His Landmark Discovery
In life, Irving Stokes, trained as an electrical engineer, is revered nationally for sharing in a crucial discovery during World War II, the existence of radar. Following months of devastating bombardment by the Nazis, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that radar saved his vulnerable nation.
In an Orthodox Jewish community on the Westside, Mr. Stokes is revered as a prime mover in the establishment of the only yeshiva for miles around, Yeshiva Ohr Eliyahu.
This is not just another Jewish day school. Some of the most rigorously religious families in midtown and West Los Angeles dispatch their children every morning to the care of Rabbi Shlomo Goldberg. As the dean, Rabbi Goldberg teaches and oversees nearly three hundred students.
And so, into this historically contentious battleground —where believers and skeptics have jousted for centuries over whether religion and science are allies or rivals — strode the passionate Mr. Stokes and his vision.
Upon reflection, it now seems to have been a brilliant stroke by Mr. Stokes. A man of God and a man of erudition, he introduced a formulation to the Ohr Eliyahu community that he promised was tantalizingly tailored to the sponge-like minds of strongly religious children.
Just as the pursuit of science inevitably had led him to become a religious Jew, he assured Rabbi Goldberg that the study of the sometimes intimidating discipline would tighten rather than threaten the religious underpinnings of Ohr Eliyahu’s students.
“We would not be here, physically or spiritually, if not for Irving Stokes,” Rabbi Goldberg said before presenting a plaque to Mr. Stokes’s widow Dorothea.
As his health waned in his last years, it was said that Mr. Stokes comprehended the complexities of the universe as intimately as a reader knows a book he has read one hundred times. Deeply, almost desperately, he wanted others to experience the joy that scrubbed and caressed him when he sat down to learn.
Plumbing the Unfathomable
For ten years or more on Sunday mornings at 10, he assembled a core of men from his synagogue community — first, the Pacific Jewish Center, then the Torah Learning Center — in his home. With the unwavering concentration of dedicated scholars sailing on an exotic journey, the group plumbed the outer limits of man’s knowledge of the universe.
As fervently as any grown man could advocate an idea, short of standing on a street corner with a blood-red flower in his lapel, Mr. Stokes believed that all persons, but especially children, should have the nutritious rays of science shined on them daily.
He was convinced that exposure to un-mined scientific wonders would create seedlings of unquenchable curiosity. Carrying a lifetime guarantee, the seedlings would expand, he said, stretching the walls of students’ minds.
For all of Mr. Stokes’s passion, though, the pursuit of scientific pathways at Ohr Eliyahu did not necessarily fully take until four years ago.
Enter Rupert Randall.
New to America, Mr. Randall, a young, tall and slender Englishman who parts his fair hair in the middle, came to the Westside expressly to join the large colony of British expatriates in Santa Monica. His search for work led him to the Ohr Eliyahu campus in Blair Hills.
Apparently, each party was what the other was looking for, and today Mr. Randall is the Science Coordinator of a program that school officials predict will grow exponentially, in prestige and size.
“I am really trying to turn this into a respectable Science Department with a respectable science program,” Mr. Randall said.
He told a crowd of parents and supporters that the study of science facilitates moral development and moral maturity.
A student, in his view, is almost never too young to learn. “A child’s mind has scientific tendencies, and he is naturally curious about the world,” Mr. Randall said. ‘Children will start to ask questions. It is just a matter of allowing them to see questions that will push them in the right direction. I find that you can teach the science that often is taught to fourth or fifth grade students to first graders. Even at that age, they are perfectly able to understand. It just is not traditional to teach students at that level.
“The understanding and the skills of the students have been such that every year I have stepped up the level of sophistication in the Science curricula. When I arrived here, I was teaching Basic Science to all of the grades. Now we can become much more sophisticated with the higher-grade boys and girls.”
A Model Couple
Dr. Allen Karz, a noted heart surgeon, who studied with Mr. Stokes for many years, dipped into the Talmud to honor the engineer and his wife.
“It is mentioned (in the Gemora) that as people become older, if they are wise, they will draw closer to HaShem (God),” Dr. Karz said. “They will reach out to enhance (the lessons of) Torah in their community. They grow. This was Irv and Dorothea.
“If people are not as wise when they get older, they look, instead, for more frivolity, for more enjoyment out of life that is not in the direction of spirituality or gaining Torah knowledge.”
When Mr. Randall stepped to the podium, he addressed a question that challenges, sometimes troubles, religious schools, the much-discussed so-called conflict of science and religion.
“Some religious schools question the wisdom of teaching science and broadening the students’ perspective,” he said. “That is due, in part, to a fear of some conflict between religion and science. Such a fear is not present in this school.
“I mean what I am going to say as a big compliment: To me, it seems that is in large part because people in this school are very, very comfortable in their religious beliefs.
“When you believe you know the truth of the bigger picture, how can the smaller truths that come forward be in conflict?”
Mr. and Mrs. Stokes on Film
Alan Lipman, a major supporter of Ohr Eliyahu and an accomplished photographer, presented the yeshiva with two photo studies, one of Mr. Stokes and one of the couple together.
Cal Tech graduate Alan Danziger, an electronic engineer and another longtime Stokes student, recalled how his teacher led his class through college textbooks. “I am sure,” he said, “that we studied them more carefully than (university) students. With Irv, we really took textbooks apart.”
Having known Mr. Stokes for more than twenty years, Mr. Danziger distilled the essence of his teacher.
“More than a scientist, Irv was a consummate engineer,” he said.
“Everything he looked at, he wanted to fix. He was not deeply puzzled with how-do-things-work? But he could not look at anything without saying, ‘Why can’t we make it better?’ Dr. Karz will tell you that he had hundreds of ideas about medical instruments. He wondered why they had built some one way and not another. Always he had ideas for improvement. That was Irv.”
