Saddened to hear of Leah and early passing. She was a very smart sermonizer and left you something to think about. RIP

My sincere condolences. Pastor was a great lady and a wonderful pastor. She will be greatly missed.

Leah had a great smile, a big heart, and an incredible mind. She was a dear friend at Yale Divinity School, and I have memories of laughing with her around lunch tables with Peter Jonas, Gene McAfee and others. She and I studied Hebrew together, and she was always the superior student. We did Clinical Pastoral Education together at the federal psychiatric hospital St Elizabeths, and then lived on the same street in DC for our intern years. After graduation and marriage, she was a good friend to Nancy and me, and we had fun times taking our children to amusement parks and celebrating birthdays together. We've lost a very special person, whose memory we will cherish.

Leah was one of my closest friends in divinity school. She was the crucifer at my wedding. and I was very sad to hear of her death. When I arrived at Yale my musical tastes and knowledge were pretty primitive, so Leah took on the responsibility of tutoring me. She used to make me cassette tapes of classical music pieces and gave me advice about what to listen for in Bach, Mozart, etc. Leah was part of a gang of us who hung out together--Henry Brinton, John Wolf, Erma Seaton (later Wolf), and myself. Leah used to gently tease John and I because we were both from northern Wisconsin and were not quite fully civilized. Leah was intellectually formidable, even by Yale standards, but she was also a lot of fun. Her big "vice" if you want to call it that was on Friday evenings she used to watch the show Loveboat on a tiny black and white TV. There was no getting between Leah and her boat, especially if the week's studies were strenuous. This seemed so out of character for Leah, because she considered tackiness a great sin and affront to God, but Loveboat was truly one of the most silly shows ever created. As Whitman said, we contradict ourselves--we contain multitudes. In our first or second year the holicaust survivor Ellie Wiesel was a visiting scholar at Yale. There was a rumor that Wiesel was teaching a small seminar on the Book of Job that was open by invitation only, but nobody knew where it was or how to get in. Leah had a friend in the law school who was Jewish (I think he had a crush on her) and her friend snuck Leah and I into the seminar. Wiesel was sitting in front of a fireplace with the Hebrew text in front of him, speaking with it like you would speak to an old friend. As he spoke, it was hard not to think about Wiesel being a modern incarnation of Job himself. Leah and her friend and I stood silently in the back of the room among a small group of (probably unauthorized) listeners. There was something very holy about that moment, even if we weren't supposed to be there. Leah was one of the most organized and focused people I've ever known. She always had a plan and was generally five or six steps ahead of everyone else. I think she knew every bishop on the east coast. You probably know this, but she graduated from Yale, was ordained, and got married in the span of two or three weeks. That has to be some kind of record. You all have my deepest condolences. There was only one Leah. Peter Jonas + Arcadia, WI

Please accept our deepest condolences for your family's loss.