and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in the history of art and archeology, where he studied with Richard Brilliant, Alfred Frazer, Jerrilynn Dodds, Howard Hibbard, David Rosand, Joseph Connors, George Collins and other professors.
In these roles Gruber has been, in the words of journalist Bill Gladstone, "in the vanguard of an international movement to restore endangered Jewish heritage sites around the world.
[5] In the decade and a half following the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe (1990-2005), Gruber organized and supervised for the World Monuments Fund and the U.S. Commission more than a dozen countrywide surveys of cultural heritage sites of significance to religious and ethnic minorities.
These identified, mostly for the first time, thousands of previously unrecognized and undocumented synagogues, churches, mosques, cemeteries and Holocaust-related sites, almost all of which were visited by survey teams that described their condition.
He is author or editor of numerous articles and survey reports about Jewish monuments,[10] and is a frequent public lecturer in the United States and Europe.
He curated the accompanying exhibition "The Future of Jewish Monuments" at the Joseph Gallery of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
In addition to his work for the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, which he took over from Raina Fehl, Gruber serves on many charitable boards and advisory committees.