Dear Rabbi Lamm, I was delighted to hear that you have been designated the new President of Yeshiva University. Congratulations! As you probably know, your Assistant, Rabbi Herbert C. Dobrinsky, and yours truly are right now at work on the next issue of the Yeshiva University publication The American Sephardi, which will be dedicated to the memory of your revered predecessor. As Editor of The American Sephardi, I have a special stake in Yeshiva University, because through it I am trying to help realize the ideals of my late father, Ivan Salomon, who conceived the plan of establishing a Sephardi Program at Yeshiva University.It was my father's hope that Yeshiva University would broaden its outlook and realize the insufficiency of a Jewish culture based exclusively on Eastern European foundations and lifestyle. Dr. Samuel Belkin shared my father's feeling that the Sephardi heritage in all its ramifications—Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, the Dutch, British and, above all, American—should be studied in a respectable academic environment and that Yeshiva University was the place.Thus, for the first time in an institution catering largely to an Ashkenazi student body of Eastern European background, the possibility was created for a Center in the United States of America for the study of the great past of Iberian Jewry on the part of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi young people.In addition, both Dr. Belkin and my father, together with the Reverend the Haham, Dr. Solomon Gaon, foresaw the opening of the gates of Yeshiva University to the American Sephardi community as a Center for the dissemination and revival of Sephardi cultural traditions.Finally, it was their great visionary hope that rabbis and teachers could be trained at Yeshiva University according to the needs which Sephardi survival imposes.Thus, I greet you, Rabbi Lamm, as the new President of the institution on which we of the Sephardi community and of the historic Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portug…