The Joanne G. and Paul A. Tanker Program Support Fund in Jewish Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts will enrich the Jewish Studies program by providing funds to support opportunities and resources that will promote and cultivate knowledge and learning in the area of interfaith relations.

“We want to provide support for work that will have positive effects on future relations between Christians and Jews,” said Paul Tanker. “In my readings and in what I see in everyday life, there is so much similarity in the great religions. Therefore it is disturbing to me that there is still so much hatred in the world. Although I grew up in a time of extreme anti-Semitism, I feel that people are becoming more tolerant and that this is a pattern for the future. My Penn State education was very helpful in my career and provided me with the tools I needed for success in the business world. Joanne and I hope that our gifts will help to make a better world for our children and grandchildren.”

Paul Tanker came to Penn State in 1943, but World War II interrupted his education. After two and one-half years he returned to campus on the GI bill and worked in a fraternity house as a dishwasher in return for three meals a day.

He accelerated his studies by taking 18 to 21 credits each term and during summer sessions, and he graduated in commerce and finance in June 1948.

Prior to starting his own business, he was an accountant for several years. He is the retired president of Tanker and Associates in Philadelphia, a firm he established in 1960 to provide comprehensive employee benefit plans to corporations and private institutions. Joanne Tanker is an art historian and a pastel artist. She is a graduate of Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and has a master’s degree in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

According to Alan Block, director of the Jewish Studies program, the endowment has already made a significant impact on the Penn State students who took a new course in Jewish Communities during the spring semester. The course concentrated on the history of the Dutch island of Curacao in the Caribbean, a community in which Christians and Jews have lived and worked together since the second half of the 1600s. At a time when most of the Jews in continental Europe were ghettoized, Dutch Jews engaged in an almost untrammeled range of economic activity, bore arms in the militias, owned land and ran plantations, and were represented in local councils.

“Through the extraordinary generosity of Paul and Joanne Tanker, 12 students in the class traveled to Curacao during the 2001 spring break,” Block said. “The week included a series of lectures and tours, including the Jewish cemetery, museum and services at Synagogue Mikve Israel, the oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. We helped students to see the world and understand the Jewish experience in a more profound way.

Contact:
Mike Bezilla 863-4512 ( work) 238-5842 (home) mxb13@psu.edu
Laura Stocker 863-4512 (work) lstocker@psu.edu