Condolences to Efraim, and all the Zuroff family, on the loss of his dear father, Abraham N. Zuroff, who passed away peacefully at the age of 92 in Jerusalem on Sunday August 3rd. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Zuroff is forever the legendary founding principal of BTA (Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Brooklyn, NY) building one of the very rare educational institutions that was able to synthesize deep authentic Jewish learning with modern cutting-edge and culturally successful American education. In that specific period of American Jewish history, it took the steadfast and uncompromising devotion of the American born Abraham Zuroff to demonstrate that the two could be combined in a way that would attract Jewish youth to the unique fusion of authentic Jewishness and authentic wordliness (rather than a watered down version of either).

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Zuroff was principal of the school for over thirty years (“a life sentence,” he would famously quip) and during that period became the supervisor of all of Yeshiva University’s high schools.

The funeral was held Monday morning at Eretz Hachaim Cemetery near Bet Shemesh.

For his thousands of students, his life was a central inspiration. It is poetically symbolic that he left our world on the eve of the Jewish mourning day Tishebov (Tisha B’Av) that starts this evening, and commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem remembered tenaciously by Jews not only as a day of permanent memory and sadness but at the same time a reminder of the need to rebuild and recreate with a lot of hard work and stubborn steadfastness in the pursuit of quality.

Abraham Zuroff’s original research includes the book “The Responsa of Maimonides” (NY 1966, 804 pp.) on the replies to queries of the 12th century rabbi-physician-philosopher whose life and work demonstrate that same special synthesis of the authentic Jewish and the authentic scientific-worldly-modern.