09/09/2026
In September 1909, a photographer captured a remarkable Rosh Hashanah scene. Jewish New Yorkers stood along the Williamsburg Bridge, prayer books in hand, looking toward the East River. They had gathered for tashlich, the Rosh Hashanah ritual that calls Jews to a nearby body of water to symbolically cast away their sins.
But the photograph captures something larger than the ritual itself.
The Williamsburg Bridge had opened just six years earlier. It was an engineering marvel of its age, linking Manhattan’s crowded Lower East Side with rapidly growing Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Here were Jewish immigrants and their children standing atop one of the great testaments to American modernity while practicing a tradition inherited from generations before them.
The bridge was new. The prayers were old.
That image depicts something essential about the American Jewish experience. Each generation inherits traditions, ideas, texts, and institutions from those who came before. But preserving an inheritance does not mean standing still. We carry it with us as we cross into places our predecessors could not have imagined.
As Gratz begins a new year on our new campus on the Main Line, I find something of that same spirit here. Our surroundings are new, but the purpose that animates them is not. We have created a new home for an institution whose mission reaches back more than a century and whose commitments—to learning, scholarship, community, and the Jewish future—have endured across generations.
Our new campus is not a departure from that inheritance. It is another way of carrying it forward: bringing an old mission into a new home and creating new possibilities for the generations who will follow us.
The bridge was new. The prayers were old. And the journey continued.
May the new year bring all of us new possibilities, renewed purpose, and the courage to carry what matters most with us as we cross into what comes next.
Shana Tova,
Zev Eleff
Gratz College President
