Private Giving
Penn State Intercom......June 21 , 2001

Gift will support
Jewish Studies program

Paul and Joanne Tanker of Philadelphia have given $250,000 to the University's Jewish Studies program to encourage curricular innovations and various forms of student involvement.

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.

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 graduated in commerce and finance in June 1948.

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. Twelve students in the class traveled to Curacao where they participated in a series of lectures and tours, including the Jewish cemetery and museum, and attended services at Synagogue Mikve Israel, the oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.

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