Attracted to biology from childhood, Rabbi Tenderler attended Yeshiva, as well as took evening courses at New York University. There he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and then a master’s degree in the subject before eventually earning a doctorate degree at Columbia.
Yeshiva appointed him as a biology instructor in 1952, and within a few years he was appointed assistant dean in charge of student affairs. He was later named a Rosh Yeshiva in the seminary, a title given to the head teachers of the school and one held upon his death. His son Mordecai said he had lectured by Zoom from his hospital bed until five months ago.
Years earlier as a student, Rabbi Tenderler was studying at a local library when he was approached by Rabbi Feinstein’s daughter Shifra Feinstein, who asked him a question of chemistry. He married and had eight children, moving to Monsé in 1960. There he was named Rabbi of the community synagogue.
Mrs. Tendler died in 2007. In addition to Mordecai, they have three daughters, Rivka Rapaport, an Israeli high school dean, Sarah Oren, a nurse at Hadassah Medical Center in Israel, and Ruth Fried, chair of science at Yeshiva University High School. School for Girls in Holliswood, Queens; four other sons, Yaakov, an internist, Aaron, a rabbi in Baltimore, Hillel, a Baltimore lawyer, and Eli Don, a lawyer on Long Island; one brother, the dean of a yeshiva in Sholom, Los Angeles; more than 200 grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In a tribute he wrote for the online journal Tradition, Dr. Edward Reichmann, professor of emergency medicine at Einstein and a former student of Rabbi Tenderler, said that Rabbi Tenderler taught generations of observant medical students to think about the implications of Jewish morality. Was. in his training and he “changed forever the way in which the field of analysis and medicine was integrated into the analysis of the Jewish world through the lens of the Torah.”
“It is no exaggeration,” he said, “to say that Rabbi Tendler’s name was in every religious Jewish physician’s Rolodex (or, today, smartphone).”