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Upon witnessing the completion of a Torah scroll he donated to Rutgers University Hillel, the eighth Hillel and 16th site overall where he has done so, Ira A. Lipman envisioned how the Torah would look in Hillel's new 37,000-square-foot building.

Growing up in the South, Lipman was so desperate for a vibrant Jewish life that he would drive three hours from Little Rock, Ark., to Baron Hirsch Congregation in Memphis, Tenn. Though the Rutgers campus isn't quite that spread out, Lipman noted the university's "immense amount" of Jewish students (about 5,000) and the opportunity to "bring them back" to Hillel and its new home, slated for completion in September 2013.

Lipman asked the students and other community members at the March 26 ceremony at Hillel in New Brunswick to "please use the Torah and please use it regularly."

"You have one of the great universities in the world and you have yiddishkeit spread throughout Rutgers, and you have to build that building," Lipman, founder and chairman of the Guardsmark security services company, said.

"I can see that you've got a huge opportunity and you can really persevere and win," he said.

Each year, Lipman commissions a Torah for a Hillel, synagogue, or center of Jewish learning and holds the dedication on the yahrtzeit of his father, Mark. Rutgers Hillel had nine Torah scrolls before Lipman's donation, but only three of them were kosher. Andrew Getraer, Hillel's executive director, said the Torah will benefit generations of future students and provide "an extraordinary foundation for which we are all grateful."

While the ink dried on the Torah's final letters, inscribed by sofer Rabbi Binyomin Spiro, three rabbis who have served as Lipman's mentors spoke about what has become an annual rite for the businessman and philanthropist, as well as how the Lipman family got to this point. Rabbi Samuel Fox, Lipman's rabbi in Little Rock before moving to Dayton, Ohio, said Mark Lipman exemplified the notion that "one man can make a difference."

As a synagogue president in Little Rock, Mark realized that in order to maintain an Orthodox community, "we must have a new building," Fox recalled.

"It was a tremendous undertaking, and Mark with vision and vigor was determined to bring what to many was a pipe dream into reality and realization," Fox said, calling Mark a "man of action."

Rabbi Rafael Grossman, senior rabbi emeritus at Baron Hirsch Congregation, said that he met Ira Lipman during his second week living in Memphis, and when Ira took him to meet Mark, Grossman immediately felt his decision to move to Memphis "was a very hopeful and promising one." Grossman said he "can't tell you how much I'm moved each time" he attends the dedication of a Lipman Torah.

"Guardsmark is all over the world, and pretty soon Lipman Torahs will be all over the world as well, and I think the latter is the more profitable of the two," Grossman said.

Rabbi Sol Roth, leader of Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, said he has been present at all 16 of Lipman's Torah dedications, with the first coming at Fifth Avenue Synagogue. The powerful experience of that first dedication is what inspired Lipman to commission a Torah every year, Roth said.

Citing the tension between the competing impulses of self-assertion and selflessness in Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's "Lonely Man of Faith," Roth said "the result of that tension is creativity," and that creativity leads to progress in communities. The Lipmans embody progress in the Jewish world, he said, because Mark moved the Jewish community of Little Rock forward, Ira moves various communities forward with Torahs, and Ira's Torah donations to Hillels in particular advance Jewish life at institutions that respond to the needs of young people, the leaders of the future.

Ira, born in Little Rock in 1940, said Fox was his "first fresh feeling of yiddishkeit, Jewish life that I needed." When Fox took a job at Beth Jacob Congregation in Dayton in 1952, Ira said he started borrowing his parents' car to drive to Memphis because he was "so desperate for yiddishkeit."

Lipman said he was honored to wear his black and red Rutgers yarmulke, and that when he returns to Rutgers, he is eager to see the Torah in the new building. He also spoke of his mother Barbara, who turned 99 a year-and-a-half ago and passed away five months later. Lipman said that because he remains in a state of mourning, "this particular Torah dedication is more helpful to me than you can imagine." Every Torah dedication "takes the sting out of the loss" of his father, Lipman said.

Rabbi Yisroel Porath, Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) co-educator, explained that the Jewish people were given three crowns -- kingship, priesthood, and Torah -- and while first two crowns are for specific families and people, "the Torah is not an inheritance, it's a heritage, and that everyone has access to." Through their donation, the Lipmans are renewing the excitement for Torah at Rutgers, Porath said.

Rabbi Esther Reed, associate director for Jewish campus life, described that the last mitzvah listed in the Torah is the commandment to write a Torah, but that the Sefer Hachinuch states that the mitzvah entails not just to write a Torah, but also to "be" a Torah. It is incumbent on Jews to incorporate the Torah into their lives, Reed said, and the Lipmans' donation will enable Jews at Rutgers to "be the Torah scroll that we want to become."