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Baseball for Rabbis. Louis' closest friend was another young Torah student almost as sobersided as himself. Solomon Goldman descended from a line of eleven rabbis. Now head of Anshe Emet synagogue in Chicago and one of the most respected scholars in U.S. Judaism, he remembers his friend Louis as painfully shy. In Goldman's house he would often lower his head and walk past Goldman's mother and sisters without a word. Goldman attributes this to Finkelstein's piety: to walk with the head held high, Jewish tradition teaches, is bold and immodest.
For all his painful shyness, Louis Finkelstein was never backward when he had a cause. In order to counteract the drift of Brownsville away from the Torah, he and Sol Goldman launched an intense juvenile crusade — buttonholing youngsters, speaking on street corners, organizing study clubs, and lining up pledges to observe the Sabbath.
Finkelstein graduated from high school in three years, then moved on to New York's City College. He was president of the student Zionist organization — and one of the few Jewish students on friendly terms with the boys in the Roman Catholic Newman Club. But he did not really find his element until he entered Jewish Theological Seminary.
There, his grasp of the Torah soon brought him to the attention of the faculty. White-maned Dr. Solomon Schechter, the seminary's president, took special pains with the shy scholar. Walking with him on the street one day, Dr. Schechter stopped at a newsstand to read the latest World Series scores. "Can you play baseball?" he asked. "No," admitted Finkelstein. "Remember this," said the old man. "Unless you can play baseball, you'll never get to be a rabbi in America."
Scholar Finkelstein got the point and never forgot it — though he never played a game of baseball (or went to a dance, or had a date with a girl in his student days). He took enough interest in the outside world to get himself elected president of his class in its final year. In 1922 he married the sister-in-law of a faculty member, handsome Carmel Bentwich. He has three children: Hadassah, 28: now married to a mathematician and living in Connecticut; Ezra, 24, in his second year at Columbia University's School of International Affairs, and Emunah, 19, who is training for social work.
After graduating from the seminary, Finkelstein took a small congregation in The Bronx, where he stayed for twelve years. When he was midway in this work, the seminary's next president, Cyrus Adler, persuaded him to join the faculty "for a year or two." He stayed for 15 years, and when Adler died, 44-year-old Louis Finkelstein succeeded him.
Shift of Center. The seminary he was called to lead was neither the oldest nor the biggest in the U.S.* It was founded in 1887, with eight students and three teachers, then met in a small Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. When Louis Finkelstein took over in 1940, it had a set of handsome, six-story Georgian buildings on Manhattan's academy-studded Morningside Heights — and perhaps the most distinguished faculty of rabbinical teachers in the English language. By the standards of 1940, it was turning out a fair number of graduates: eight or ten young rabbis a year, an equal number of qualified teachers for Jewish schools.