H eadlines
Balcher Continued from Page 5
was organizing a trip to Israel.

In the 1970s following the
Vietnam War, young people
were weary of authority, Brier
said, making them a challenging
demographic to
engage. Balcher could connect with
young people, even if they had
conflicting politics.

“His passion transcended left
or right,” Brier said.

His interest in connecting
others extended to his family life.

“Every chance, every oppor-
tunity, he told us how proud
he was of us,” said Balcher’s
younger son Alex Balcher.

In his last months, Lou
Balcher would come downstairs
every morning and tell his wife
Jocelyne that he loved her, Alex
Balcher said.

Born in Cleveland, Balcher
was the second-youngest of six
children. “He was very determined to
unite us together over the last
year-and-a-half,” eldest brother
Aharon Botzer said. “We have
been having Zoom meetings
every week, without exception,
for a year-and-a-half.”
Though Botzer was not living
at home much while Balcher was
growing up, he came home from
college over breaks and took
Balcher and his other brothers
on cross-country hitchhiking
trips, including one from Ohio
to across the West Coast, to the
Rocky Mountains and across the
Canadian border, over a month.

During a trip in Wyoming,
the brothers tried to build a raft
to take down the river. Botzer
remembered Balcher standing
on the shore, holding the ropes
to the raft, which fell apart in
the water. Balcher pulled the raft
and his brothers to shore.

“That’s very much what Louie
did in his life — pulling the
strings to make things happen,”
Botzer said.

Balcher is survived by his
wife and two sons, as well as
his siblings Aharon Botzer, Shari
Weiss, Connie Inukai, Chuck
Balcher and Judah Botzer. l
knowing half the attendees
there. He greeted the other half
of attendees in the same way.

“He would do his 30-second
Google introduction: Type
in ‘Philadelphia’ then type in
‘Israel’ into Google,” Daveed
Balcher recalled.

“Lou” would pop up in the
search suggestion bar immedi-
ately, he said.

Lou Balcher’s wide network
impressed attendees of events he
organized. “He had amazing contacts and
was able to bring them in,” said
Congregation Tifereth Israel Rabbi
Jeff Schnitzer, a friend for 25 years.

“So when he would announce a
program, it was somebody real
that was presenting.”
Balcher hosted an annual event
to remember Operation Entebbe,
a covert mission in 1976 by Israel
Defense Forces commandos
to rescue 102 hostages, mostly
Jewish and Israeli, held in an
airport terminal in Entebbe,
Uganda. He invited special force
operatives who completed the
mission to speak.

Balcher’s ability to connect
with others is what made him
an apt leader of YJLC, Schnitzer
said. He was interested in
engaging a demographic he
felt lacked a cohesive Jewish
community. “There really is no organiza-
tion other than what — at least
at that time — he was doing that
addressed young Jewish singles
after college,” Schnitzer said. “And
he felt that the best way to do that
was to engage them in activities
and with other young adults.”
YJLC hosted a ski trip
in February and a summer
canoe trip in the Poconos. The
organization hosted meetups
in Philadelphia, New York,
Washington, D.C. and Florida.

“Lou immediately went to
heaven and was ... immediately
promoted to archangel in charge
of Jewish youth affairs,” Brier said.

Brier met Balcher in 1972 in
Philadelphia; he was one of the srogelberg@jewishexponent.com;
Jewish youth with whom Balcher 215-832-0741
6 FEBRUARY 3, 2022
Former Hillel Rabbi Howard
Alpert Dies at Age of 70
O B I T UARY
JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
ON JAN. 21, a Friday night,
Rabbi Howard Alpert and his
wife Sarah had eight friends
over for dinner at their Boca
Raton, Florida, apartment.

The rabbi gave a d’var Torah,
and they enjoyed a night of
eating and conversing.

Later that night, after
their friends left, according
to Sarah Alpert, “things went
downhill.” Rabbi Alpert, who
spent 30 years as CEO of Hillel
of Greater Philadelphia, died
the next day. He was 70.

Alpert is survived by his
wife, their five children and 10
grandchildren. “He lived in all his years of
life,” said Sarah Alpert, his wife
of 48 years.

During his
career, Rabbi Alpert served Jewish
students from the University
of Pennsylvania, Temple
University and other schools
in the region. Hillel of Greater
Philadelphia had a general
Rabbi Howard Alpert
JEWISH EXPONENT
mission to help Jewish colle-
gians at local institutions.

Alpert stepped down from
his position in February 2017.

In an interview that month
with the Jewish Exponent,
Alpert explained how he
viewed his legacy.

“We tried to create Hillel
as a model for a pluralistic,
unified community,” the rabbi
said. “We may pray different
and think different, but our
students respect all Jews and
forms of expression.”
That impact was real, and it
lived on, according to Alpert’s
proteges. Jeremy Winaker is the execu-
tive director of the Greater Philly
Hillel Network, the successor
organization to Hillel of Greater
Philadelphia. After rabbinical
school, Winaker joined the
Hillel staff at the University
of Delaware. While there, he
networked with Alpert and
observed him from afar.

Through that experience, he
learned Alpert’s core princi-
ples for a Hillel operation:
availability to each student
and pluralism. It was essen-
tial, according to Alpert, for
a Jewish campus organiza-
tion to help all types of young
Jews, from the Orthodox to the
religiously ambivalent.

Now, Winaker is in Alpert’s
town playing a similar role
to that of his mentor. And
in helping young Jews from
Bryn Mawr College, Haverford
College and other schools that
the Greater Philly Network
serves, he is applying the same
principles. “He set an example,”
Winaker said.

Rabbi Daniel Levitt is the
executive director of Temple
University Hillel, another
successor to Hillel of Greater
Philadelphia. Levitt is in
his seventh year working at
Temple, and for the first three
he served under Alpert.

The director said, more than
anything else, he learned from
his mentor’s “radical trust in
our students.”
Alpert saw students as
young people on their own
Jewish journeys and as the
Courtesy of the Alpert family
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



H EADLINES
Catherine Regehr
Trunk Show
Rabbi Howard Alpert
with his wife Sarah
Daytime to Evening
Courtesy of the
Alpert family
Cocktail, Gowns & Evening Separates
Thursday to Saturday
February 10-12
next generation of Jewish
leaders. Th erefore, Hillel direc-
tors needed to help them lead,
make mistakes and learn.

Th e rabbi’s approach applied
to both individual Jewish
journeys and communal issues
that Jewish collegians wanted
to address.

“It is Hillel’s role to give
students independence to
fi gure it out for themselves,”
Levitt said. “He wanted Hillel
to be a student organization.

He didn’t want it to be too
institutionalized.” Levitt views his operation
the same way.

“Th at’s a really important
lesson,” he concluded.

A legacy like Alpert’s can’t
really be measured.

But Levitt credited him with
impacting thousands of young
Jews who fi gured out what
Judaism meant to them. He
also recognized his mentor for
hiring, training and helping to
shape multiple generations of
Hillel staff ers.

Winaker gave Alpert a
similar degree of credit.

“Jewish campus life is
much stronger in our region
thanks to Howard Alpert,” he
concluded. According to that 2017
Exponent story, the rabbi “grew
up in New York, attended
Queens College and received
his rabbinic degree from
Yeshiva University.” Before
arriving in Philadelphia, he led
Hillels at Queens College, the
University of Illinois and the
Ohio State University.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Daniel Alpert, the rabbi’s
40-year-old son, said there
were four decades of students
who “were inspired by him and
guided by him.”
Alpert’s own fi ve children
felt the same way, according to
Daniel Alpert and his brother
Avi Alpert.

All fi ve kids have had
different Jewish journeys.

Together, they now repre-
sent both Conservative and
Orthodox Judaism. In the
past few years, the family has
celebrated a Conservative b’nai
mitzvah, an Orthodox b’nai
mitzvah and a women’s-only
Orthodox b’nai mitzvah.

Rabbi Alpert couldn’t attend
the women’s-only service.

But he loved it as much as the
others, according to his sons.

“He was so glad that it was
happening,” Daniel Alpert
said. Outside of his religion and
career, Rabbi Alpert enjoyed
spending time with his wife.

In the fi nal summer of his
life, they traveled cross-country
in a trailer and went camping.

Later in the year, Rabbi Alpert
stunned Sarah Alpert with a
surprise 70th birthday party.

Th ey went back to their old
Lower Merion community and
walked into a roomful of friends.

“I didn’t know it was
coming,” she said. “He gave a
beautiful speech. How much
he loved me. How our life was
so good.” ●
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FEBRUARY 3, 2022
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