Rabbi Jack Sable, the architect of Riverdale’s post-war Orthodox Jewish community, has died at the age of 87. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, who succeeded Sable as rabbi of the Riverdale Jewish Center and a Jewish pioneer in his own right, offered the eulogy.

Jack Sable brought life to the barren landscape of Orthodox Jewish life in the 1950s when Orthodoxy, decimated by the Holocaust, was considered old-fashioned and doomed to the dustbin of assimilation. Rabbi Sable came on the scene when there was not one Orthodox synagogue or kosher restaurant in the neighborhood and there were still restrictive covenants barring Jews from parts of the neighborhood.

Jack Sable founded the Riverdale Jewish Center and became its first rabbi. The “R.J.C.” was the first Orthodox shul in Riverdale and still is an anchor of its vibrant Orthodox community. It became known as “the house that Jack built.”

It was poetic justice that he was eulogized in the same shul that he worked so hard to build. Sable also founded the Riverdale Academy Yeshiva which merged with Salanter and Akiva yeshivas to become the Salanter Akiva Riverdale Academy, or S.A.R. It is the largest yeshiva in the Bronx, with an enrollment of 1400, and with its modern architecture and open school methodology has been held out as a model day-school of the Modern Orthodox movement.

Riverdale was in Rabbi Sable’s thoughts until his dying day. “Our father chose never to leave Riverdale. I think it’s clear why. His lifeblood is in this building, in this community, and in all its institutions,” said his son David.

Jack Sable was a role model of Modern Orthodoxy long before it was fashionable. He was the New York Commissioner on Human Rights and regional director of the Emergency Management Agency. He served in the air force and was stationed in San Francisco when he met his wife of 61 years, Elissa. The couple left three children, nine grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Sir Christopher Wren, England’s most famous architect, rebuilt much of London after the great fire. He was buried in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, an edifice he constructed. His epitaph is, “Lector si monumentum Requiris circumspice,” which means, “Reader, if you seek a monument, look around you.” The entire Riverdale Orthodox community is a living monument to Jack Sable’s indomitable pioneering spirit.