Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz

Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz (1886-1948) was an educator who helped shape Orthodox Jewish schooling in the United States. Born in Világ, a village in the Austro-Hungarian region that is today part of Slovakia, he studied in Hungarian yeshivot and continued under Simcha Bunim Schreiber, a grandson of the Chatam Sofer. He emigrated to America in 1913, teaching for a period in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before becoming principal of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1921. There he broadened the school, opening a high-school division in 1926 and later a postgraduate program, and he founded the advanced yeshiva Beis Medrash Elyon. In 1944 he established Torah Umesorah, a national body that promoted the growth of Orthodox day schools. His outlook drew on the Torah im Derech Eretz tradition.