Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld (1923-2020) brought enormous benefits to his local community in Queens, and the Jewish world at large, and his connection to Yeshiva University ran deep throughout his life. He was a community rabbi and spiritual leader to many. He lived in two distinct worlds—that of "Old World", pre-war Poland, where he was deeply influenced by Chassidic rebbes, and that of modern, post-war America. He worked as a youth director in a New York synagogue and taught at Yeshivah Zichron Moshe in the Bronx.

He was offered a position as rabbi in a large congregation in Worcester, Massachusetts. He turned it down in favor of a new, unheard-of synagogue that barely brought together a minyan in a basement in Kew Gardens Hills, a neighborhood in Queens, much to the bewilderment of the Yeshiva University faculty. From a small core group in 1953, when he assumed the rabbinate, the congregation later named Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, numbered 800 members by 1955. He was heavily involved in the national Orthodox organizations. He was the president of the RCA, the Rabbinical Council of America; president of Yeshiva University’s Rabbinical Alumni association; played many roles in the Young Israel movement; led the Orthodox Union (OU) kashrut division; and served as chairman of Poalei Agudas Yisrael of America.

His local involvement led him to establish the Queens Vaad Harabbonim, or rabbinical council, while owing to his prominence on the national stage he gave the invocation at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas before President Ronald Reagan.