Category Archives: Jewish identity

May 11, 2009 · 8:21 am

Shards of Faith, Reassembled

by Van “Zev” Wallach (Stamford, CT)

I wear a chai — the Jewish letter symbolizing life — around my neck. I’ve studied Hebrew and Yiddish, have visited Israel, subscribe to Jewish newspapers, and have been told I look rabbinical. In fact, my great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Schwarz, was the first ordained rabbi in Texas.

Hearing this religious background, you would never imagine my spiritual journey began as a New Testament-reading, hell-fearing member of the First Baptist Church of Mission, Texas. How the heck, so to speak, did that happen? And how did I return to Judaism?

The story began when my mother’s German ancestors moved to Texas in the 1870s, settling in small towns amidst Christians who enjoyed nothing as much as hectoring Jews until they saw the light. My mother married my St. Louis-born father, son of Russian immigrants, in Temple Emanuel in McAllen, Texas. They moved to France, where their union produced two sons.

As in other spheres, the Russians and the Germans couldn’t get along, so my parents divorced and my mother returned to her hometown of Mission, on the Mexican border. My father remarried and moved to New York, and I saw him one weekend in 10 years, a gap lasting from 1962 to 1972.

Shards of Jewishness lodge in my earliest memories. While my mother had no outward interest in any faith, she had bucked the family trend toward intermarriage and then provided, for reasons I cannot fathom, some aspects of a Jewish home. I like to think that a spark of the neshama, or soul, of Rabbi Schwarz remained in her and she unconsciously passed that along.

Once we went to Temple Emanuel, although my brother Cooper and I didn’t like it. Mom taught us the essential Jewish prayer, the Sh’ma. We had a menorah in the house, the Union Prayer Book, and The Wit and Wisdom of the Talmud, printed in the 1920s. Mom kept a bottle of Manischewitz concord grape wine in the refrigerator, forever skewing my taste toward nauseatingly sweet kosher wines.

I remember Mom sobbing when she watched Judgment at Nuremberg on TV. She saved her ketubah, or Jewish wedding contract. But we never had a Shabbat dinner, nor a seder, nor Hanukkah celebrations. An unexplained rift with the Jewish community in nearby McAllen ended almost all contact with other Jews in the area.

Isolated and indifferent to Jewish practice, my mother left religious instruction to our Southern Baptist neighbor, Mrs. D. Her basalt-hard faith reflected the Baptists’ smothering love of and barely concealed disdain for “the Jewish people” to make our family a natural target for intense spiritual cultivation.

Every Sunday, Cooper and I got carted off to the First Baptist, and in the summer we attended Vacation Bible School. My search for identity in an overwhelming non-Jewish world flowed toward Christian belief. From a young age, the hellfire messages of Baptist preachers terrified me into unease, guilt, and finally acquiescence.

I accepted Jesus to relieve the gnawing fear of damnation and was duly baptized on Super Bowl Sunday 1972. That’s also the day the beloved Dallas Cowboys, coached by Mission’s own Christian gentleman, Tom Landry, beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3. Thank you, Lord!

And yet, we remained the town Jews. My mother’s family moved to Mission in 1925; everybody knew who and what we were. Mrs. D called Cooper and me her “Jew-els.” When golf-obsessed Cooper wanted to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, the adult sponsor exclaimed, “Why, Cooper, you can’t join the FCA. You’re a Jew!”

Meanwhile, a kernel of curiosity about our heritage sprouted in me. I listened to a San Antonio radio show, The Christian-Jew Hour, and read literature from the so-called Messianic Jews to try to square the circle of irreconcilable belief systems.

The circle would be broken when Cooper and I finally visited our long-absent father in Manhattan for a week in 1972. A self-employed engineer with WASP pretensions, he attacked my religious beliefs and most aspects of our small-town Texas upbringing, which he loathed. In his ham-handed way, he showed me I didn’t have to be a Baptist. He pried a few fingers from my death grip on the King James Bible.

Doubts, like weeds, cracked the concrete of my faith. Bit by bit, I became disenchanted with Christianity. It felt less organic, more imposed on me. As a high school sophomore I was nervy enough to talk to the rabbi in McAllen, although I could not admit my Baptist background. I even attended Rosh Hashanah services in 1974, my great act of teenage rebellion.

When I told my mother what I was going, she started crying. “Van, I didn’t know you were interested,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think you would understand,” I said. I was 16 years old.

I stopped church but lacked the strength to start going to temple. By 1975 my identity and belief as a Southern Baptist had vanished. My Jewish self-education started as I read books like This is My God by Herman Wouk and Basic Judaism by Milton Steinberg.

I liked what I read about Judaism, the faith’s simplicity and self-acceptance versus the devouring anxiety I felt as a Christian, where I always wondered if I measured up to perfection, whether I really believed. Trust me on this – Jewish guilt is nothing compared to the fears of a doubting evangelical. The last time I ever attended the First Baptist was to get a graduation Bible as a high school senior in 1976.

I first met Jews outside my family as a freshman at Princeton University. I checked out Hillel activities during Freshman Week and signed up for Hillel classes. But while I had left the Baptists, they hadn’t left me. My heritage dogged me, along with my utter lack of familiarity with Jewish practice and culture (getting the jokes in Annie Hall doesn’t count).

I had never attended Hebrew school, never lit Hanukkah candles, never had a Shabbat dinner, never attended a Passover seder. The Jews at Princeton seemed so East Coast smart and at ease, even jaded, in their faith. I felt shame at my ignorance. Book learning could not replace the experiential void. I yearned to know and be accepted, but I had no way to do that. Like the simple son at the seder, I did not know to ask.

I thought about unburdening myself to the Hillel rabbi, but he intimidated me. Indeed, I feared all Jewish authority figures as echoes of my father who would mock rather than understand me. Christianity remained my cross to bear. While my former beliefs held no appeal, I could not find a niche in Princeton’s Jewish life.

Jewish holidays passed in silence. Nobody invited me home for seders. Had I been more involved in Hillel, able to say those three hardest little words — “I need help” — then maybe I would have been welcome somewhere. I never asked, and nobody ever answered.

That changed in my senior year when classmates Marc and Steve invited me to join their families in Brooklyn and the Bronx for Passover. These friends helped me take my first steps in living a Jewish life. They both did great mitzvot — good deeds — and I will always be grateful to Marc and Steve and their parents for welcoming the stranger in their midst.

The pace of Jewish exploration quickened after I moved to Brooklyn a week after I graduated from Princeton. Synagogue-hopping became my weekend obsession, as I sought to expand my Jewish experiences. I sampled everything from Reform to the Flatbush Minyan and for a while attended the beginners’ services at the orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue. But I could never talk about the past. I arrived at services eager and anxious, and seemingly from nowhere.

How deeply that past remained embedded in me soon became obvious. I had met a woman, Beth, who was Jewish, jolly, and from Long Island. She invited me to join carolers bringing holiday cheer to Brooklyn. I reluctantly agreed and we gathered one Saturday.

Was the first song “Jingle Bells”? I don’t remember. What I do recall is a sudden choking feeling. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I realized, I can’t do this. The songs all had meanings and childhood associations far beyond secular celebration.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave,” I told Beth as I hurried away.

I called her later to explain. While Beth saw the songs from a distance, to me they reflected a faith I had been raised in, an affirmation of the birth of the Savior. To this day I do not sing or listen to holiday music — whether the topic is Jesus, a white Christmas, or Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.

I finally settled on the conservative Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn as my shul. I still recall my first Saturday morning service. I knew so little about Jewish customs that I recoiled and shook my head when a man offered me the honor of an aliyah during the Torah reading.

During an aliyah, you read prayers in Hebrew before and after parts of the weekly recitation from the Jewish Bible. I had no idea what to do, and I declined. Who was I to deserve this? What if I screwed up?

I had reached an impasse. Spiritually, I was at ease in Jewish beliefs and had no desire to go backward, but I saw no way forward without ‘fessing up to my ignorance and what I viewed as my twisted background. I finally decided to speak with Kane Street’s rabbi, a man I immensely liked. In this Jewish version of a confessional, I came clean – about my parents, the Baptist beliefs, the unguided drift from Christianity to Judaism, my sense of shame at what I had been.

To my surprise and delight, the rabbi was not the least bit shocked. It turned out I wasn’t the first Jew to lack a bar mitzvah or an enriching Jewish upbringing. Imagine that. Our conversation marked my fresh start as a Jew. As the Baptists would say, I got right with God. I felt relief that I had faced the facts of the past and didn’t get laughed at.

Over the last 25 years, I have built my version of a Jewish life. I have studied Hebrew and feel, if not fluent, then more aware of what’s happening during services. I was married at the Kane Street Synagogue in 1989 by a new rabbi, a woman I like to call “Rebbe Debbie.”

Since my divorce in 2003, I have dated only Jewish women, who I find intelligent, passionate, and adorable. The rhythms of Judaism seeped into me, so that I transferred the emotional response I had to Christian prayers and music to Jewish liturgy that I have heard hundreds of times – Aleiynu, Adon Olam, Yedid Nefesh, Ain Keloheynu, Kaddish and Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva.

My adult experiences are catching up to the intellectual leap I made as a teenager. I gave myself the Hebrew name “Zev” (wolf) to use when I have an aliyah, an act that rattles me only slightly now.

While I’ve made peace with my past and current beliefs, I am still aware of the split in my life. My Jewish friends remember childhood seders; I colored Easter eggs. They played with dreydls; I decorated Christmas trees. They hated Hebrew school; I liked Vacation Bible School. My childhood and adult sides are mostly separate.

The chasm yawned whenever I returned to Mission and visited with Mrs. D. My break with the past saddened her. “Could you ever believe the way you used to?” she once asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m happy with what I am now.”

But some shards of faith bridge the distance of decades. I have the family menorah and the Union Prayer Book from Mission, and books that mention that hardy Prussian on the prairie, Rabbi Schwarz.

The chai around my neck? Mom gave that treasure to me for Hanukkah 1979, four years before she died of cancer. While a Baptist preacher presided over my mother’s funeral in 1984 and she was cremated, her older sister Charlotte, a fervent Baptist, placed Mom’s tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Gonzales, Texas, next to their parents’ graves.

Whenever I’m in McAllen, I attend services at Temple Emanuel – where I feel most welcome. And I still say the Sh’ma every night, the way my mother taught me.

Van “Zev” Wallach is a writer based in Stamford, Connecticut. A native of Mission, Texas, he holds an economics degree from Princeton University. Van writes frequently on religion, politics and other matters. His interests include travel, digital photography, world music and blogging, which he does at Kesher Talk http://keshertalk.com/, where this piece originally appeared.

“Shards of Faith, Reassembled” is reprinted with permission of the author.

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May 4, 2009 · 8:31 am

A Ger in Gan Eden

by Pat Alder (New Paltz, NY)

What a long, strange trip this has been for me.

I suppose you don’t know many Jews born in a Catholic hospital, do you?  Allow me to explain. I converted to Judaism in 2003 at age 47, but I had been a “practicing” Jew for thirty-three years prior to that day.  Do the math.

I can trace the beginning–the first time that I felt the pintele Yid–to when I was a kid exploring my neighborhood of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, on an old bicycle with hard rubber wheels. (At least I never worried about a flat tire.)

One Saturday morning I heard an intriguing sound coming from a small house with a kelly green fence surrounding the small parcel of land.

Transfixed, I stood alongside the fence, listening, delighted, and, like a tuning fork, my being resonated with the singing that floated out of the windows toward me.

After a while men in black hats and suits poured out of the little house talking and wishing each other something that sounded close to ” Goott Shabbis.”

When I told my parents, who were good Catholics, they thought it was time that I learned about my own religion and sent me to Catholic school where I proceeded to be the gadfly in Sister Mary Linus’ class.

“Okay, if Jesus could convert wine to water, why could He not have prevented His death? He didn’t know what was coming?”

I was six years old.

Once I was whacked with a ruler for forgetting some aspect of dogma, and I grabbed the ruler–my fiery Irish Latin temper ablaze–and smacked the sister back.

My parents were called in to speak to the Mother Superior, and, shortly afterward, my full-time religious school training was over, except for Wednesday afternoon classes for Catholics attending public school.

My friends in public school were few, but mainly Jewish. I asked questions, many questions, of them, and–wow!–they answered me.

The more I read, inquired and observed, the more I felt the pintele Yid inside me and saw myself as Jewish.

I’ve heard it said that people who feel Jewish–but who are not born Jewish–possess a Jewish soul.

I wasn’t Catholic. But was I Jewish?

All I knew then was that the most basic tenets of Judaism made more sense to me than the whole of Catholicism.

Fast forward twenty-three years to my first marriage to a Reform Jew.

I began the conversion process and took the classes. But the day we were married, we moved from New York to Vermont where my new husband had a new job at a radio station.

Although he was supportive of my goal, our marriage fell apart after four years. Despite this setback, I continued on my quest to become Jewish.

Twenty years later I found myself back in the Hudson Valley area of New York. I knew no one and was too busy at work to make friends. In desperation one night I prayed:  “If you know of one person…one good person here. . . let me know.”

Unbeknownst to me, a good person was nearby. His name was Chuck, and he was my managing supervisor at work. We were on chatting terms. He knew I was Jewish, but only I knew that I was Jewish in spirit. It was the High Holy Days. He told me of a temple he attended and invited me to come along to Yom Kippur services.

Yom Kippur morning. It had been sixteen years since I was last inside a synagogue, and I was nervous. Chuck spotted me and waved me over to join him. At first the prayers were unfamiliar, and Chuck was giving me a play by play of the service itself. I hummed where I needed to, bowed where I needed to, and generally followed my friend.

Soon after the holidays, I began to attend shul regularly. I got to know the rabbi and many of the families. After one service I went over to the rabbi and asked if there were conversion classes and  told him of the incomplete one I had started and now wanted to finish.

He was delighted to hear I wanted to do this and told me the classes were on Tuesday nights, which was fine at first, but then I began a new job and continued studying as a “distance learner,” calling, e-mailing, and meeting with the rabbi so he could monitor my progress and answer my many questions.

Some of my questions were answered, and some were “chok,” which means “There is no conclusive answer, but one accepts it on faith.”

Now that was an answer I could live with, even if it didn’t answer the question directly.

I studied for a year, observing all the holidays, learning Hebrew.

Hebrew. That was the most difficult part. But I had a very patient teacher in Naomi. Eventually, I could read the letters and slowly make out the words. My proudest moment was driving back from Monroe and being able to read a sign written in Hebrew. “Hey! I know those letters!!”

But what did it say? I didn’t know. I think that’s how Hebrew is taught.  Learn the words first, we’ll get to what they mean later on. G-d knows what you are saying. (This approach reminds me of the story about a man who prays by repeating all the letters again and again without forming any words: “I give G-d the letters,” he says, “and G-d will know what I am saying.”)

A year. The holidays flew by, month by month.  I said Kaddish for my father, lit the Shabbat candles, observed Havdalah, fasted and feasted. I loved every minute.

It was time. If I was going to complete the process, it was now. I asked the rabbi if it was really time. We talked in his office, and he thought I was ready to go in front of the Bet Din.  But was I truly ready?

Yes.

Nervous? I was panic stricken, despite all the ribbing I got from the rabbi and others.

On the scheduled day, I walked into the rabbi’s office at the stroke of noon and saw, in addition to the rabbi, the cantor and Howard, another person who I knew fairly well. I thought the Bet Din was made up of three rabbis. These were folks I knew!

“You mean…y’all are it?” was my first question.

“Yes.. we… all… are”  was Howard’s reply.

I answered many questions, primarily regarding my Shabbat observances and my belief in Jesus. (I didn’t really have a belief. I said that he was a nice person, but no son of G-d.) I left thinking: “I don’t know… I hope that was okay.” I felt drained, tired, although I had spent less than an hour answering their questions.

The Purim services later that night went well. Most of the congregation liked the Purimshpiel where I told jokes a la Bob Hope. After the service, the rabbi grabbed my arm, and, in my surprise, I shot him an annoyed look. He knew in that instant, I needed to know their decision.

“Did I make it?”  I asked.

“Yes, yes you did” the rabbi replied.

I’m Jewish!

Wellllll, not exactly…yet.

“We now need to schedule you for the mikvah,” the rabbi told me, smiling.

A week later, towel in hand, I went into the Orthodox shul where the mikvah was located. A lovely bubbeleh, Claire, took me in hand and showed me around.

My being sans attire in front of her? Well, that was a different story altogether. “Look, it’s not like she hasn’t seen other naked women before you,” I told myself in an effort to calm my jittery nerves.

The mikvah smelled of humidity and pine cleaner and was quite warm. Claire took my towel, and I gradually immersed myself into the warm, slightly fizzy water.

The three men who formed the Bet Din stood on the other side of the door, yelling. ” Okay! Now dip three times into the water.”

Claire was there to make sure I dipped myself completely and, indeed, performed the mitzvah.

But I’m a rather overweight woman, and, for those science buffs reading this, a quick fact: Fat floats. I couldn’t immerse under the water for the life of me. Like a champagne cork, I bobbed to the surface.

Finally, I felt my body go below the water’s surface. Then twice more…and, finally, the blessing, which the rabbi said in Hebrew and I repeated after him.

The words, when translated into English, mean, “Blessed are You, King of the world, Who has made us holy with Your commandments and commanded us concerning the immersion.”

Once the immersion was completed, I was asked to say the “Shema,” and I said the first line loudly, proudly, and with thirty-three years of suddenly freed passion. Then I repeated the rest of the prayer after the rabbi.

As soon as I finished saying the words, I heard the three witnesses singing “Mazel tov and siman tov” and clapping along with the melody. Claire was singing and clapping as well.

Then it was over, and I was official, even though the paperwork had to be filed, and I still needed to choose a name.

I was Jewish…really, really Jewish.

“Welcome to the tribe!” is the greeting I get once I tell other Jews of my conversion.

And I must say I don’t think I could have fallen–or should I say “dipped”–into a better tribe of people.

Pat Alder, a comedienne, writer, and occasional background actress, has appeared at Stand Up New York, the Improv in Los Angeles, the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, and at many other clubs and Jewish Community Centers nationwide.

The author/performer of the one woman show, Man! What a Life! and a contributor to the online comedy magazine Shtick!, she was the last person seen on NBC’s short lived comedy series Cold Feet  (1999) and refuses to accept blame for its cancellation.

Pat performs comedy in NYC when she can, continues to work as an actress, and writes every day, usually in her time sheet at her day job.

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April 27, 2009 · 8:18 am

Now What?

by Ellie Sugarman (Sarasota, FL)

The many hours, weeks and months that I’ve spent learning Hebrew are almost over.

I will become a bat mitzvah on May 9th, 2009 at Temple Sinai in Sarasota.  My family and friends are planning to attend.

It’s been a challenge to learn not only how to read directly from the Torah, with its minuscule print, but having to learn how any mark under or above each letter alters its sound.

The unique markings above or below the letters, or at the side of a consonant, tell you whether to hold or repeat the sound.  Certain markings will tell you to sound more than one consonant together.  These marks are called the “trope, ” and they help listeners know when a new thought begins and ends.

So, I had to learn not only how to chant the letters which make up each word, but how to stress or elongate the syllables.

All this is not very easy, especially for someone my age!

It’s common for children of thirteen to become a bar or bat mitzvah.  But occasionally an older individual who never had a bar or bat mitzvah dreams of a ceremony of his or her own.

For me, becoming a bat mitzvah became a goal after I found myself as a widow after fifty-nine years of a good marriage. It was very unsettling.  I needed to feel rooted again.

Perhaps I am unique in this need, but I felt learning about my Jewish heritage would offer me solace and well-being. I felt I was on the right path.  I felt sturdier and protected.

It was when some dear friends invited me to welcome the Sabbath over the course of many Friday evenings that I began to have these “feel good” feelings.

Observing the Sabbath each week at their home, and chanting the blessings for the bread and the wine, allowed me to feel the love and warmth of my hosts.

I hadn’t realized what was happening to me.

Returning to the synagogue was helpful, too, and a Sabbath service that I attended about six months ago at Temple Sinai was especially reassuring.

I was asked to recite one of the prayers before the Torah was read, and I was able to do it well.

Walking back to my seat, I had an epiphany. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

It had been a cloudy, dreary day, but for a minute the sanctuary suddenly appeared so very bright and sunny.  Everything around me was glowing.

I blinked my eyes, and the natural color of the room returned.

If someone were to tell me that they had experienced this, I would have listened but possibly would have challenged the truthfulness of it happening.

I do not doubt my experience.

My motto has always been, “Yes, I can.”

I don’t know what else I will be able to learn or accomplish in the years ahead.  Right now, I’m looking forward to becoming a bat mitzvah.

After that, who knows?

There’s always a trip to the moon!

Ellie Sugarman, a perennial student, will be called to the Torah as a bat mitzvah on May 9, 2009, to read her Torah portion, Emor. She has volunteered at the Women’s  Resource Center for the past seven years and was a docent at the Ringling Museum of Art for more than 15 years.

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April 20, 2009 · 8:11 am

Remembrance

by Nina Gold (Waterville, ME)

On Holocaust Remembrance Day,
Yom Hashoah in Hebrew,
he told her he was human
he understood what it was
to fear long walks, gas, and G-d—
but he felt, too, the hot terror
in the shoulders of a bare-faced teenager
wearing a uniform starched by his mother,
taught to hate, given orders, and handed a gun.

All the while, she was gathering things:
a few shirts, underwear,
sewing jewelry in the hem of her coat, snatching
sacred photographs and stuffing them
into hidden pockets. Just as he finished talking
about how organized religion was the man-made cause
of nearly every war and nearly
everyone’s hatred,
she slipped away and could never reply
that in this case, yes, religion was
inextricably bound to death, to

Those who gave their lives

but Hitler had nationalism in mind.
When she disappeared, his heart
shattered like glass.
He raised their children Jewish.

Nina Gold was raised in Newton, Massachusetts and is currently a student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

She says that she wrote about the Holocaust because she’s interested in young people’s relationship to anti-Semitism.

“Some students I know see anti-Semitism as a real, contemporary issue—something that has a place in their lives—while others consider it foreign or anachronistic. When I hear Jews my age say, ‘I’m not really Jewish,’ or ‘my parents are Jewish, but I’m not anything,’ I sometimes fear we may be our own worst enemies.”

You can read more of her work on her blog: http://minibeastspeaks.blogspot.com

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April 13, 2009 · 8:31 am

My Father, The Jewish Athlete

by Helen Epstein (Lexington, Massachusetts)

When I was growing up in the 1950s, none of my friends’ Dads worked out at a gym, let alone swam laps in a pool. My father did. For nearly two decades between the two world wars, he represented Czechoslovakia in international competitions and two Olympic Games. He also coached and served as a role model for younger Jewish swimmers.

One of three sons of an assimilated Jewish family, Kurt Epstein was born in 1904 in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia. The Epstein boys played at being American cowboys; their parents employed a cook and a nurse, a German tutor and violin teacher.

Sports were an important part of life for Czech children by then– girls and boys, Christians and Jews, children of factory workers as well as children of factory owners learned to swim, skate and row. The Epsteins lived on the Elbe river and, early on, Kurt began to use it.

“Any mood can be improved by a good swim,” my father always said.

But there’s no question that he saw swimming as a response to anti-Semitism. That was one of the reasons he joined his school rowing club, which introduced him to athletic discipline, and its rewards.

Rowing made him an asset to his school and small town and soon Kurt began to think about competitive swimming. He and his friends who swam in the Elbe followed newspaper reports of races in Prague, invested in a stop watch, began to clock their times. Then, they signed up to compete.

According to scholars, Czech Jews, like Jews all over Central Europe, were well-represented among athletes of the 1920s and 1930s. This was largely due to the work of Dr. Max Nordau, who called for a “muscular Judaism” at a Zionist Congress in 1898. Dr. Nordau, a physician and one of Herzl’s earliest supporters, argued that a muscular Jewry had existed in ancient times but over the centuries had been destroyed by ghettoization.

Whether or not Kurt was aware of Nordau’s ideas, he would have been in sympathy with them, and eager to put traditional Jewish stereotypes behind him like most Czech Jews.

In 1924, Kurt took pride in joining the Czechoslovak Army in “It never occurred to me to stay up all night and drink potfuls of coffee like some to try to produce an irregular heartbeat and get a rejection,” he recalled.

He was selected for reserve officers school and posted back to Prague where he played water polo in the Vltava River. Then the Czechoslovak National Swim Club requested that he be furloughed to compete in Barcelona, the first of many competitions he attended from Scandinavia to North Africa.

By the early 1920s water polo was one of the roughest and most popular spectator sports in Europe. It is tempting to ponder the psychology that drew men to such a rough sport. Kurt recalled speculating about it himself whenever his team played against the Hungarians who rarely lost a game.

I once asked why a player was playing so furiously since his team was already winning by two digits. He answered that after the war, each one of Hungary’s neighbors had taken a piece of their land. Therefore it was important at least in sports to score as high as possible.

For my father, the ultimate place to score was at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Whether or not to participate in what would become known as the Nazi Olympics was a hotly debated question throughout the world. The Maccabi ordered all its members to boycott.  A Gallup poll indicated 43% of Americans favored boycott and many athletes refused to participate.

Kurt Epstein decided to go. When asked whether he ever regretted his decision to participate, Kurt always said no. He believed sports occupied a higher plane than politics and described the triumph of “the American Negro runner” as he called Jesse Owens, who defied Aryan notions of racial superiority by winning four golds.

Two years later, Hitler annexed what is now the Czech Republic. Kurt was deported to Terezin, then to Auschwitz, then to a small labor camp called Frydlant. There, the prisoners took turns giving lectures to one another on subjects they loved. My father gave one on the Olympic ideal and the importance of amateur sports. He sometimes gave his sports training, along with luck and friendship, as reasons for his surviving Nazism.

When he returned to Prague after the war, he was elected to the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee. When the Communists took over in 1948, he felt that he would not survive a second totalitarian regime and vowed to get out in time “in a swimsuit if necessary.”

He arrived in New York City in the summer of 1948 where, for a decade, he was unable to find steady employment but where he was soon elected Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World. Eventually, he was accepted into the ILGWU and became a cutter in a clothing factory in New York’s garment district.

He maintained a correspondence with a network of athletes-in-exile –Jewish and non-Jewish — living in Australia, South America, Israel and Europe, read the sports section of the newspaper every day and never lost his belief in the international brotherhood of sports.

He taught his children how to swim, and I still do.

Helen Epstein is the author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From — the first two volumes of a trilogy about the families of Holocaust survivors — and the biography of Joseph Papp, the American Jewish founder of Free Shakespeare in New York City’s Central Park.
Her website is http://www.helenepstein.com.

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April 6, 2009 · 8:59 am

Growing Up Jewish

An Interview with David B. Black (Yardley, PA)

(interviewed by Rick Black)

Port Chester, NY was a small town, especially the Jewish community.

We went to shul on Lake Street, then on Willett Avenue, and in the Jewish Center. In fact, my father was a founding member of the shul on Willett Avenue – Congregation Knesseth Israel at 249 Willett Avenue. A lot of the Orthodox Jews lived between Travis Avenue and Townsend Street but that was a different group, a religious group, and we had nothing to do with them.

Of course, I went to Hebrew school. The rabbi’s name was Winkler. He was the head and he had a son our age who was part of our gang. At Hebrew school, we were not the greatest kids but I remember the one pleasure that we had was when we left Hebrew school, we would go to the Lifesavers building on Main Street, which was a block away, and there they had three big lifesavers in front of the building – peppermint, wintergreen and I don’t know what the other one was, it might have been orange. We used to play king of the hill and we would run up on the hill and try to hold it, and the other kids would grab our coats and rip our buttons off, and my mother would always wonder how I lost all my buttons – but I never told her.

The other thing at the Lifesavers building was on Saturday morning when the football season was in vogue, they would have a fella from our high school team, Baker – who was the star fullback – giving out samples of lifesavers to all of the automobiles that were passing by. Most of them were on their way to the Yale game and, as they would pass the Lifesavers building, he would drop the lifesavers in their car, and we used to chase after the extra samples that fell in the street.

I was bar mitzvahed in a very small shul – the one on Lake Street. We didn’t make much of it. It was just a small bar mitzvah for our family. I davaned Saturday morning for the service, Shacharis and Musaf, and when they took the Torah out of the ark, I had to sing the “Shema” and my voice broke, and a kid from Hebrew school said, “You alright?”

My father was so proud that I’d be able to davan now. My folks gave me a party for all my friends, all the boys, at my house on Washington Street. We had them over and had a lot of fun. I got a lot of fountain pens. I must have gotten six fountain pens and three didn’t work. I remember the best one that I had was Waterman’s, and that was my favorite.

And, of course, I used to caddie and my mother bought me a set of golf clubs when I was bar mitzvah. I used to make a dollar a round plus a twenty five cent tip, and that allowed you to play on Monday at the course. I played golf at the public courses.

* * *

Before the Jewish Center was built, we would play basketball in barns around town. It was hot but we didn’t care. Even though I was thin, I wouldn’t let that stop me from playing a lot of ball. I went to Hebrew school after my regular classes and then I would spend a lot of time at the Jewish Center, playing basketball and working out.

While at the Center, I played a lot of billiards, I learned how to play pool, I played a lot of ping pong and, later on in life, I was doubles champion for Westchester County in ping pong with Irving Walt as my partner. I was taught boxing and hitting the punching bag. I was pretty good at the punching bag. I had a lot of friends and we played a lot and spent a lot of time at the Jewish Center.

We used to have a good time in the gym. In fact, the fella who had the candy machine in the hall never collected any money because all the guys used to bang the machine against the wall and the candy used to come out. We didn’t feel that was stealing. We felt that he didn’t know his business! We used to have a lot of fun. Many days I would bask in the sun on the roof.

We had a basketball team that was not so hot – but it was pretty good. I was a forward. Our coach used to get the games for us in Stamford and Greenwich and White Plains and New Rochelle and Mamaroneck and Mount Vernon. One day we traveled to Staten Island – we got beat so bad. We used to play in Yonkers – they had a very good team. And some of our boys were on the town team that played for the county championship in White Plains. We lost in the last ten seconds – one of our guards threw the ball to one of the other Yonkers players in error and he made a basket and we lost by one point. We had some good times.

While in junior high school, four friends and myself started a club called the Maccabeans, and we were a very active club. We would run beautiful dances. We would decorate the gym with balloons and confetti and hire a band and the whole town would come and pay tribute to the dance that we would put on. We would take the money that we raised and we would donate it to the Jewish Center for some cause – it might be a new standing radio, it might go for someone to go to camp who couldn’t afford it – but it was a good deed for everyone.

We had about 35 or 40 members after we got started and it was the most popular club in the Jewish Center. We were guided by a young lady who was Ethel Goldman and she saw to it that we ran the club in a constitutional way. I was the president of the club for maybe five sessions. They wouldn’t hear of having another president. They liked the way I conducted the meetings.

The dues were ten cents a week for everybody. If they were behind one month, we looked into the fact to find out whether they had the money or didn’t have the money. And if they didn’t have the money, we used to let them stay in anyway. One of my friends, Joel, though, had a friend who was gentile, and said he would like to put him up for membership in the club. It was a question of letting him in or not, and we took a vote, and voted against it. You had to be of the Jewish faith and connected to the Center to get in – that’s what we figured.

One time our club decided to put on a Broadway musical at the Jewish Center and they hired a director to put on “Loose Change” – that was the name of the musical – and I was one of the chorus. I lost 10 pounds by dancing in this show. It was a very good show; it sold out for three nights. But when we came to the dress rehearsal and the production manager was up front and the curtain went up and he raised his arms to start like a conductor, everybody froze. We didn’t get off the first kick.

So, he said, “I don’t understand you. It’s a good thing that we’re having this rehearsal because if this happened tomorrow night, we would be in dire trouble.”

So they put the curtain back and they started again – and this time it was okay. We were very successful with the play; it was a humdinger.

* * *

My Dad knew we had the club and he used to sell a lot of pants in his store, and when he had to have the pants fixed, he would give the pants to be repaired to a special tailor, and one of the tailors was a Russian. He had his wife and children come over to this country when I was about twelve. And my father said, “You know, this young man has no friends here. Why don’t you introduce him to your friends and get him started?”

So, this fella’s name was Max Bregoff and I met him. He was a tough Russian. I introduced him to a lot of my friends who were members of the club and we made him a member of the club, too. We called him the mad Russian. He used to get very angry. He’d spit at them. He was a tough hombre but he found the American way and he was able to live a good life and enjoy himself. He spent a lot of time at the Jewish Center. Yes, he did find the American way and he became a friend.

After I graduated high school, I still played basketball for the Jewish Center. And then we had a very good ball team that used to play before crowds of two, three, four thousand people. We played other teams within the town – the Don Boscoes, the Holy Name Society, the Catholic organizations, the Y.M.C.A. It used to go on for weeks.

One time we took our team to play against Don Bosco, the Italians, and heard ’em say, “Let’s get the Jews.” But I never really had any trouble with anti-Semitism in Port Chester. We played a lot of teams and used to raise a lot of money for the Jewish Center.

David B. Black, 94, is my father. He was the men’s wear merchandise manager for Alexander’s Department Stores for over thirty years until his retirement in 1978. Over the past two years my brother interviewed Dad weekly to gather material for a family memoir, from which this is an excerpt.

Rick Black, my brother, is a prize-winning poet and former journalist who creates hand-crafted books at Turtle Light Press in Highland Park, NJ. You can see his work at http://www.turtlelightpress.com/abouttlp.shtml

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February 9, 2009 · 8:19 am

Digging in the Dirt: Gardens, Blessings, and Tu B’Shevat

By Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

With Tu B’Shevat coming, I’ve been thinking about the holiday–it’s the new year of the trees, the end of winter, the beginning of spring– and about our attachment to the land and its fruits. Living in New York City for the past 25 years, it’s so easy to feel disconnected from the holiday. This year, however, is different. My father has taught me to be a gardener.

Gardening has given me another perspective on produce and how it gets from the ground to the table. I grew up in Connecticut and now live in New York City, where it’s easy to think that vegetables come from the Food Emporium or Fairway, and that they really do grow with that shiny spray stuff on them. It’s easy to forget that produce comes from the dirt.

I’ve never been a nature girl and wanted nothing to do with my father’s garden for many years. But I became interested about two years ago as I watched my father work in his garden and saw the look on his face. My father welcomed me into the garden. He taught me how to smell the soil to see if it is good, how squash should be planted close together in a circle and then thinned out, how cucumbers need to be planted near a fence because their tendrils need to climb, and that parsley can last until January or February if it’s covered at night when the frost hits. We worried about what would happen if there was no rain or too much rain. And many times, we were in the garden speaking to the plants, urging them to grow, or just sitting on the lawn watching the garden, and talking about our amazement at how sometimes in the sunlight it seemed we could see the plants growing.

My father taught me that I had to get my hands in the dirt. He said if I wore gloves I wouldn’t be able to feel it. He showed me how to feel the connection between the earth and me. It took time to get used to that. I was constantly on the lookout for worms, snakes, and bugs, but once I made peace with that fear I couldn’t wait to wake up early in the morning, go to the garden, and see what had happened the previous night.

When I was back home in New York, I would call my father, and we’d discuss how the plants were doing in the garden, especially one small, faltering eggplant in the south corner which we finally agreed we couldn’t save and had to pull out. Even when I wasn’t there, the garden was present in my life.

My father showed me how to hill and weed around the plants as they were growing, and I began to feel like a kid again, covered from head to toe in dirt. I began to re-connect to those experiences of seeing things for the first time. My heart jumped when I saw the seeds push their way up through the soil or when the first purple of an eggplant appeared. I ran screaming into the house when we began harvesting the plants to show my mother the first carrots, the first red tomatoes, and ears of corn. I began to understand why my father was always in his garden, and I wanted to be there too. I enjoyed being in the dirt. I looked for work in the garden. If there wasn’t something to be hilled, weeded or planted, I was disappointed.

Before becoming a gardener, I would recite a bracha over food but it didn’t contain much meaning for me. I could recite the blessing in the morning: “Blessed are you, Sovereign of the Universe, who dresses the naked” because I knit and know the amount of work that goes into making a garment. As I put on my clothes, I could relate to the seriousness and intention of this blessing. I don’t want to recite a blessing in vain, and I think the fact that I couldn’t connect to an experience with the earth made it hard for me to consistently recite the brachot over food.

And then the garden got me thinking about figure eights. The more I gardened, the more I saw and felt the growing process, the more I saw how brachot are related to experience, and how experience is related to brachot and how they are truly inseparable. I understood how brachot and experience constantly flow back and forth, into and out of each other. I think that’s probably what the rabbis had in mind when they created brachot.

My experience with brachot has been enriched because I made the connection that the rabbis were trying to teach. I don’t mean to say that one must have a deep experience in order to recite a bracha. That’s not possible every time, and one doesn’t need have to have my type of direct experience either. I don’t have a spiritual experience every time I recite a bracha. But what I hope for is that a bracha, which is really an acknowledgement and doesn’t need to always be formal, will sustain me, will relate to an experience, and I hope that my experiences will make me want to acknowledge them with brachot.

This year I plan to celebrate Tu B’Shevat at a seder (a kabbalistic invention modeled on the Passover seder) with four cups of wine and different types of fruit. Even though it is winter and I am far from the garden, I know that the experience of reciting brachot at the seder will take me back to the garden and that the garden has brought me to a new understanding of the land, its fruits, blessings, and brachot.

Janet R. Kirchheimer, a poet and teaching fellow at CLAL–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, is the author of How to Spot One of Us, a collection of poems about the Holocaust.

This essay, which previously appeared in e-CLAL, CLAL’s weekly webzine, and in various Jewish newspapers, is reprinted here with the author’s permission

If you’d like to read a sampling of poems from How to Spot One of Us, visit the online magazine, Babel Fruit: http://web.mac.com/renkat/Winter_07/Janet_R._Kirchheimer.html

And if you’d like to learn more about the book, visit: http://www.clal.org/sp137.html.

For more information on Janet, check out the CLAL website: http://www.clal.org/clal_faculty_jrk.html

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February 2, 2009 · 7:49 am

Ask Your Father and He’ll Tell You

By Ruchama King Feuerman (Passaic, NJ)

My father is getting older, weaker. I had been pretending it wasn’t so, ignoring how slowly and consciously he walks to the fridge, how it takes weeks to recover from a cold, how he keeps asking me to repeat what I’m saying because he can’t hear so well. And then there are the new bottles of pills that join the old ones on his night table. I’d been overlooking that.

It’s not that he’s faded completely, not by a long shot. He still has a full head of hair which is pretty amazing for a man his age. He makes astute comments on politics, wry observations about human nature, and knows just the thought-provoking question to ask on the parshah that makes me realize I’m not half as smart as I think I am.

And yet, and yet. While his memory is all there, the vividness of certain memories isn’t. It strikes me as a loss. He is, after all, the repository of the memories of his entire generation. His life was vastly different than mine, and he was there as I began to experience my own life. His life stories shaped mine.  Why should they be lost?

I could kick myself for all the things I didn’t ask my grandparents when they were alive. For instance, my grandmother was always insisting she was related to a famous rabbi. Though we respected our grandmother, for some reason we thought she was exaggerating. Everyone we knew claimed to be related to a famous rabbi. Her last name had been Ziv, which didn’t ring any bells back then. By the time I was older and put together that Ziv and the Alter of Khelm were one and the same family name, my grandmother had already died. I didn’t have enough genealogical information on hand to make a real connection to the Ziv dynasty and I probably never will. Gone. A beautiful piece of family history down the tube. Not to mention the memories she carried with her of a previous generation.

I find as my father ages, I’m seized with urgency. I am hungry for details of his life, the small, seemingly trivial memories that shape a man and his personality–the names of his boyhood friends, the games he played, the after-school jobs he took, the teacher who believed in him, the principal who didn’t. Then there are the big memories that are part of a cultural narrative of what has been called the greatest generation: rationing in World War II, playing marbles at his friend’s house and hearing a radio bulletin announce “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor,” gas and butter rationing during the war, scrap metal collections, having to give up his bedroom every weekend to the Jewish soldiers his parents hosted at their home.

I was so influenced by my father’s memories growing up that I sometimes felt I was right there, observing the single great tragedy of his life, when a car knocked off his ear when he was a young boy. I see him going to school, wearing a bandage on the side of his head because his Depression-era family couldn’t afford to buy him a prosthetic ear. I ask my father everything: how he got kicked out of high school for poor grades only to earn a full merit scholarship a year later to William and Mary College; how twenty-nine relatives all lived in one small house in the 1930s, the whole crew subsisting on Grandpa Sam’s single salary as a tailor; how he became religious in his late twenties and so set in motion a generation’s return to Judaism. I write down everything, and in my father’s retelling of his life, I see an image of Yaakov wrestling with an angel, for just as Yaakov had been maimed and yet emerged stronger, so had my father. I want to know it all, even his failures, the parts where he didn’t vanquish his fears. But not too much failure. It’s hard for a daughter to hear.

They say a photograph is worth a thousand words. We love our photo albums for the memories they hold, but pictures will never capture the who said what to whom and why–the special fragrance of a Pesach cholent, the feel of a Borsalino on a yeshiva bochur’s head, the young daughter who at every Shabbos meal would plan in great detail the kind of wedding she wanted, the certain niggun that made everyone turn pensive. I know now that photos are not nearly enough, that these memories will not carry over unless they are written down.

I search out the details of my father’s life in a way that makes it new to me. He was born in Washington , D.C. and speaks with a Southern accent. As one who found Judaism later in life, he is filled with religious enthusiasm, constantly quoting his rabbi or the Torah in what I call Southern-Israelite speak–he can’t help sounding like a gospel preacher sometimes. His favorite verse from Tehillim is:  “Hashem has granted me joy according to the days he has afflicted me,” and, boy, I see how that verse has played itself out in his years.

He is too weak these days for walks or even to hear details about my children’s life, but he’s never too weak to talk about his own. He gets comfortable on the easy chair. I ask a few questions and he starts speaking. I’m a fast typist (and he speaks more slowly than he used to). I see it’s not the first question I ask that gets him going. It’s the second question, that’s a response to the first. The “Really? And what happened when you said that?” or “Hmm. That sounds pretty terrible.” And he’ll interject, “No, actually it wasn’t,” and he’ll set me straight until I get it all down the way he remembered it and he saw it and knew it. I’m riveted to his words. He doesn’t use any flourishes or metaphors or fancy language. It’s plain, plain, plain, and yet I’m under the spell of a master storyteller. He knows how to pause and make me physically ache for his next phrase. “Nu, so what happened?” I urge. I’m at the edge of my seat. He’s not only telling his story, but my story, too. Because what happened to him is ultimately my story as well. My father’s sense of himself entered me and is part of who I am today, but unless I write it down, my kids won’t understand me, and certainly not him. And every generation must understand the previous one.

At certain points I say, “Dad, did that really happen?” He nods. Uh huh. Or a few times he’ll shake his head, “Don’t put that part in.” I don’t include it, though I can’t understand what he finds so raw or objectionable. Still, they are his memories and he can decide. Sometimes in the middle of speaking he nods off to sleep. I say, “Dad.  Da-a-d?” He gives a start, blinks a few times and says, ‘Where was I?”  “The part where your bubbe was apoplectic because she thought the Irish policeman was going to arrest her,” I prompt. “Oh, that part.” He pauses. “I thought we passed that.” “Nope.” So he obliges and fills me in.

I can hardly believe what he has endured. There have been so many car accidents, aside from the first one. The next accident took place in his early twenties. A car collision threw him fifteen feet from his car and he landed on a huge spread of red ants. Those red ants softened the hard ground and thus, saved his life, but his face blew up afterward like a beach ball. He was laid up in a hospital for six months. There were more accidents that followed and many illnesses. At any point in the year he could walk into a hospital and be admitted. There were financial catastrophes and death struggles to make a living. There were petty betrayals and the deeper disappointments of not fulfilling one’s potential, big mistakes and bad choices. He says it all in a bland voice. He is beyond any requests for pity. It’s like it happened to someone else. Thankfully he rounds it out with the good stuff, the shining moments, the heroism of supporting a family, his religious renaissance, his outrageous chessed and volunteer work and his position as gabbai in shul, the connections he made with people which lifted him to a different plane entirely, the love he instilled into his family. The totality of his life hits me. I type and weep, blow my nose and type some more. He seems surprised to see me cry, and then I can’t help notice a look of gratification on his face. Here at the computer, I am bearing witness to his rich, difficult life.

I’m not alone in this. In the writing workshops I lead, I see more and more people writing about their parents and grandparents. They are more than witnesses. They are creating treasures, word heirlooms to pass down to the next generation. I’m not telling anyone to write about their parents. It just happens. Cousins get thrown in and great uncles and aunts, and neighbors too. Such stories. The bubbe who sped off on a horse to a different village in her eagerness to make a shidduch. The Munkach Hassid who used his famed humor even at the pits, and how some Jews escaped while the Nazis, y’mach shmam, were literally rolling with laughter. Such stories. Sha’al avicha v’yagecha, zkainecha v’yomru lach. “Ask your father and he’ll tell you what happened….” (Deut. 32:7) Hearing these stories, I feel richer. Even if they aren’t my own parents’ stories, they still feel like mine. I feel the scope of another human being, another Jew. Any Jewish life is an event, a reason to sit up, notice and take notes.

Ruchama King Feuerman is a novelist and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times and numerous publications. This story is reprinted with her permission from her recently published anthology, Everyone’s Got a Story. (www.judaicapress.com/product_info.php?products_id=614 – 65k –)

Feuerman, who lived in Israel for ten years studying and teaching Torah, now resides in Passaic, New Jersey, where for the past fifteen years she has taught writing workshops. She recently was awarded a 2009 Artists’ Fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

To find out more about her upcoming writing workshops, visit: http://www.writetogether.typepad.com/

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January 12, 2009 · 1:20 pm

The School on Bleibtreustrasse

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

In the spring of 1934, a new stage of my life began: I started school.

Because the German school year began in the spring and I had a July birthday, I was six, going on seven, when my mother first walked me the short distance to the public school on Bleibtreustrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

To sweeten the occasion, my mother’s friends, the Winbecks in Hannover, sent a Schultuete, a large cone-shaped bag of candy, for me.  It was a sweet occasion, and I was happily excited over it.

My best friend at the time was Ursula Kurzweg, the daughter of our concierge. Every day we walked together to and from school where our first grade teacher, Herr Klausewitz, an elderly gentleman near retirement, treated us in an easy-going manner and instilled in us the history of Germany during Bismark’s time.

I enjoyed that year for yet another reason.

At recess, when everyone was allowed into the courtyard for “fresh air,” I had the almost daily chance to see my first cousin, Hans Gottschalk, who attended the boys’ school next door to mine. Hans was three years older than me–almost an adult in my eyes–and I had strong feelings of affection for him. He waved to me over the fence whenever he saw me. This not only made me happy but improved my status with the other girls in my class who were impressed that I rated the attention of an older boy. Of course, I never let on that he was my cousin.

The following year, though, things changed considerably at the school on Bleibtreustrasse

A new teacher, Fraeulein Schulz, who walked with a heavy limp, brought in an entirely different atmosphere of strict discipline. I was affected as soon as she noticed that I used my left hand to write the cursive script we were learning. It became her special project to convert me to right handedness. She tried to do this by hitting my left hand with a ruler whenever she saw me writing. I ducked behind the desk of the girl in front of me when it came time to practice writing, but Fraeulein Schulz and her long wooden ruler waited to pounce on me at every chance.

At some point during the school year she adopted a new stance. Obviously she had entered a rejuvenating period in her life by fixating on the persona of Adolf Hitler. She trained us to become part of her new purpose in life. Every morning when she limped into the classroom each of us had to stand at attention, raise our arm and return Fraeulein Schulz’s greeting of “Heil Hitler.” With her big swastika emblem pinned to her bosom, and her arm outstretched in salute, this teacher introduced us to the new world of Nazi Germany.

That year during the Jewish High Holy Days, when all the Jewish girls were absent from school, our teacher instructed the rest of the class to no longer speak to us when we came back. She threatened punishment should anyone disobey her orders.

So, I had no idea why my friend Ursula Kurzweg suddenly ignored me and would no longer walk to and from school with me. Only when I managed to ask why she was mad at me, especially since we hadn’t had a fight, did she reveal Fraeulein Schulz’s command not to be caught speaking to the Jews in class.

I now believe it was during this episode of being ostracized that I first realized I was Jewish. Prior to the second school year, the subject did not touch me, or perhaps I did not think about it. My mother taught me it was wrong to sew or write on Saturdays because it was Shabbes, a day of rest. Other than that, few Jewish holidays were observed in my parents’ home. Even my religious maternal grandfather was part of a very liberal assimilated trend of German Judaism. He and the rest of the family thought of themselves as German citizens who were Jewish, with the emphasis on their nationality.

But the ostracism of Jewish children at school brought to me an awareness that I was different, perhaps less worthy than the others. It started me on a habit of being apologetic for just about everything I did. I certainly did not recognize that the feeling might have been exactly what the Nazi thought-machine hoped to foster. How could I at that age?

By laying down her own personal rules, Fraeulein Schulz did more damage than many a Nuremberg law. In the name of the Third Reich, Fraeulein Schulz inflicted psychic injuries on me and my Jewish classmates for which I blame her to this day. And for which, I trust, she still sizzles in that hot part of the netherworld where she deserves to spend eternity.

It has taken a great part of my life to overcome the demeaning attitude of being Jewish that was laid upon me in grade school.

I feel extremely happy that my grandchildren are free of such negative feelings, are well into their religious experience, and are proud to be Jewish.

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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January 6, 2009 · 9:22 am

An Act of Atonement

By Harriet Kessler (Woodbury Heights, NJ)

We were probably the first girls– Susan Fuld and I–to be bat mitzvahed in all of Rego Park, NY.

It was 1946, and our shul, the Rego Park Jewish Center, was a storefront across from the public library on Booth Street.

I don’t remember the rabbi’s name. And I don’t remember anything about the ceremony. I do recall that Susan and I prepared for and went through the ritual together, and that of all the 12-year-old Jewish girls in P.S. 139, we were the least likely bat mitzvah candidates.

Both of our families were ideologically secular.

Susan’s parents, middle-class intellectuals, were college educated civil servants who read The New York Sun at night. Her father, an accountant, and her mother, a grade-school teacher– Zionists who made aliyah some seven years later when the House Un-American Activities Committee came calling–believed that religion was the opiate of the people.

My parents, a self-taught plastics engineer and a housewife, were labor-oriented high school graduates who read The New York World Telegram and were Workmen’s Circle devotees. In fact, living in Far Rockaway before our move to Rego Park, we could have doubled for the family that ate on Yom Kippur in Woody Allen’s Radio Days.

Despite our parents, Susan and I went to synagogue.

Not that our parents objected. They simply looked at us incredulously when we called for each other and trotted off to children’s services every Saturday, questioning what we found so appealing about spending time in the synagogue.

I dreamed of becoming a writer and a singer, and shul meant stories and music. David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Noah.  Such high drama! I loved the Bible stories because they were exotic and powerful. And I loved the songs–David Melech Yisroel, Hine Ma Tov, Shalom Alecheim, Ein k’Eloheinu–that let me show off my high notes as I sang at the top of my lungs.

Shul also meant celebration. The best was Simchat Torah which I so enjoyed that my mind’s eye often returns to a chubby little girl in a sailor dress and brown oxfords, her black corkscrew curls bouncing as she parades with all of Jewish Rego Park (except for Susan’s parents and mine), dancing down the center aisle of the old Jewish Center.

But if we went to shul despite our parents, we prepared for our bat mitzvah because of them.

For Susan– and it was all her idea–the Jewish rite of passage was intended to help her parents bear the pain inflicted by her older sister.

Dorothea, Susan’s senior by seven years, had married a Catholic boy, graduating from high school and eloping the next day with him before his Army unit left for Europe. Secular or not, her parents were devastated.

I never questioned why Susan’s performance of a ritual that was meaningless to her parents would help matters. But I took her word that becoming a bat mitzvah would assure her folks that they still had one Jewish daughter.

For me, though, the bat mitzvah meant atoning for my father’s sins.

I knew–even at 12–that my father had battled his temper all his life, usually without success except where his family was concerned. When I was eight, for example, we’d moved from Far Rockaway because of his shame following a 3 a.m. arrest. (The police car’s screaming siren had alerted all the neighbors.) His crime? Socking the arresting officer’s brother-in-law in a fit of road rage.

But, more significantly, my dad’s 13th year had come and gone sans bar mitzvah because of his lack of control. Like the young boy in “The Conversion of the Jews,” an early Philip Roth story, my father was the thorn in his heder rebbe’s flesh. Taking nothing on faith, continually interrupting the class with a relentless stream of questions, he eventually provoked the rabbi into striking him with a stick.

Where Philip Roth’s protagonist responded to his rabbi’s blows by screaming, “You don’t hit over God,” running from the schoolroom onto a rooftop, and threatening to jump unless all the Jews converted, my father simply hit the rabbi back–and ended his own Jewish education.

To my young mind, his missing out on a bar mitzvah meant that he wanted for Jewish legitimacy. I decided that he needed validation and that I needed it, too.

Was my father pleased? I don’t remember. Was I less isolated? I don’t recall that either. If I was, the feeling didn’t last.

Looking back, though, the bat mitzvah seems like a milestone in my unending struggle to be a good Jewish-American.

It was my first act of atonement, and, possibly, my most genuine–a touchstone that I return to year after year.

Harriet Kessler, whose first love is short story writing, is longtime editor of The Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey and Attitudes Magazine. You can read her work at www.jewishvoicesnj.org

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