Home

For Englishtown resident Carolanne Rothholz, a 50-year reunion for her elementary school turned into a mission of preserving the school's legacy.

In June, the Class of 1959 at Yeshiva Rabbi Moses Soloveitchik (YRMS), which closed in 1988, gathered at the school's old site on Yeshiva University's Wilf Campus in the Washington Heights portion of Manhattan. Rothholz noticed that the building, now called the Schottenstein Center, had a plaque in honor of the Schottenstein family's restoration efforts but no mention of YRMS.

YU offered Rothholz the opportunity to produce a plaque in the building commemorating YRMS, and she is currently in the process of contacting old classmates and other alumni to raise money for the project.

"Yeshiva Soloveitchik had its own history [outside of the Schottenstein Center]," Rothholz said. "For 40 years, that school was on that site. Thousands of [YRMS] students walked those halls."

Rabbi Irving N. Weinberg and Joseph Lichtenberg founded YRMS as an elementary school that was committed to the principle of "Ivrit B'Ivrit," containing Judaic studies classes exclusively in the Hebrew language, Rothholz said. The school originally contained a primarily German-Jewish student body that eventually included many Russian students, she said.

As practically every student at YRMS was on scholarship by the 1980s, the school could not raise enough money to support itself, Rothholz said. But when the school was at its peak, she said, it was one of the leaders of its time in Jewish day school education.

"This was a big, thriving school," Rothholz said.

The YRMS building, located at 560 West 185th St., was donated to Yeshiva University upon the elementary school's closing, and the Schottenstein family went on to fund the restoration of pipes, windows, and other broken-down elements in the building. The Schottenstein Center currently houses the Philip and Sarah Belz School of Jewish Music, a cantorial institute at YU's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

Rothholz, however, said that without the groundwork laid by YRMS, the Schottensteins would have never had anything to restore in the first place. YRMS produced a generation of leaders in the Jewish world, she said, and the school's rich history needs to at least be acknowledged at the Schottenstein Center, Rothholz said.

On a plaque, Rothholz said she would like to include a symbol for Etz Hada'at, the tree of knowledge, to represent the educational journeys of the thousands of students who grew up at YRMS.

If you are a YRMS alum or anyone else interested in supporting Carolanne Rothholz's cause through a donation towards the cost of the plaque, please contact her by calling (732) 617-9994 or emailing carothholz@aol.com. Donations can also be mailed to Carolanne Rothholz, 478 Union Hill Road, Englishtown, N.J. 07726. The deadline for contributions is Aug. 15.