Rabbi Dovid Refson might have been in the right place at the right time, but that fact alone does not account for Neve Yerushalayim’s outstanding success. The largest college for women in the Jewish world was built on his dedication, smarts, and the mussar he heard from his mentor, Rav Elyah Lopian. Now, Rabbi Refson is once again nurturing the school as it enters a new period of challenge and change.
It’s been a year spent in transit for the dean of the Orthodox world’s largest all-women’s college. Unprecedented financial challenges have forced him out of his beloved classroom and on to the fundraising trail.
If he appears a bit weary, he compensates with humor, candor, and insight.
The builder of one of the kiruv world’s flagship institutions has been called farsighted, even visionary, but as he eases into a red-and-gray-striped lobby chair, he waves away the labels. If Dovid Refson had a goal when he was young, it was simply to make himself useful.
The seeds of the English Torah world were planted when Rav Elyah Lopian made the decision to leave Lithuania for England in 1928. His children and talmidim would become the key figures in the post-war European Torah world, but the beginning wasn’t easy.
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