Rajinderjit Singh of Upper Brookville, interfaith leader, dies at 86

Rajinderjit Singh, an educator turned interfaith leader, helped found the Long Island Multi-Faith Forum to bridge people of Judeo-Christian, Muslim and her own Sikh faith.

A resident of Upper Brookville since the 1960s, Singh died Monday at the assisted-living facility Sunrise of Glen Cove of natural causes at age 86, said her son, Dr. Harjit Singh, a physician and a professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

“She was a teacher in every aspect of her life,” her son said. “She knew exactly what to do in terms of getting her kids ahead without pushing things on them. She could bring you to the life lessons that she wanted you to take on.”

“She had tons of compassion, a hundred times more than her body weight,” said Arvind Vora, chairman of the 30-year-old Long Island Multi-Faith Forum, of the slight but indefatigable woman. In addition to her work for that group, she was a longtime president of the East and West Association of Sikh Women for World Peace, a founding member of the civil rights and social action organization the Sri Hemkunt Foundation, and a fundraiser for the humanitarian organization CARE, among other efforts.

“She was a very strong woman,” said her daughter, pediatrician Dr. Jasjit Singh-Ahuja, of Irvine, California. “She was widowed at the age of 35 in a place far from where she grew up. There wasn't much of her family here at the time, and she managed to raise two kids by herself. She was very successful at her teaching career, and after she retired, she had a new career as an interfaith leader.”

She was born Rajinderjit Kaur Singh on Dec. 17, 1937, in what was then Rawalpindi, India, before it became part of Pakistan following the first Indo-Pakistani war in 1947. Forced by the Great Partition to move, her family settled in Ambala, India. In the footsteps of her professor father, Raj Singh, as she was known, earned two master’s degrees at Panjab University and married cardiologist Harbans Singh. (The last name Singh is highly common in Sikhism, explained her son.)

She began her teaching career in 1954 at a secondary school in Bhopal, India. In 1960, after she and her husband moved to London, Raj Singh worked as a middle-school teacher. Immigrating to Queens in 1962, she spent two years as a preschool teacher in Long Island City. Following a move to Connecticut and another back to Queens, the family settled in Upper Brookville around 1967.

Singh went on to teach at Bayville Primary School from 1969 to 1995, when her longtime lupus became severe enough that she retired. Her husband had died in 1972.

One of the first Sikhs to move to Long Island, she held prayers in her living room before the first temple was built. She found her new mission after meeting two mothers of Sikh boys who had been teased brutally about their turbans and took their own lives. “The pain I saw on those mothers’ faces just went through me,” she told Newsday in 2003. “I said, ‘I’m going to start an education project to educate people about this.’”

Her decades-long interfaith work became especially important after 9/11, said Vora, “when Muslim people were harassed along with Sikhs, who also wear turbans. People didn't know the difference between Muslim and Sikhs.”

Singh’s many accolades include an Interfaith Visionary honor bestowed by the Temple of Understanding on that United Nations group’s 50th-anniversary celebration in in 2010.

She also earned a Newsday Everyday Hero accolade that she held in very high regard, said her son. “It was up in her house and up in her assisted-living facility. It was one of her favorite framed pieces.”

In addition to her two children, she is survived by younger brothers Amritjit Singh of Austin, Texas, and Inderjit Singh of Princeton, New Jersey; younger sister Janamjit Kohli, of Providence, Rhode Island; and three grandchildren. Her older brother Atamjit and her younger sister Manjit died before her.

A service will be held Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Moloney's Funeral Home in Lake Ronkonkoma, followed by Antim Ardas (Sikh prayers) at the Glen Cove Gurdwara Sahib temple from 2:30 to 5 p.m., and cremation.

Correction: Rajinderjit Singh died at 86. An earlier version of this story had an incorrect age in the headline.