A Tribute to Dr. Yosef Walder a”h

Look up Dr. Yosef Walder a”h, who was niftar on 16 Adar II at 73, and you’ll find phrases like, “brilliant scientist,” “innovative entrepreneur,” and “distinguished philanthropist.” Dr. Walder’s sons give us deeper insight into who this man was, what made him so unique, and what it is that the world lost when he passed.

Joseph Walder was born in 1951 in Philadelphia; his father was a furniture salesman, and a child of immigrants.

The family moved to suburban Chicago, where Joe grew up. Joe had a passion for science from the very beginning, and his father built him a basement chemistry lab for homemade experiments. He went on to earn both an MD and a PhD from Northwestern, eventually becoming a professor of biochemistry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

In 1987, he established Integrated DNA Technology (IDT — not to be confused with Howard Jonas’s communications company), which would grow over the years to become the leading provider of synthetic RNA and DNA for life-sciences research. IDT’s products and services are now used in virtually all aspects of biomedical research around the globe. An inspiring encounter with Torah Judaism in Skokie on Purim 1994 set him on a course of increased observance. He immediately moved to an apartment near the Skokie Kollel and Chabad, while still making the three-hour-plus commute back to his other home in Iowa City, near the company, as needed. About a year later, Dr. Yosef met his future wife Shira Malka, and in 1998, the family moved to a house in Chicago, where they identified some of the most important needs of the Jewish community that they set out to fill.

While the beneficiaries of Dr. Walder’s generosity span the globe, it is his hometown of Chicago and the surrounding areas that reaped the most from his transformative visions — Walder Education, Walder Science, and the Kehillah Fund to name a few.

“You know what he meant to you,” his son Mordechai said to the locals at the levayah, “but I don’t know if you know what you meant to him.”

Dr. Walder saw his chesed as merely “coming full circle,” for he felt an eternal debt of gratitude to the community that introduced him to Yiddishkeit.

Everything he accomplished was at the side of his life’s partner, Mrs. Shira Malka Walder. When she joined IDT, Dr. Walder split his own office so she could have her own. The tzedakah was theirs.

“Whenever he made a trip to the IDT Iowa branch,” remembers his son Moshe Chaim, “he would return for Shabbos and say he first had to stop at the local flower store to buy flowers for his ‘precious meideleh.’ ”

When it came to his scientific advancements, Dr. Walder’s number one priority was using the proceeds to support the Jewish community — through both his own innovative projects and his contributions to others’. It was never about how much he could make, but how much he could give. He’d pledge significant contributions in advance, as though he were saying to Hashem, “I am making myself into a kli to give, fill me up so I can do it!”

At the levayah, Moshe Chaim recalls a powerful line from Rabbi Gadi Levy: “The Walders donated most of what they earned.”

With such a “lishmah” motor powering the company, it is no coincidence that over the next two decades, IDT blossomed into the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality, custom synthetic DNA (known as oligos). Today, this product has become an essential tool in genetic research and finding cures for diseases, a testament to Dr. Walder’s pioneering efforts.

In 2018, the Walders decided to sell IDT. The sale’s proceeds were used to establish the Walder Foundation — which supports Jewish life, science innovation, the performing arts, migration and immigrant communities, and environmental sustainability, among other causes.

“Wherever I go,” says Moshe Chaim, “when people realize who my father is, they beam with praise and tell me how lucky I am to be his son. Mordechai, my sister Kathryn, and I feel so blessed to have been raised in the home of someone so incredible. I now live in Yerushalayim with my wife and children, and I hope to raise them to remember their grandfather by following the lessons that he embodied for the world.”

Those lessons can be distilled into four main categories: humility, chesed, attention, and emunah. Dr. Yosef Walder parlayed those lessons into a life of accomplishment.