If You Plan It, It Is No Dream

As Jewish communal professionals turn Jack Ukeles’s visions and methods into reality, his legacy lives on.

Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, creating policy planning for city and state governments as well as major Jewish organizations around the world, Jack Ukeles had one consistent goal: to blend research, data and strategic problem-solving with idealism in making the world a better place.

Ukeles, who died in Jerusalem July 22 at the age of 88, was widely and deeply admired as well for his integrity, wisdom and compassion on both a personal and professional level.

“He taught, he inspired, he challenged,” observed Asher Ostrin, an executive of the global Jewish humanitarian Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who worked closely with Ukeles for many years. “He didn’t think for you, he thought with you.”

Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since making aliyah in 2012, Ostrin described his friend and colleague as a communal hero who “translated visions into a course of action.” He noted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry. “Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students,” Ostrin said, “and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear.”

Those values were shaped growing up in a religious Zionist home, aware of the trauma his parents endured in Eastern Europe before settling in New York. Ukeles’s mother wanted a first-rate Jewish education for her only son, and after visiting a number of yeshivas, moved the family from The Bronx to Brooklyn so he could attend the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He thrived there academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team. During his high school years, Ukeles was also active in Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth movement. After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed to integrating modern scholarship and traditional Jewish learning, he applied and was accepted in 1955 to Bar-Ilan University’s first class.

“My father was proud to be a member of that first class, and as a student leader there, he wanted to help build the school and be a part of its growth” in synthesizing secular and religious studies, his daughter Raquel Ukeles recalled. “But the administration wasn’t interested.” He was 18 at the time.

After a year in Israel, Ukeles attended a yeshiva and Brooklyn College, where his motivation to improve the world drew him to take courses in community planning, research and data. He received his B.A. in political science in 1959, and an M.A. in city planning two years later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1962, Ukeles spent a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright Fellow and returned to complete his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971.

During his graduate school years, Ukeles turned a summer job in the New York City planning department into a three-year position during which time he helped produce the first data-driven analysis of New York City’s housing needs, and was part of a team that reshaped the city’s approach to urban renewal.

He then turned to academia, starting a long-term pattern of moving back and forth between university posts – including at Penn, Columbia University and the New School, where he later became chairman of the first urban policy graduate program in the US – and designing and leading civil service and financial reform in New York through the mayor’s office under Abe Beame and Ed Koch.

In 1981, Ukeles joined the Jewish non-profit world as senior planning officer of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (now UJA-Federation). He led the charity’s first scientific study of the New York area’s Jewish population, and major studies on senior services and Jewish poverty. Five years later, he went out on his own, launching Ukeles Associates, Inc., and for 28 years led consulting projects combining his experience in policy research, planning and management for a range of secular and Jewish non-profits.

Family members noted that the common thread in Ukeles’s career in academia, city government and non-profits was to deal with difficult problems by making decisions based on real data, not theoretical ideas, and to bring the stakeholders around the table to make the best – or sometimes least worst – decisions based on need and priority.

His two daughters, Raquel and Yael, described their dad as the most important teacher they ever had. They said that when they and their brother, Meir, were young, their dad would often bring home examples of problems he was dealing with at work and ask their advice. Sitting around the Shabbat dinner table on Friday nights, he would describe two worthy cases and ask how they would choose between them in allocating resources.

“He taught us how to think and problem-solve,” said Raquel, who is head of collections at the National Library of Israel. “He was a careful listener and welcomed curiosity,” noted Yael, a product market manager and founder of two non-profit Israeli environmental education programs.“The best compliment from him was, ‘that’s a great question.’”

Knowing the right questions to ask was one of Ukeles’s strengths. Elie Kaunfer, CEO and president of the Hadar Institute, a center of Jewish life and learning, said that when Ukeles conducted the first formal evaluation of the organization in 2011, “he taught me so much about what kind of questions to ask – not just about experience of the program but ultimate impact on people’s lives.”

John Ruskay, former CEO of UJA-Federation who worked closely with Ukeles on a number of projects, referred to him as “one of the deans of Jewish communal service. He brought to his work a lifelong commitment to maximizing the possibility of a flourishing Jewish future.” Echoing the comments of many who knew Ukeles, Ruskay added that he was “a loyal friend and dear colleague who I and so many others turned to repeatedly for counsel, for wisdom, for ‘chizuk’” (inner strength).

Sometimes that counsel came with critique. Steve Bayme, a former American Jewish Committee executive and longtime Ukeles friend, noted: “Jack knew how to offer constructive criticism and even occasional rebuke in ways that colleagues, including those in senior communal positions, could hear and absorb.” One example was cited by Alan Gill, who served as CEO of the JDC. He praised Ukeles for “his expertise in challenging and guiding us” as a consultant “in our discussions. He knew how to push us to be hard” on evaluating their work. He said Ukeles “yelled at us” once, which was unheard of from consultants who tended to be dispassionate and analytical, he noted. But the outburst had “a positive effect,” Gill added, reminding JDC staff how much “the mission and work mattered” to Ukeles.

That sense of heartfelt criticism also applied to Ukeles’s devotion to, and frustration with, the state of Israel in recent years. He agonized over the growth of extremism in the charedi community and Jewish settler violence, and he spoke out in pieces he published in The Times of Israel. His last column, posted four months ago, described settler violence as an existential threat to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Steve Bayme noted that, “characteristically, Jack did not limit himself to diagnosis of the phenomenon but also offered strategies for countering the phenomenon.”

“Jack loved the Jewish people,” said Sally Gottesman, who was hired by Ukeles as a young consultant in 1997, and has remained close to the family ever since. Now an activist-philanthropist focused on gender and justice in the Jewish community, Gottesman said Ukeles was “a mentor and master teacher” and praised his efforts to promote equality for women.

A prime example was his support for and great pride in the accomplishments of his wife, Mierle, who in seeking to blend art with waste management became the official artist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation, a volunteer position she has held since 1977. Her unique career was the focus of an award-winning 2025 documentary, “Maintenance Artist.”

“Jack was my heart and soul,” she said. “His support, championing my being a free artist and a full person, all through the years, extending as well to his supporting the work of many other women artists of our time, was without a peer, without an end.”

Ukeles’s son, Meir, who works with an Israel-based VC fund investing in startups, noted that in addition to his father’s many professional accomplishments, he “was truly at home and at peace in nature. At sunrise the morning after my high school graduation we drove 12 hours to Allagash, Maine,” he recalled, “and spent three magical days canoeing in the wilderness. Anyone who ever saw my dad chopping wood or building a fire saw a truly happy man. That balance between nature and civilization was what made him whole.”