By Stacey Dresner

Ellen Umansky recalls the morning in 1994 when she first arrived at Fairfield University as the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Chair of Judaic Studies.

“I walked in and shut the door, only to discover that the only items in my office were a chair and a phone — which was on the floor. When I went to leave my office, I discovered that it was locked from the inside, as well as from the outside, and I couldn’t get out.

“I called Orin Grossman, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and said, ‘Help! I’m locked in this room and there’s no furniture here except a chair and a phone.’ He joked, ‘Well I promised you a Chair.’”

Umansky made it out of that locked office, and began to work as the chair of Judaic Studies and, ultimately, to help create the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, a renowned center for academics as well as Jewish cultural events for the entire community, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

Umansky got the position after Caldor owners Carl and Dorothy Bennett, who had been sponsoring an annual Jewish lecture series at Fairfield University for several years, gave the Catholic institution $1.5 million to endow the chair in Judaic studies.

“I was just so proud and still am proud to be the Carl and Dorothy Bennett professor because both Dorothy and Carl were just wonderful people, and really philanthropic in the best sense of the word,” Umansky told the Jewish Ledger in 2021. “In addition to that initial endowment they have continued to make a substantial financial gift to the Bennett Center every year which has enabled us to continue the quantity and quality of the programming that we have had.”

In August, after 28 years, Umansky will retire from her position at the Bennett Center.

In the past few months there have been two retirement celebrations held for Umansky, one a brunch hosted by the Provost’s office and the dean of Arts & Sciences and attended by faculty, staff and students, and the daughter and son of Carl and Dorothy, Robin Bennett Kanerek and Marc Bennett.

“I’ve been to a number of these retirement events over the years,” said Joselyn Boryczka, who served until recently as Vice Provost for Scholarly and Inclusive Excellence at Fairfield University. “We put together a slide show so there could be photographs of the 30 years of Ellen’s work and there were people who stayed long after the event was concluded, just watching the slide show, looking at the photographs and recalling all the memories. It brought tears to my eyes.”

“When I think back to what Jewish life at Fairfield was like 28 years ago, it is a far cry from what it is today and Ellen was the primary person to make that happen, both in terms of its impact on students on the campus, and I also think in terms of the ‘town/gown’ connections between the Jewish community of greater Fairfield and the  university,” said Rabbi James Prosnit, Jewish chaplain at Fairfield University.

A born scholar

Umansky was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in a Reform Jewish household in New Rochelle. She says her love of learning was greatly influenced by her father, whose bedroom was filled with books about the Civil War and World War II.

“I guess I just grew up in a house where reading was important, and I fell in love with books,” Umansky says.

After graduating from New Rochelle High School where she was an excellent student, Umansky’s father insisted she go to an all-woman’s college. She went to Wellesley College, she says, because her father read that it was the most antisemitic of the “seven sister schools.”  

“So, for him to have a daughter get into and go to the school most unfriendly to Jews, I think for him, that was making in America,” Umansky said.

At Wellesley Umansky did experience antisemitism for the first time. But it was there that she also “fell in love with the study of religion.”

“I started taking every course in the school in Old Testament, New Testament and early Christianity. At the time, there were no courses in Judaic studies. There was Old Testament, but there wasn’t anything like Rabbinic Judaism or Modern Jewish History. So, I started with the New Testament,” she says.

“I really do love to study the Bible. I would go home to New York, and I would ride the subway, and I would see people reading the Bible in Spanish. And I thought, that’s the thing about religion, that you don’t have to be a college graduate to be religious. Every civilization that we know of has had some sort of religion, so I saw religion as a unifying factor that shows human beings’ search for meaning. That’s what religion does – it creates a framework for meaning.”

Studying religion also meant figuring out why the Campus Crusade for Christ wanted to convert her.

“In my own mind, I wanted to answer this question of, where does this intolerance and hatred come from, so I decided to continue my study of religion.”

At the time, there were not many senior women in the entire field of Judaic studies and few feminist scholars in biblical studies.

 “I had no women mentors or role models,” she says. Few senior faculty members of Judaic studies programs – all men — would even accept women as their graduate students, and she was turned down by several.

“Here’s an example of what it was like being a female graduate student in the early ‘70s when I was thinking of applying to Yale Divinity school,” she recalled. “My ex-brother in law had a cousin who was the senior person in Judaic Studies at Yale and I got to meet him. So, I go with my mother to his office. And I remember wearing sunglasses, I guess it was just a sunny day and I didn’t take them off. He looks at me, and this is what he says – and I remember it all these 50 years later – ‘Ellen you are so pretty. Why would you want to go to Yale Divinity School? How are you going to meet a Jewish husband?’

“My mother could tell that I had started to cry. When we left she said, ‘Why were you crying? He was so complimentary towards you.’ I said, ‘Ma, he wasn’t taking me seriously.’”

She did end up going to Yale Divinity School where she got a degree in religion and where she learned from and with “educated religious Christians who were happy to meet me. I made many friends at Yale Divinity School. There wasn’t any of this trying to save me…It was people who were interested in the study of religion, both intellectually and personally. The more I studied about Judaism, the more observant I became—the more Judaism actually did have meaning for me.”

During her first year at Yale, there weren’t very many women at the Divinity School. But things soon began to change. During her second year there, the program was 50 percent women.

“By the end of my first year, I really had become a full-out feminist…I was one of the few women, especially among graduate students. It was mostly men but having gone to a women’s college I felt such confidence in being there. I spoke up in class all the time.”

After Yale, she was accepted to Columbia University, where she often struggled to be respected and accepted by her male professors and advisor.

In her studies, she “left the bibilical world” and her focus switched to women’s influence on Jewish practice, concentrating on Jewish women in the late 19th and early 20th century.

“I decided that rather than go on and continue my study of the Bible, in which I thought I would come to the conclusion that – like now we see — that the biblical authors weren’t that interested in women. I felt I should jump to a period in which I could hear women’s voices.”

While still at Columbia she taught in the religion department at Princeton for two years, and after getting her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1981, taught there for an additional year. It was a year-to-year appointment without benefits

By then she was married, and she and her husband lived in Manhattan. Umansky was not considered for a tenure-track position at Princeton, and began applying for jobs. In those days she says, women were generally hired for junior positions and rarely given tenure.

An acquaintance, David Blumenthal, who held an endowed chair in Judaism studies at Emory University, suggested her for a job at Emory.

“It still moves me today because he was the first academic in my life who ever really cared about me as a scholar, as a budding scholar,” she says. “He was the mentor that I never had.”

She took the position at Emory and worked there from 1982-1989. She lived in Atlanta while her now-ex-husband remained in New York for his job. But by 1989, they had just had their third son and Umansky knew weekend commutes from New York to Atlanta were not going to work for the growing family. She took a leave from Emory and decided she couldn’t go back.

“My husband offered to relocate to Atlanta, but I knew I couldn’t go back to Emory, not just because of the commute but because I wanted my kids to be near my mother in Stamford. I wanted my kids to know her.”

She taught at Hebrew Union College in New York as a visiting professor for four years before the position at Fairfield University was endowed by the Bennetts.

“The job was to create an undergraduate minor in Judaic Studies and to do programming, including outreach to the Jewish community. That was the job description. So, I don’t think the word “center” was in the job description,” Umansky recalls.

One of the first things Umansky did was go to Fairfield U’s library.

“There were virtually no books I thought that undergraduates could use to write a good undergraduate paper on any topic in Judaic studies. So that kind of was my first agenda — going to get books where students can actually write research papers.”

A generous financial gift to be used for new books was received from the Kroopnick family in New Haven and then Yale’s Sterling Library donated some of the duplicate books it was purging from its shelves.

Umansky then took a look at the class catalogue to see which courses were being offered and which courses could be part of the Judaic studies program.

“We already had a course here on ‘Literature of the Holocaust’ taught by someone in the English department, so I began with that. Then I taught four classes a year. And then my friend Patricia Behre in the history department taught a course called ‘Religious Outsiders,’ about religious outsiders in the late medieval period about Jews, witches and midwives, I think. So that became a Judaic studies course. Then, Patricia decided to create a course on Christian antisemitism, which she still teaches, and that became a Judaics studies course.”

So, Umansky decided to take her case directly to the faculty.

“I went to Philip Eliasoph in visual and performing arts and I said, could you create a course on Jewish art?”

That course did come to fruition after some fundraising in the community, something that Umansky and her longtime office assistant Elaine Bowman began to do with a vengeance. They met members of the Jewish community seeking sponsors for a variety of programs, including an endowed lecture on Jewish art called the Samuel and Bettie Roberts Lecture on Jewish art and Artists. Umansky also worked to bring to Fairfield University the annual Jacoby-Lunin Humanitarian Lecture, the Diane Feigenson Lecture in Jewish Literature, and the Daniel Pearl World Music Days Concert, among other events.

And of course, she also worked closely with the late Carl Bennett on the Bennett Lecture Series

“Basically, almost all of our lectures are made possible by people in the Jewish community in the Greater Fairfield area who had attended programs and believed in the work of the Bennett Center,” Umansky says. “Carl was very clear at the beginning. He said, ‘I don’t want to be your only donor. You’ve got to go out and find your own donors.”

She didn’t have any fundraising experience but she learned quickly.

“I think if you have an outgoing personality and you really go out there and explain what you need money for, the worst thing that can happen is they say no. And I passionately believe in the mission of the Bennett Center—to integrate Judaism and Jewish culture into life at a Jesuit university is a wonderful thing.”

In the early days she also began her long-running Lunch and Learn course, a 10-week class for community members, which aided in one of her other missions – outreach to the community.

“The relationships I have had from the beginning with the Jewish professionals in the area and the people I’ve met teaching Lunch and Learn to for the past 28 years has been wonderful.”

Jim Prosnit, rabbi emeritus of Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport has been an adjunct lecturer at Fairfield University for 30 years. “Before Ellen coming, my adjunct class was about the only Judaic thing done at Fairfield.”

He thinks of her not only as a friend and colleague, but as a leader who has helped strengthen the local Jewish community.

“I think she has an expansive vision,” Prosnit says. “What I think she brought to the university wasn’t just her ability to teach courses —  that she’s great at that. But I think she really had a vision of what a Bennett Center could be; where you not only teach the undergraduates but you also can inspire the educational outreach of the university to impact so many people in the area by bringing programs and scholars to the university. I think every rabbi in the area would say she enhanced our adult educational opportunities for our congregants by creating this program that reached into the greater Fairfield area, and that was a real blessing for us.

“Before she came, I think there was probably a limited Holocaust education going on at the university,” he notes. “So not only did she teach a course, ‘Faith after the Holocaust,’ but she established an annual Fairfield Holocaust Commemoration, which was important to the university and embraced by many people in the university, not just the Jewish community there. And I think she established really good relationships with the other faculty members in the religious studies department and also within the Jesuit community.”
This summer, she has been working on a project to digitize the more than 200 lectures, events and concerts that the Bennett Center has sponsored over the years.

“Ellen told me some of the people she had brought to Fairfield over the years — like Elie Wiesel and Benazir Bhutto, among others — really major figures, and that they came to our little university in Fairfield, Connecticut was incredible,” says Boryczka. “We started talking about where we were going to be storing these materials and what would happen to them after she left. And she said one of the greatest gifts she could think of when leaving Fairfield is to have those lectures digitized and saved in a way that they could be accessible to people around the globe.”

Working with the university library and archivist, the project has is in full swing.

“This is such an important part of the university’s history, and it is also crucial for the Jewish community, globally, to have the archival record of these important voices, reflective of different moments through history of Jewish culture and tradition. Preserving those important legacies is so crucial,” Boryczka says.

As an academic herself, Boyczka is thankful to Umansky for being a trailblazer.

“She as a female scholar was also breaking ground in that space,” Boryczka notes. “The path that she broke for feminist scholars of Judaic studies and Jewish religious studies, specifically, has opened the doors for so many others and has been so impressive.”

“I think she will be missed,” says Prosnit. “Everyone brings new gifts and new talents and things like that. But there’s no question about the fact that she will be missed, both in terms of her credentials, but who she is as a leader and as a spokesperson for Jewish life on campus.”

PHOTO: ellen umansky