Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, has announced a $5.2 million gift from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation in Cleveland to endow a faculty chair and strengthen programming at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education.

The gift will be used to create the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Professorship in Jewish Education Research, complementing two similarly named chairs in Jewish education and Jewish educational thought at the Mandel Center. Since its establishment at Brandeis in 2002, the center has helped generate new knowledge and ideas around the teaching and learning of classical Jewish texts in a range of settings, as well as new models of professional education for Jewish educators.

In 2010, the foundation also established the Mandel Center for the Humanities, which according to the university has become a hub of academic activity featuring new curricular and cross-disciplinary research. The foundation also established two named graduate fellowships — in the humanities and in English and American literature.

"We are profoundly grateful for the ongoing support of the Mandel Foundation and the warm and deep partnership that has characterized our relationship for more than a decade," said Sharon Feiman-Nemser, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Professor in Jewish Education. "Looking ahead, we believe the new faculty chair reinforces Brandeis as the premier home for serious scholarship in Jewish education in the service of a more vibrant and dynamic Jewish future."