THE PORTICO AND THE FOUNDATION

An appreciation, written on the occasion of the Park East Synagogue – Chabad of the Upper East Side partnership New York — August 2026 I. An Introduction, and a Disclosure There is a particular species of financier who is almost invisible in the popular imagination and almost indispensable to the functioning of the American banking system. He does not run a household-name fund. He does not appear on television. He does not, in the case of the subject of this essay, appear to maintain a corporate website. And yet, across four decades, he has been present — usually as an organizer, frequently as an architect — at several of the moments when private capital was called upon to absorb the wreckage of a banking crisis and turn it back into a functioning institution. I met Les Lieberman for the first time this week, at a gathering of Harvard young professionals hosted in the orbit of Park East Synagogue: name tags, a few speeches, the pleasant collision of people in their twenties and thirties trying to work out what a Jewish professional life in New York is supposed to look like. What was remarkable was that the man circulating among us — asking what we did, what we wanted to do, and, with real interest, what we were reading — turned out to be the president of one of the oldest congregations in the city, the founding organizer of a bank holding company that consolidated eight failed Florida institutions into a $2.9 billion exit, and the executive chairman of a newly chartered vehicle built to do it again on a national scale. He did not mention any of that. This essay attempts to fill in what he was too gracious to say. A note on method: everything factual here is drawn from the public record — SEC proxy filings, OCC approvals, trade press, and the official announcements of Park East Synagogue. The passages of appreciation are my own, and are offered as such. II. The Making of a Specialist From the audit room to the takeover desk Lieberman’s career begins, unglamorously and revealingly, in accountancy. Before he was a merchant banker he was a Certified Public Accountant at Main Hurdman, one of the mid-century firms later folded into what is now KPMG. This is not a footnote; it is the load-bearing beam of everything that follows. A bank is, at bottom, a balance sheet with a charter attached, and the person who can read the loan tape, price the reserve, and see where the credit marks are wrong holds an advantage no amount of deal charisma substitutes for. He learned to read financial statements before he learned to negotiate over them. His education followed a similar logic: a Bachelor of Arts from Franklin and Marshall College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania — a liberal arts foundation followed by the most quantitatively rigorous finance faculty in the country. From 1985 to 1989 he headed the Financial Services Mergers and Acquisitions Group at Drexel Burnham Lambert