has two younger siblings. His brother, Seth, is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina. His sister, Sharon, is a longtime administrator at Berklee College of Music in Boston. The Bernankes were one of the few Jewish families in Dillon and attended Ohav Shalom, a local synagogue; Bernanke learned Hebrew as a child from his maternal grandfather, Harold Friedman, a professional hazzan (cantor), shochet, and Hebrew teacher. Bernanke's father and uncle owned and managed a drugstore they purchased from Bernanke's paternal grandfather, Jonas Bernanke. Jonas Bernanke was born in Boryslav, Austria-Hungary (today part of Ukraine), on January 23, 1891. He immigrated to the United States from Przemyśl, Poland, and arrived at Ellis Island, aged 30, on June 30, 1921, with his wife Pauline, aged 25. On the ship's manifest, Jonas's occupation is listed as "clerk" and Pauline's as "doctor med". The family moved to Dillon from New York in the 1940s. Bernanke's mother gave up her job as a schoolteacher when her son was born and worked at the family drugstore. Ben Bernanke also worked there sometimes. Young adult As a teenager, Bernanke worked construction on a hospital and waited tables at a restaurant at nearby South of the Border, a roadside attraction, amusement park and fireworks retailer, in near his hometown in Hamer, South Carolina, before leaving for college. To support himself throughout college, he continued to work during the summers at South of the Border. Religion As a teenager in the 1960s, Bernanke helped roll the Torah scrolls in his local synagogue. Although he keeps his beliefs private, his friend Mark Gertler, chairman of New York University's economics department, says they are "embedded in who he (Bernanke) is." Once Bernanke was at Harvard for his freshman year, fellow Dillon native Kenneth Manning took him to Brookline for Rosh Hashanah services. Education Bernanke was educated at East Elementary, J.V. Martin Junior High, and Dillon High School, where he was class valedictorian and played saxophone in the marching band. Since Dillon High School did not offer calculus at the time, Bernanke taught it to himself. Bernanke scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and was a National Merit Scholar. He also was a contestant in the 1965 National Spelling Bee. Bernanke entered Harvard College in 1971, where he lived in Winthrop House, as did the future chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with