From LoHud.com

NEW ROCHELLE — Brother John G. Driscoll, who re-created Iona College as a high-profile Catholic college during a 24-year tenure as president before becoming an international leader in Christian-Jewish relations, died Tuesday evening after a long illness. He was 77.

A wake will be held at Iona's Spellman Hall from 1 to 8 p.m. Sunday.

Driscoll, a New York City native and mathematician by training, became president of Iona in 1971.

During his tenure, he expanded and modernized Iona's campus, grew the student body, and lobbied in Albany for education aid for private colleges and students.

He built new athletic facilities, expanded women's athletics and made Iona's sports teams more competitive.

"He took Iona when it was a small commuter college and began a residential program, created opportunities for faculty, built facilities," Liguori said. "He was a dynamo and a pastoral leader."

During a difficult financial period for Catholic colleges in the early 1990s, Driscoll closed Iona's Yonkers campus.

"It will always be a pain in my heart," he said then.

Driscoll was a member of the Congregation for Christian Brothers, the Roman Catholic religious community that founded Iona in 1940.

He was beloved by many in and around New Rochelle for the pastoral interest he showed for anyone in need, said William O'Shaughnessy, president of New Rochelle-based Whitney Radio. Driscoll would leave notes and messages of hope for people going through tough times, he said.

"He was a magnificent soul, a monumental person," O'Shaughnessy said. "All the townies loved him. I don't use the word often, but I think he was saintly."

After his retirement from Iona, Driscoll turned an interest in Jewish history and theology into a second career. He moved to Jerusalem and studied the Hebrew language and Jewish understanding of what Christians call the Old Testament.

Driscoll became a faculty member at the Bat Kol Institute in Jerusalem, where Christian scholars study Jewish traditions, and a scholar-in-residence at Hebrew University. He traveled the world — South Africa, India, Australia, Ireland — to teach Christians what he had learned about the Torah from a Jewish point of view.

"Brother Driscoll believed that it is essential for Christians to understand their roots in Judaism," said Elena Procario-Foley, who has held the Driscoll professorship since 1999, leading numerous programs about Christian-Jewish relations at Iona.

"He traveled the world to teach Christians what he learned, and became a major figure in Jewish-Christian studies," she said.

Driscoll visited her classes several times in recent years after his health prevented him from traveling.

"I would introduce him to students and say that our mission statement for the college talks about preparing students who will be lifelong learners," Procario-Foley said. "Here was a man who was a lifelong learner."

Deborah Weissman, president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, described Driscoll on Wednesday as a "beacon to us all" in a letter from Jerusalem to Procario-Foley.

Weissman wrote it was fitting to be thinking of Driscoll on the eve of the Jewish holiday Sukkot, during which Jews gather in a sukkah — or temporary dwelling — to remember the 40 years of wandering in the desert.

"The Sukkah is a multilayered symbol, of the fragility and transience of human life, but also of God's providence and the need for human beings to make the most of our lives on Earth," Weissman wrote. "Jack certainly did that."

A funeral Mass will be held at 9:30 a.m. Monday at Holy Family Church, 83 Clove Road, New Rochelle.

Donations in Driscoll's memory may be sent to The Br. John G. Driscoll Fund, Iona College, 715 North Ave., New Rochelle, NY 10801, or to St. Joseph's Care Center, 30 Montgomery Circle, New Rochelle, NY 10805.

Fr. Lawrence Boadt’s untimely death is a loss for so many of us across the spectrum of not only Catholics but Jews as well.  I have known him as a colleague and as a friend for many years, as an editor for Paulist Press, eager to publish books furthering the cause of Catholic-Jewish relations, my own included, and as a neighbor when he was at the Paulist College across the road from where I worked at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.   One normally notes the wit and wisdom of a friend and colleague when they pass, but in this case that would be an understatement. 

Larry Boadt excelled.  There is no other word for it. His book on Sacred Scripture, Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction, became a classic in the field and was used in countless seminaries and theology programs at universities. It incorporated the best not only of biblical scholarship but of the critical scholarship of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, thus putting into reality the great vision of the Second Vatican Council on the renewal of dialogue between the Church, as the People of God, and the Jewish People, as the original and still present People of God. 

I spent much time with my good friend, Larry, while he was in Washington: meals shared, dialogues attended together, phone conversations in which we learned from each other.  When he moved to New York, well, Mahwah, New Jersey, a part of me moved with him.  And he continued as editor of Paulist Press to ensure that high quality books in the field that did not exist when he and I went to college, would be published.  For this reason alone, all Catholics and all Jews involved in or interested in this most historic of dialogues, must enter a note of praise and thanksgiving into the book of life.

May Larry rest in Peace,

And may his name be for a blessing.

Dr. Eugene J. Fisher
Retired, Associate Director,
Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Rabbi Dr. Michael Signer served since 1992 at the University of Notre Dame as the Abrams Chair of Jewish Thought and Culture and Director of the Notre Dame Holocaust Project. Before that he was Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles.

His interest in interreligious affairs began during his doctoral studies at the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and he later participated in the Priest-Rabbi dialogue at St. John's Seminary, where he and others founded the St. John's/Hebrew Union College academic exchange.

He taught in universities in Berlin and Augsburg, and was an American Jewish Committee Scholar at Catholic Institutions in Poland.

Michael Signer was the author and editor of five books on topics that range from Medieval Latin biblical commentaries to contemporary Jewish-Christian relations, and was one of the four authors of the historic statement, Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity.

Michael Signer was among the founders of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, and delivered an important paper on Dabru Emet at its first annual meeting on October 28, 2002.

At its 2008 annual meeting, the CCJR unanimously passed a resolution honoring Michael Signer for his many contributions:

For these and other contributions, the Council of Centers expresses its sorrow, but also gratitude, through a Book of Tribute.

Read the dozens of tributes to Michael Signer or post your own memories, reflections, or prayers about him by clicking here.

The Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations joins the interfaith community in grieving for the loss of a leader in Holocaust Studies, Rev. Dr. Franklin Littell. For over forty years he pursued the implications of the Shoah for Christianity and for Jewish-Christian relations. His obituary from The Philadelphia Inquirer of May. 25, 2009 follows.

Rev. Franklin H. Littell, scholar of the Holocaust

By Joelle Farrell, Inquirer Staff Writer

The Rev. Franklin H. Littell, 91, of Merion Station, a Methodist minister widely acknowledged as the father of modern Holocaust studies in America, died Saturday at home after a long illness.

Mr. Littell dedicated his life to Holocaust research after spending nearly 10 years in postwar Germany as chief Protestant religious adviser in the U.S. high command. He was the first American scholar to offer courses on Holocaust and genocide studies, and at Temple University he established the nation's first doctoral program on Holocaust studies in 1976.

His scholarship examined individual responsibility in a free society and sought to encourage interfaith dialogue, especially between Christians and Jews.

Mr. Littell was the author of more than two dozen books and more than 1,000 articles, and was working most recently on his memoirs. He also was an activist who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil-rights struggle, said Marcia Sachs Littell, his wife of 30 years.

"He believed you could not hide behind the ivory tower of academia or the sanctity of the church," said Marcia Littell, a professor of Holocaust studies at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. "You must be actively involved in all that you do."

Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Littell earned his bachelor's degree from Cornell College in Iowa. He completed his master's degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York and his doctorate at Yale University.

After returning from Germany, Mr. Littell began offering a graduate seminar, the German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, in 1959 at Emory University, the first course of its kind in America.

In 1969, after professorships at Emory, the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, and the Chicago Theological Seminary, Mr. Littell joined the Temple University faculty. He retired in 1986.

In 1970, Mr. Littell founded the annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, which for the last decade has been based at Saint Joseph's University. His 1975 book, The Crucifixion of the Jews (Harper & Row), was the first work to explore Christianity in response to the Holocaust.

In 1976, in addition to beginning the doctoral program on Holocaust studies at Temple, he founded the National Institute on the Holocaust there.

President Jimmy Carter named Mr. Littell a founding member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. In 1979, he was the first Christian appointed to the International Governing Board of Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem.

Mr. Littell was emeritus distinguished professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Richard Stockton College and a visiting professor in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for 25 years.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Littell is survived by daughters Jeannie Lawrence and Karen and Miriam Littell; son Stephen; stepsons Jonathan Sachs and Robert Sachs Jr.; stepdaughter Jennifer Sachs Dahnert; and 11 grandchildren.

His first wife, Harriet Davis Lewis, died in 1978.

Burial will be private. A memorial service will be held in the fall. Donations in Mr. Littell's memory may be made to the annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, Box 10, Merion Station, Pa. 19066.