Anne Lehmann (center) with daughters Karen Lehmann-Eisner and Barbara Lehmann Siegel. Photo by Richard Lobell

By Tim Boxer

OT a day goes by that Anne Lehmann hasn’t thought of her only son Jamie. He died when he was 32.

His passion had always been music. In fact, he went off to nursery school with an album of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik tucked under his arm.

He was a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Columbia, a Kellet and Danforth Fellow at King’s College in Cambridge, a graduate of Yale Law School, and an associate at the prestigious New York law firm of Cravath Swain and Moore.

Nina A. Weiner with husband Walter Weiner before the processional. Photo by Richard Lobell

As Anne’s mother lay in the hospital, agitated by the long tube in her throat, it was Jamie who sat for five hours, holding her hand and reading Tehilim while she slept.

Jamie would drive back and forth from Yale in Connecticut to Lawrence, Long Island, to entertain his mother’s 94-year-old father.

So when Anne stepped up to accept an honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University at the Pierre Hotel in New York, she dedicated her degree to the memory of her son Jamie.

Anne and her late husband Manfred, a business consultant who established telecommunications in developing countries in the Caribbean and Africa, had already created a chair in medieval Jewish poetry at Bar-Ilan. Now Anne is sponsoring a new music library in Jamie’s name.

Bar-Ilan president Moshe Kaveh bestows honorary doctorate degree on Deborah E. Lipstadt. Photo by Kate Milford

Bar-Ilan Chancellor Emanuel Rackman also conferred honorary degrees on Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, and Nina Weiner, co-founder of the International Sephardic Education Foundation.

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