My Father, Sidney Spiegelman, Z"L, 3 Years

Sidney Spiegelman, Z"L, 1920-2016, United States Navy World War Two

You could say that in my father's death he did me a favor. He passed away just a few days before Passover, just as I was about to really clean and get the house ready for Pesach. It was also a year I had thought would never happen again. We were to host the Passover Seder for two of our (then) unmarried kids. They had requested a "quiet" Seder "without strange strangers."

I'm a terrible housekeeper; the Pesach cleaning is always very stressful for me.  And I had thought that I'd retired from Seder hosting, since our daughter now hosts the big family one every two years, and we've been going to others as guests on the alternate years.

Once I got the news that my father had died, from the complications of "old age," my halachic, Jewish Law status changed. Since I wasn't going to travel to New York for the funeral, which would only be three days later, also leaving no time for more than a bare minimum shiva, Jewish ritual mourning period, of less than an hour, my status as a morner began almost immediately.

As a mourner, I was forbidden to clean, cook etc. My children and husband had to make time to take over all responsibilities for Passover and the Seder. All the food we had already bought for the Seder was sent to my married daughter, who suddenly became the expert in preparing Gefilte Fish. I wasn't supposed to even peek into the kitchen to give orders.

My father with his brother,
my Uncle George, who had
predeceased him.

My father with his brother,
my mother, who had
predeceased him.

My father was blessed with a long life, even though he wasn't all that happy being the very last of his generation. His brother and sister had both died before him, as did my mother. He missed them all.

During World War Two, my father served in the United States Navy, being a pioneer in the use of radar. He discovered that a lot of his training had been riddled with inaccurate presumptions. A gifted "problem solver," his analysis and solutions were crucial to the success of radar in the Pacific against Japan.

After the war, he found my mother, whom he had first met before going overseas, and married her. When they were first married, they lived in Brooklyn, NY, where they had both been born. When I, their firstborn, was an infant we moved to Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY, where my brother and sister were born. In late summer, 1962, we moved to Great Neck, NY. My father worked as an accountant, adding CPA to his qualifications. After starting his career in the State Insurance Fund, he began a private practice on the side, eventually only working for himself.

Family, friends and work were my father's life; he had no hobbies.

Later on my father suffered a form of dementia that affected his ability to care for himself, but left him very social and fascinating. At one point, due to my mother's condition, she could no longer care for him, and we brought my father to Israel to live with us. My father enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, niece and other family members. Here in Shiloh, my father made a lot of friends, and we had hoped that my mother would join him in Israel, but it didn't work out. Instead, my sister cleared the house for sale and moved my mother to Arizona, near her. We brought my father to join her. 

That's why they both died in Arizona, but they're buried in New York, in the burial plot of Oakland Jewish Center, of which they were among the founders. Both my parents stayed New Yorkers in their minds and hearts. One of the standard questions asked to check dementia is:

"Where do you live?"

My parents would answer "New York," even after being moved to Arizona. That answer to me was not due to dementia. I have no doubt that they were totally accurate. They were just visiting Arizona until they were to be returned to New York, buried among their old friends. 

לעילוי נשמתו

אלכסנדר זיסקין בן צבי הירש

בן דוד יוסף 

בן אלכסנדר זיסקין

Succot Now and Way Back When, Memories

Here's a collage of this year's succah decorations. We've had our own family succah all but two years we've been married, though neither my husband nor I grew up with a succah.

I remember that our Oakland Jewish Center, Bayside, NY, Hebrew School had us "decorate" or enter a succah before the holiday. There was a major "disconnect" concerning Succot, because it wasn't a holiday we really celebrated. School in our very Jewish neighborhood was cancelled on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but not Succot. I do have some memories of visiting the Rabbi's home and seeing a decorated hut by their house, since my aunt was a close personal friend of Rabbi and Mrs. Issacson. But until I began becoming religious in high school, after we had moved to Great Neck, Succot Holiday and the sukkot huts weren't part of my Jewish Life.

My husband's family was more traditional, but they lived in an apartment, so the succah was just whatever the shul had built.

Our first year married and in Israel, we lived in the Maon Betar in Jerusalem's Old City. We didn't have a succah, but we carried our main meal to the Bnai Akiva succah, which wasn't all that far away. The following year, we were in our very own apartment in Bayit Vegan, which actually had two balconies suitable for a kosher succah.

The first years we used the one off of our bedroom. A  close friend met my husband in Machane Yehuda and helped him buy all the equipment needed. Then she came over to help assemble it. We didn't even have enough chairs for all the guests we had invited. I don't know how we fit everyone into the succah for the meals, but we did.

When we planned our Shiloh home, a 2x5 merpeset seemed nice and big, but now, bli eyin haraa, we can't fit the entire family inside the succah, unless we just stand sans table. Or we can have a small table as buffet and stand around it eating. The kids decided that they're coming over for lunch before Simchat Torah, a time when we can eat indoors.

Now I'm looking forward to the holiday and wonder when the rains will start.

ושמחת בחגך

Have a Wonderful Joyous Succot Holiday

"No Holocaust Story" is a Story

I grew up without knowing anything about the Holocaust or the term "survivors." This was the 1950s in New York. From the time I was a few months old my parents and I lived in a brand new garden apartment development/community for veterans, Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY. Our parents were all pretty much the same, Jewish (well over 90%), white born/raised in a poorer neighborhood of New York and determined to give their children a better childhood than they had.

Our parents had survived the Great Depression with difficulty, and if our fathers had suffered fighting in World War Two, most of us never knew about it. Children of the 1950s were protected from awful realities. Disney reigned, and we were supposed to "live happily ever after."

Most of our mothers considered that their job; they were home raising us. Our parents were 100% American and didn't have foreign accents. Only our elderly grandparents had accents. They had come from somewhere in Europe to America, the Land of Opportunity. I didn't know more than that.

It seemed in my childhood perspective that we were all the same. The only real difference was that my father had aunts, uncles and cousins, while my mother had none. Only much later on, when I was already a grandmother did I fully discover that not only had most of his parents' siblings made it to New York, but so did his grandparents.

I only became aware that there had been Nazis, a Holocaust etc from the news, television and maybe a bit from Oakland Jewish Center Hebrew School. I was in Elementary School when The Diary of Anna Frank came out and Adolf Eichmann was captured and tried.

I never felt connected to any of the Holocaust stories or history. It happened to others, not my family, just like the Spanish Inquisition.  It took many decades for me to realize that my lack of a personal family story is the Holocaust story personified.

My mother's parents had to have come from families before they got on those boats to New York. They certainly didn't sprout from laboratories. Over the years when I had tried to discuss this with my mother, it became very clear that she, too, was in the dark about her parents' histories. Being the eighth out of nine of a very poor his, hers and theirs family, she was raised more by her elder siblings than her elderly and tired parents who were busy trying to scratch out a minimal survival in Brooklyn.

To personalize Holocaust Memorial Day, I'll just write a bit about what I know of my grandmother's family.  I have only the vaguest memories of my maternal grandmother, Ida Vishnefsky Finkelstein Shankman. She died just before my third birthday. Until my mother was close to fifty and already had two grandchildren, she thought that her mother was the only one of the family that escaped Europe. Only by chance did one of her elder half-sisters mention that they had an uncle and cousins in London, but the one sister who knew more and had corresponded when young, had already passed away.

My two older "half aunts" then brainstormed trying to remember what they could of their mother's history and information about the uncle who went to live in London. They put together what they could remember and sent it to HIAS. A cousin read it and via HIAS contacted them.

We are descended from the Vishnefsky's of Rogotshov, Belarus. Apparently the family was relatively successful. They were musical and someone was a barber/doctor. I don't know their first names. One son moved to London, Harry who changed his name to Marks and worked as a carpenter.

My grandmother, Ida (Chaya Raisia) married a Finkelstein and had a daughter while still in Europe. Her husband went to New York, and she followed a bit later, first visiting her brother in London. When they reunited in New York, she had two more daughters before her husband took sick and died. A poor widow with three young children she married my grandfather Abraham Shankman a widower with two sons. Together they had four more children, including my mother. None of my grandmother's relatives ever made it to America as far as her children knew. They must have been killed in the Holocaust or by Stalin just after the war. So, I too have a Holocaust story.

Rosh Hashanah Memories and Prayers

• What is Rosh Hashanah for you?
• What are your favorite and first memories of Rosh Hashanah?

My very first memories of, what must have been, Rosh Hashanah were of being in a great big tent with my father. The tent was set up, according to my memory, in a parking lot in Windsor Park, the garden apartment complex just west of Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, New York, where we lived from the time I was an infant until the summer I was thirteen. I had to have been either two or three years old at the time. I remember that these were Jewish Prayers, and my father stood me on the folding chair. My guess is that I was stood on the chair to hear/see the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah. 

In subsequent years, we went to the newly built Oakland Jewish Center, which was our synagogue until we moved to Great Neck. As I've always understood it, that tent was erected before there was a building by those who founded the shul. In the ten years or so we were members, it expanded a couple of times. In its heydays of the late 1950's and early 1960's it was popular and constantly growing. Later on the the membership began to decline, and it finally closed its doors the summer of 2013. The remaining members joined the Little Neck Jewish Center a few miles to the east. Davka, in the final years we were in Bayside, OJC had a tent in its parking lot for the "Junior Congregation" to pray in on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In those days, our Conservative shul did not permit driving on Shabbat and Jewish Holidays. Also all members lived nearby, within walking distance. Besides the seating, mixed versus separate, there were hardly any differences between the Jewish observances in Conservative and Orthodox synagogues. 

I have strong memories of the shofar being blown. It used to be the dominant sound of Rosh Hashanah for me. But in recent years, I find the prayers, when we all sing/pray together to truly stand out in my mind. 

I've photographed from this very old Rosh Hashanah Machzor- Prayerbook 

Here in my local Shiloh shul, Noam Yonatan, Ramat Shmuel, most of us join in singing/praying loudly. There is no operatic-style chazan demanding his solitary stage. Men and women, sitting separately of course, pray rather vocally, which I love. 

We pray, beg, demand of Gd that we all be inscribed in the BOOK OF LIFE. Yes, there is shouting when we reach that line. We all know how unexpectedly death can Gd for bid come to those young and old. 

And as you can see, we pray in the plural. We pray for all the Jewish people, not just for ourselves and our loved ones. That is also something I truly treasure about Judaism, the plural in our prayers. 

May Gd accept our prayers and forgive our sins.

שנה טובה

גמר חתימה טובה

SHANAH TOVAH

GMAR CHATIMA TOVAH

History- Post World War Two, How Did Entire NY Neighborhoods Become Jewish?

There's an interesting article in the New York Daily News I found in one of my facebook groups, Top of the Court about Growing up in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, New York.  The person who wrote it is younger than I am, and the family name doesn't seem at all familiar. But we did live there in BPG for some of the same time.

My family was among the original residents.  We moved in on the last day of 1949.  I was a baby then.  I guess that day was chosen, because my parents' rental lease for the little basement flat was probably up, and they couldn't afford to pay for another month.  They spent New Year's for 1950 as owners of a small two bedroom co-op garden apartment on the second floor.

I have no real memories of that apartment, because we moved out pretty quickly to an adorable, though tiny two bedroom duplex, which gave us a backdoor to a garden.  It was almost like having a house, because the apartments next to us were of one floor and didn't have backdoors. A few years later we moved again.  This time was to the largest type of apartment in Bell Park Gardens which had three bedrooms on one floor. Ours had an extra few inches, because there was white siding instead of bricks in the front, the living-room wall.

My memories of Bell Park Gardens, which we left in 1962 when I was thirteen were rather idyllic.  It was a community, very homogeneous, lots of young families of similar backgrounds, lots of Jews.  Almost everyone was Jewish.  At least one of the couple had to be a veteran of the American Armed Forces, army, navy etc. Our parents didn't have accents, but most of our grandparents did.

There were no Holocaust survivor parents I knew of.  It's strange, because I now have friends of my generation who grew up in other New York neighborhoods in which "all the parents were survivors."  They were raised on the tragic family Holocaust stories whether hearing them or the haunted silence of the secrets that were too traumatic to voice.

I only learned of the Holocaust from the media and a bit from Hebrew School (Oakland Jewish Center) when the Diary of Anne Frank was publicized and made into a play then a movie.

First published under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes from 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944) by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam in 1947, it received widespread critical and popular attention on the appearance of its English language translation Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girlby Doubleday & Company (United States) and Valentine Mitchell (United Kingdom) in 1952. Its popularity inspired the 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank by the screenwritersFrances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which they subsequently adapted for the screen for the 1959 movie version. The book is in several lists of the top books of the 20th century.^[1]

Soon after that was the legendary capture of Adolf Eichmann by Israel.  All this World War Two history was new and amazing for me as a young Jew in a such a peaceful and Jewish New York neighborhood.

One thing I've always wondered about is how Bell Park Gardens and the other then  new developments surrounding it had so many Jewish families.  The advertisements recruiting veterans to sign up for inexpensive housing opportunities were certainly published for the entire veteran population. My fathers stories of his service in the United  States Navy were about being the only Jew, or the only Jew not afraid to admit his Jewish identity. My uncle had similar stories.  So how when such a small percentage of American soldiers were Jewish did these veteran housing projects end up so overwhelmingly Jewish?

If you have an answer, please reply in the comments, thanks.

My Mother and Her Judaism

Let's start with the official obituary.

Spiegelman, Shirley

Shirley passed away at age 88 Saturday June 15, 2013, in Tempe, AZ. Born in Brooklyn in 1925, she moved from Great Neck, NY, to Arizona in 2010. Devoted to her family and community, Shirley had a lifelong passion for dance, theater and the arts, making the most of the cultural offerings in New York and wherever she traveled. She put her experienced eye and mind to work for many years as a docent at the Nassau County Museum of Art, on Long Island. She was pre-deceased by her parents and eight brothers and sisters.  She is survived by her adoring husband of 65 years, Sidney, her loving children, Vivian, Hal Thomas Spiegelman and Batya Medad, seven grandchildren, four great grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews. All will treasure her spirited love, beauty, warmth, fairness and good cooking. A service will be held at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 18th, at Sinai Mortuary, 4538 North 16^th Street, Phoenix, AZ. A graveside ceremony will take place at 1:00 p.m. Wednesday June 19^th at the New Montefiore Cemetery, 1180 Wellwood Avenue, West Babylon, NY.

It definitely mentions a host of hobbies, interests and activities, but it leaves out something that was very crucial to her life, Judaism.

 

Like many of her generation in the United States, my mother's parents, who had emigrated from the Ukraine and White Russia to New York before World War One, were Torah observant, kept Shabbat, kashrut, the Jewish Holidays and more.  My grandfather had been a great lover of chazanut, the "artisitic," operatic singing of Jewish Prayers and she would accompany him on Shabbat to the large synagogues to hear the great cantors of that generation, such as Koussevitzky.

As a teenager, she was friends with the kids in her high school who were in Hashomer Hadati, and renewed friendship with a couple whose elderly mother lived in our building in Bayit V'gan, Jerusalem.

My mother was the eighth out of nine children in a poverty-stricken "his, hers and theirs" family.  By the time she was in her teens, her elder siblings were adults and were no longer religious.  She once told me that it was expected that she would follow their lead and she did.

My father, although always a proud Jew, wasn't from a strictly religious home and didn't believe it was important to keep kashrut, Shabbat and Jewish Holidays.  But as a Jew, it was important to him to be a member of a synagogue.  They were founding members of the Oakland Jewish Center, Bayside, NY and then joined the Great Neck Synagogue when we moved.  My mother was always active in the synagogues' Sisterhood and Hebrew School PTA's.  In Great Neck, where they lived for decades, she took an extremely active role, being President of the Sisterhood for many years, helping to organize the "Kiddush," provide food for mourners and ran the gift shop.

When I announced that I was Orthodox, she joined my father in trying to stop me, but later on, when I began college she agreed that I should have my own kosher dishes, so I could come home for visits and eat.  I remember going off with her to a local "five and dime" and buy a slew of pots, pans and dishes for my personal use.  A couple of years later, after I became engaged they got instructions on how to kasher the house.  That made it possible to socialize with the more religious members of the shul and have us over with the kids.

After my sister and I moved my parents to Arizona, they joined a Conservative shul they had liked to frequent during visits to my sister.   My sister has made an effort to take them there whenever possible.

In the New York neighborhoods of their childhood, Judaism was the dominant religion.  It was the culture and the food.

Yes, Succot is a Real Holiday

Robert, of Seraphic Secret, has a great piece of dialogue about Succot:

I was asked to attend a script conference tomorrow, Tuesday morning. I told the producer that it was a Jewish holiday and I couldn't attend.
“Wait, the holidays are over, your Yom Kee-pur just ended, right?”
“Uh, yeah, but now we have Succot, Shemini Atzeret and then Simchat Torah.”
“No disrespect, but you are kidding, tell me you're kidding.”
“Sorry.”
“Let me get back to you.”
An hour later the producer, not Jewish, truly bright, creative and decent, calls back.
“I asked all the Jews in the company and they're drawing a blank.”
“Right. Well, I'm not surprised. Look, lemme send you a few links and then get back to me.”
“Hey, I believe you. Just tell me when we can have our sit-down?”
I suggest a day and time.
“Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“I respect your commitment. I really do. But tell me, how come none of the Jews in the company know what I'm talking about?”

It brings me back to the days when I didn't really know about the holiday. In OJC Hebrew School, they took us to see the funny hut decorated with hanging fruit, and I think I visited the rabbi's home with my aunt who was their friend, but it wasn't a holiday we actually celebrated.

We didn't celebrate Simchat Torah either.

In New York City, at least in my school district in Bayside, the schools were closed for Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, but after that it was business as usual, except in Hebrew School. But since it was the beginning of the school year, it didn't feel like a school vacation.

Shavuot from my childhood is a total blank. We must have learned something about it, but I don't remember anything, not even cheesecake. At least for Purim I have vague memories of hamantashen and a grogger. No, I don't remember hearing the Megillah. And no mishloach manot either.

At least in Israel, even for the non-religious, the Jewish Calendar is the calendar of the country.

Succot are all over. My kids put up ours.

They even hung a picture of their favorite rabbi, "HaRav Tzimmerman."