1n 1946, Yeshivas Torah Vodaas and Chaim Berlin planned to merge and create a grade school through graduate school group of schools including a junior college and a university. The new institution was to be called the American Hebrew Theological University. For the first time ever, here are the founding documents of the American Hebrew Theological University, a drawing of its planned campus and a surprising list of rabbis who signed on to it.
Updated at 9:35 pm CST
In these documents, Paul Mendlowitz – better known as Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, the famous Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Vodaas – and Rabbi Isaac Hutner, the famous Rosh Yeshiva of Chaim Berlin, are trying to form the American Hebrew Theological University.
Mendlowitz was the grandfather of Paul Mendlowitz, better known as the blogger the Unorthodox Jew. Paul sent me these documents to post.
All images can be clicked on and enlarged.
The founding rabbis, including Mendlowitz, Hutner, Avigdor Miller and Gedalia Schorr:
The proposed campus:
A diagram made by the founders of the component schools and degrees to be offered:
Here are letters (in PDF format) to and from the New York Board of Regents seeking permission to combine the yeshivas and open the American Hebrew theological University:
But in 1947, the founders decided to end the junior college part project due to the "unsettled business conditions of the country":
Download NY Board of Regents 2
Mendlowitz died in 1948, and the poject essentially died with him.