Saturday, 24 October 2026, 11:00 am James Madison High School 3787 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11229
Homecoming Baseball Game Sat Oct. 24th @11:00 AM
Join us at Madison for Homecoming
Ceremony honoring LEGENDARY SOFTBALL COACH GIL FERSHTMAN starts at 11:30 AM
History teacher Barry Fingerhut ’70 found hundreds of decaying photos of Madison from the mid-1920s and 1930s in the library basement in 2005. He and Ronnie Greenberg ’72 preserved them in archival sleeves and binders, and they are being donated for display at the school.
By Barry Fingerhut ’70
When I was young, even before I was a student at JMHS, I dreamed of discovering lost cities of gold in thrilling, epic adventures. As a history teacher at Madison since 1992, I was given permission in 2005 to examine books about to be discarded in the library basement storage area. There I found a buried treasure! In a dingy corner was a group of filing cabinets overflowing with what appeared to be hundreds of torn, decaying, dust-covered manila envelopes and papers. Many had been tossed onto the floor, some crumpled on the tops of the cabinets or crushed into the drawers, and it looked as though nothing of value was there. Of course, this drew me even closer, curious about my anthropological find.
I discovered photographs. Hundreds of long-forgotten photos of James Madison High School’s past. Sitting on the floor, I gently drew each one out of its ignominious tomb and found materials from the mid-1920s and 1930s. As a serious art photographer, I knew that these yellowing, acid-rich envelopes and amateur, glued mountings were eating away at the irreplaceable silver gelatin prints in stages, fading them gradually to a true death. While the ripped ones were beyond repair, I knew instantly that the history in these photographs was my new passion.
It took me over an hour to unearth most of them and make my plan. After asking permission, I took them all home. I showed them to Ronnie Greenberg ’72, my beloved spouse, and we sat there for uncounted hours, placing them into archival polypropylene photo sleeves and recording or saving any record offered of date and subject. We obtained three huge binders to arrange them in chronological order, stopping often to marvel over the images of our school’s past. The cleaning of our living room of the thousands of shreds of musty envelopes took even longer.
Now the glory of the past lies before us. When I found out from Frieda Weitz ’54 that space was dedicated at the school to keeping the remnants of Madison’s past in perpetuity, we wanted to donate these photos to the cause. Examining the photographs, one can see young ladies wearing formal hats, gloves, and carrying purses. One can see young men in three-piece suits and ties, and a number of them in knickers as well! In their eyes, though, is the eternal fire of youth, and also the occasional blanket of boredom. Everything is different but nothing has changed. Examine the long-lost past and the thrilling adventure of James Madison HS – the golden city is before you!
Barry Fingerhut taught Sociology, American History, and Economics in JMHS from 1992 to 2013.
Editor’s note: The JMHSAA will be providing a new, secure cabinet for the school to display the photographs in their binders. It will be located in the second-floor conference room where other alumni memorabilia are kept.
[Photo caption: Dramatic Society, Jan. 1934]
[Photo caption: Madison Library, March 1929]
From JMHS Alumni News, Spring 2019, page 3.
Arthur Ashkin ’40 shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing optical tweezers, laser beams that grab particles and living cells. At 96 he is the oldest recipient and the fifth JMHS graduate to win a Nobel, and he still experiments in his home lab.
By Ellen Rivin Green ’64 and Judith Naomi Ophir Fish ’64
On October 2, 2018, we were given one more reason to be proud of our school: The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Arthur Ashkin ’40, making him the fifth JMHS graduate to become a Nobel winner!
The award, which he shared with two other scientists, was for his invention of the optical tweezers – laser beam “fingers” that can grab particles, atoms, viruses, or other living cells to study or manipulate them. This breakthrough in physics has had broad medical and industrial applications, including laser eye surgery, in vitro fertilization, and highly precise machine cutting. Its use in cell research enables new ways of understanding normal and diseased states in the human body.
At 96, Art is the oldest recipient of the award. It comes after nearly a century of interest in scientific experimentation that started when he was a child living on E. 27 St. near Avenue J. Art was especially fascinated then by the Crookes radiometer, a spinning device that demonstrates how light can exert force on a physical object, a subject he never abandoned. At Madison, Art was a member of the Math Club, co-captain of the Math Team, and president of Arista. He chose as his yearbook quote: “Yearning is desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bounds of human thought,” and his research in experimental physics fulfilled that yearning.
After graduating from Madison at the start of World War II, Art went to Columbia College for his BS and became a research assistant in the radiation lab, a position that was expected to keep him out of the service. Instead, he was drafted and became an enlisted reserve, able to continue working at Columbia building magnetrons for US military radar systems.
In 1952, he received his PhD in nuclear physics from Cornell University, where he met his wife, Aline, and went to work at Bell Labs, a hub of basic science research. There he focused on “laser trapping” – working with the radiation pressure of light to exert force on microparticles and catch them – and was the first to observe optical trapping of atoms. He then branched out into trapping living material. In 1986, he developed the optical tweezers, which allowed him to explore the interior of a cell and manipulate its inner structure without harming it.
“Science,” Art recently told New Jersey News 12, “is my hobby,” and it hasn’t stopped yet. He loves gadgets and has patented 47 inventions. The recipient of numerous awards, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013. He authored the book Optical Trapping and Manipulation of Neutral Particles Using Lasers (1997) and many research papers, and is still involved in research and writing for scientific journals. He is currently experimenting in his home lab on affordable solar energy, using science to combat climate change.
On December 8, 2018, Art greeted the audience at Stockholm University remotely, and his Nobel lecture, “Optical Tweezers and their Application to Biological Systems” (posted on YouTube), was delivered by a colleague. “I hope you enjoy it,” Art said. A true James Madison High School success story!
Ellen Rivin Green is a retired NYC intermediate school assistant principal.
Judith Naomi Ophir Fish is a writer and a founding editor of The Westchester Review, a literary journal.
[Photo caption: Arthur Ashkin]
[Photo caption: Ashkin Log photo 1941]
From JMHS Alumni News, Spring 2019, page 1.
Richard D. Gitlin ’59 spent 32 years at Bell Labs, co-inventing DSL and helping lay groundwork for 3G and 5G wireless. Now at USF developing robotic surgical tools, the 60-patent engineer recalls Madison’s great teachers, an IBM crash he caused and fainting at an operation.
Richard Gitlin remembers his excitement as a kid taking the subway with his dad to explore Manhattan neighborhoods. At a Lionel train exhibit in Times Square, he was fascinated by how the trains didn’t crash. Tracing the track designs, he recognized a methodology in terms of timing and spatial independence. Arguably, the seed of networking technology was sown in him then.
Engineer, scientist, researcher, executive, teacher, inventor, and entrepreneur, Rich grew up to be a defining force in how we communicate. He has been a leader in digital communication, wireless systems, data networking, and bio-medical networking for 45 years, 32 of them at Bell Labs, where he co-invented DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) technology that enabled high-speed Internet access over the existing telephone network.
As Rich pointed out to the Alumni News, “The big ideas that change the way we work, play, and live were often conceived quite a while ago, but the additional technology, marketing, and production means to progress the invention into an innovation, such as the Internet, usually takes an extended period of time . . . The invention of DSL dates to the mid ’80s, but it took more than a decade for the first products to emerge.”
Currently, Rich leads an interdisciplinary research team at University of South Florida that is developing the next generation of robotic surgical tools for performing minimally invasive surgery (MIS) faster, safer, and more cost effectively. Five patents have been awarded for this potentially transformative work, and Rich has formed a startup company in Tampa to commercialize the technology.
Rich’s entrepreneurial spirit emerged when he was growing up in Sheepshead Bay. In an interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, he described how he would go to the local softball field with his little red wagon, take orders for sodas, buy them at the candy store, and make two cents off each returned bottle.
After attending PS 98 and Shell Bank JHS, Rich was accepted at Stuyvesant, but being only 13 at the time, his parents wouldn’t let him go. At Madison, he said, “I was a pretty serious student and was intent on maximizing my chances to get into a top-notch college.” Noting Mr. Charles Feit in calculus and Mr. Wolf in chemistry, Rich said, “I recall great teachers. Many in the English and history departments had law degrees, and in the math and sciences they had PhDs – I just thought that was required. Years later, I realized that this was special and was likely a vestige from their getting their professional degrees during the Depression and taking teaching positions . . . Weren’t we lucky to have benefited that way!”
He also remembered a teacher who took the math team to Columbia University where they learned programming on an IBM computer. Rich wrote a long program that eventually divided a quantity by zero, resulting in infinity. The machine froze, and upon cross-examination by his teacher, he admitted that he “was just doing an experiment to see how the machine would react.”
Rich’s uncle, a surgeon, was keen to see him follow his career path and he invited Rich, then a teenager, to watch an operation. Rich saw the blood and fainted. Scratch medicine; think engineering. Rich believes his interest today in MIS is partially due to such surgery being almost bloodless.
Graduating at 16, he was accepted on scholarship by Columbia but decided to attend City College’s highly rated engineering program. He graduated with honors and was awarded a National Defense Education Act Fellowship enabling him to pursue an MSEE (1965) and a Doctor of Engineering Science (1969) at Columbia.
In addition to developing DSL at Bell Labs, Rich also worked on a coding technique (multi-code CDMA) used in 3G wireless systems, and an “intelligent” antenna system that forms the basis of 5G wireless technology. After retiring in 2001, he was a visiting professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia, and later CTO of Hammerhead Systems, a venture-funded networking company in Silicon Valley. At USF he is a State of Florida 21st Century World Class Scholar, a Distinguished University Professor, and the Agere Systems Chair of Electrical Engineering.
Rich holds 60 patents, has published over 100 papers, and co-authored a graduate textbook on data communications. He is a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and a member of numerous engineering societies, including the National Academy of Engineering, the highest level of recognition in the profession. Affiliated NAE frat rats include Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), and Louis Gerstner (IBM). And for you Apple fans, Steve Jobs didn’t make the cut.
When not working, Rich likes to play tennis, work out, and take long walks near downtown Tampa with Barbara, his wife of 50 years. They have two children and two grandchildren. He can be reached at richgitlin@gmail.com.
Larry Spear is a retired electrical engineer.
Madison Baseball ‘67, Hal penned this article waiting for the Madison Ballgame to begin, straight from the seats to his iPhone. Hall went to watch a Madison Baseball game to mark the 52nd anniversary of his Madison team winning a city championship.
Madison, BaseBall & Me
So here I sit. In the stands aside my 1st base position, separated by a fence , experiencing my first JMHS game in 52 years! As a spectator no less!
I always thought that baseball represented life in such a potent way. Touching all senses, feelings, desires and yet at its core is that every batter, player upon entering the game has one fundamental desire to get home.
Clearly romancing the past can be fun and I would imagine dangerous for some but for me, dispelling “ you can’t go home” seems so real. Now I’m not living in 1967, but sitting here, looking across the field, hearing and breathing the sounds of the game are real. It’s my past and prepared me for my future.
Yes, these boys, young men of Madison have their future ahead of them but when they take the field this is truly a special time. Friends, teammates, colleagues, Boys of Summer these are precious experiences.
For me, our team was family. Some of us played ball together when we were 7/8 years old to our senior year. From Fillmore Gardens, the Highway and neighboring communities we were united under the guidance of Arnie Pinsky.
As we entered our senior year, we were confident of an outstanding season. Not with arrogance but expectations of knowing how good we were. There never was a game we couldn’t win… Never! Perhaps no greater sign would be our City Championship game . Being down 7-1 with 6 outs to play against the men of Columbus HS from Washington Heights. Succeeding with scoring 7 runs against the early favorite to win it all and Winning and becoming reigning City Champions of NYC and the last one from Madison for the past 52 years .
So moving , so powerful and while I haven’t been in touch with the entire team, sitting here in the stands, I still hear Jack behind the plate encouraging Steve to bear down, Eliot in the hot corner, Steve still making short look easy and turning double plays with Donnie at second. Barry, Kirby, Artie patrolling the outfield and Ronnie gliding athletically in center . I’m manning first sitting 15 feet now from a place I called home. There’s Tony, Barry, Jim and Larry. Basically my family.
Yes maybe I went home for 9 innings or so and while the game was great and I was proud of our current Team, I also had the time to see my guys running the field, playing their positions, hitting the ball and winning. For in 1967 these Band of Players, my lifetime friends were City Champions, and it felt good and real for this time to imagine them all in the perfect place and in the perfect time.
Hal Trencher ’67
Lynn Herman Syms evolved from a Brooklyn native and interior designer—who designed Helmsley hotels and geriatric facilities—into an accomplished bronze sculptor and philanthropist. Married to retailer Sy Syms, she led the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra board and now funds global women's empowerment.
Lynn Herman Syms’ high school girlfriends remember when their loyal Adelphis sorority sister moved in her sophomore year to Manhattan Beach and still crossed the Sheepshead Bay pedestrian bridge every morning to catch a bus to Madison. “We were six inseparable friends,” Lynn said in an interview with the Alumni News in the paneled sitting room of her Upper East Side apartment. She recalled their pact to be neighbors when they grew up and “make a tunnel through our attached houses.”
The former Adelphis president admits that her early life was “lived in a bell jar from my father’s house to my husband’s house.” Homemaking, however, was not her forte. “If I walk into the kitchen, I bum myself,” she quipped. But as an artist, a businesswoman, and a philanthropist, Lynn has always been ready for a challenge. An art major at Syracuse University and NYU, Lynn married young and raised two children. At age 40, she said, “I decided to strike out.” Moving to Manhattan, she began work as an interior designer and started a firm with a partner in Brooklyn Heights. Soon she was designing guest rooms and public spaces in Leona and Harry Helmsley’s hotels. Despite a falling out with the Helmsleys, the experience “led to a lot of growth,” Lynn said. “None of that was wasted.” She went on to develop a specialty in geriatric facilities, “creating spaces [for Alzheimer’s patients] that might speak to memory.”
Then, in her fifties, when the emotional toll of her work became too great, Lynn made an about-face career change and became a sculptor. “From the first day,” she said, “I loved it with such a passion.” She set up a studio in the National Academy Museum and School, a 190-year-old institution on E. 89 St. Lynn sculpts in clay and, using the lost wax method, casts her pieces in bronze.
The figures displayed throughout her apartment range from rough and elongated forms to more classical representations of the human body. Emotions are laid bare and run the gamut from joy to heartache. Although Lynn sculpts using nude models, she likes to then drape her figures, adding detailed folds for greater interest. Many of her pieces have personal origins. “Ode to Ms. Leslie” — a woman proudly thrusting forth her newly rounded belly — was inspired by Lynn’s daughter’s first pregnancy. “My New Life” is a cluster of seven babies that Lynn created when her first two grandchildren were born a few months apart. Lynn’s work, represented by Madison Avenue galleries, can be found in the permanent collection of the Yeshiva University Museum and in private collections.
But sculpting was only one of Lynn’s activities. In 1984 she married clothing retailer and philanthropist Sy Syms, setting her on her own course of philanthropic work as well as on joint ventures with her husband. Sy, a Midwood HS graduate for whom Yeshiva University’s School of Business was named, was also chairman of Israel Bonds. The two traveled frequently to Israel and socialized in Israeli cultural and political circles. In the mid ’80s, violinist and conductor Itzhak Perlman asked Lynn to join the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra’s international board, which promotes and supports the orchestra. In 2001, when board president Herman Sandler was killed in the 9/11 attack, Lynn took over his position and served a four-year term. She is still an active member there and on boards of other charitable foundations. “I was so lucky,” Lynn said, reminiscing about her late husband. “He was so down to earth.” In the late ’90s, Lynn convinced Sy, who had once been a radio sportscaster, to join her in hosting a weekly radio show focused on interesting New Yorkers and city life. Waxing nostalgic about the “at-home” morning talk shows she listened to years earlier, Lynn said, “The second the microphone went on I felt like I knew how to do it.” The show lasted three years, and among the guests were Mayor Ed Koch, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and TV-news anchor Jim Jensen.
Sy Syms passed away in 2009 and since then Lynn has plunged into new waters. Partnering with World Pulse, an online global community of women empowering each other to create grassroots change, she has funded the $20,000 Lynn Syms Prize, the first one awarded in 2014. The winner was a Pakistani woman, Zephania, whose school in rural Punjab is educating hundreds of girls in a society where 13-year-olds are forced into marriage and honor killings are not unusual. Strong women and raising women’s consciousness are “the theme of my life,” Lynn said. “It feels good if you can help one person.”
Always engaged in what she calls her “continuum,” Lynn will soon be returning to the National Academy to take up drawing and cartooning. Her website is lynnsyms.com.
The James Madison High School class of 1959 exemplifies lifelong friendships as they gather for their 65th reunion.
The friendships formed in high school hold a special place in our memories. Whether they were born out of necessity, or the continuation of friendships that began early in life, they provide grounding and support at a time when we mature into adulthood. The shared experiences become meaningful events in our formative years. The Madison alumni community is full of examples of friendships that stood the test of time. Few classes, though, have remained as deeply connected as the James Madison High School class of 1959. This year, they are getting together for their 65th anniversary reunion.
Listen to the JMAA Podcast. In this episode we talk about Madison Homecoming 2023 and Danny Suhr Field Naming.
James Madison High School in Brooklyn dedicated its new athletic field on October 21, 2023 to Danny Suhr, class of ’82. The annual Homecoming event drew hundreds of alumni and current students to honor the first New York City firefighter to die in the attacks of 9/11. Suhr was captain of his Madison Knights football and baseball teams. After joining the city’s fire department he became captain of the FDNY’s football team. Danny Suhr’s life was celebrated by members of his family, classmates and friends in a moving ceremony.
Saturday 25 – Sunday 26 October 2025
Join us for Madison’s Centennial celebration All tickets available in Alumni Shop Fri Oct 24th All Class Reunion at Clemente’sSat Oct.
Join us for Madison’s Centennial celebration All tickets available in Alumni Shop
Fri Oct 24th All Class Reunion at Clemente’s
Sat Oct. 25th Homecoming at Madison/After Party Clemente’s
Sun Oct. 26th Wall of Distinction Ceremony Doors open at 10 AM at Madison
Sun Oct. 26th Centennial Luncheon at Madison, immediately following Wall of Distinction Ceremony
Sunday, 5 June 2022, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm James Madison High School, 3787 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11229
More information coming soon!
More information coming soon!
Wednesday, 13 April 2022, 2:00 pm – 6:00 pm
You are invited to speak to the students of James Madison HS on March 26th for our 4th annual Career Fair.
You are invited to speak to the students of James Madison HS on March 26th for our 4th annual Career Fair. We will be setting up tables around GYM 2 and inviting approximately 150 students to attend during each period. Additionally, we are asking that some of our speakers do break- out sessions to individual classrooms, where they will present to a group of 30-34 students and run a Q & A segment.
Any Questions or to volunteer please contact:
Annette Pisano
School Counselor
718-758-7364
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