traditional subjects such as Talmud. In the period following these changes, from 1906–1915, such prominent rabbis as Dr. Phillip Hillel Klein, Moses Zebulon Margolies, and Bernard Levinthal served as RIETS president. Etz Chaim and RIETS, while separate schools, had a close relationship. There were a number of efforts to unite them, which finally succeeded in 1915, when they merged as the Rabbinical College of America. Both schools had each occupied a few locations on the Lower East Side, and now moved into a new building in the neighborhood. Shortly after the merger, the name reverted, for legal reasons, to RIETS, although the most common name used was simply "The Yeshiva." As a number of new Jewish elementary schools were opening at this time, Etz Chaim, the elementary division of the yeshiva, was phased out of existence over the course of the 1920s. The first president of the newly merged school was Rabbi Bernard (Dov) Revel. Revel was young — thirty at the time — but already renowned as a scholar; he had been ordained in his teens in Lithuania and received his doctorate in Jewish studies (specifically, the relationship of Karaite Judaism to earlier Jewish groups) from Dropsie College (now merged into the University of Pennsylvania) in Philadelphia. His wife's family worked in the oil industry in Oklahoma, and he spent time managing their interests there as well for some time after he became president of the yeshiva before devoting himself to the latter position full-time. In 1916, RIETS established the yeshiva's first high school (and the first Jewish high school in the United States), the Talmudic Academy (now known as the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy). Along with traditional Talmud and other Jewish classes in the morning, MTA (as it is commonly known) taught, and continues to teach, a full curriculum of secular subjects in the afternoon. This not only set the pattern for all Jewish secondary (and even primary) schools that would be founded after it, but was to set the pattern for the Yeshiva as well as it founded new divisions. Later, Yeshiva would establish more high schools, in including the Central Yeshiva for Girls in Brooklyn (the first Jewish high school for girls), as well as another boys' high school in Brooklyn (BTA), and a girls' high school in Manhattan. (High schools, and a higher-level yeshiva, were also founded in Los Angeles, but they are now independent.) In the 1970s, the Brooklyn schools were merged into their Manhattan counterparts, and the girls' school was later moved to Queens, where it remains today. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Yeshiva University」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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