Rabbi Benjamin Frankel

Rabbi Benjamin Moses Frankel (1897-1927) was the founder of the world’s first Hillel, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Benjamin Moses Frankel was born to Julius and Lifshe Frankel, on September 15th, 1897, in Peoria, IL, USA. Frankel married Florence Koenigsberg, but never had any children together. Frankel had three brothers named Harry, Samuel, and Mendel Joseph, and two sisters named Gittel and Gertrude.

Benjamin Frankel graduated with a rabbinical degree from Hebrew Union College and was officially ordained in 1923 at age 26. Edward Chauncey Baldwin, an English professor at the University of Illinois, lobbied Jewish businessmen in Chicago, specifically Rabbi Louis Mann, to hire a rabbi and establish Jewish life on the University of Illinois campus. Frankel was appointed as the first part-time rabbi at Temple Sinai in Champaign, IL, as well as the first director of the campus ministry. He named the organization after the sage, Hillel, as a symbol of lifelong Jewish learning and pluralism. Frankel worked closely with a small group of Jewish students from the University of Illinois, many of whom struggled with balancing their two identities of being American and Jewish at the same time. They began by meeting formally, in a room above a barbershop in downtown Champaign. Even though Frankel and his students had a stable infrastructure, space, and a community-supported budget, over time, they realized that in order to sustain and expand their organization, they needed more support and resources, so Frankel reached out to B’nai B’rith for funding. Frankel convinced B’nai B’rith to adopt the organization in 1925. His fundraising efforts quickly developed the part-time student program into a full-time organization. It wasn’t soon after that the University of Wisconsin (1924), the Ohio State University (1925), and the University of Michigan (1926) opened Hillels on their respective campuses, as well.

...
Wikipedia