Remembrance of things past: Kleinman version
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Remembrance of things past: Kleinman version

As I just entered the three-quarters-of-a-century mark, I have begun reflecting on my past. Speaking of which, my mother, Miriam, died five years ago, and I will commemorate the centennial of my father Eli’s birth next month.

By any law of probability I shouldn’t be here. I don’t mean today. I mean existentially. My parents were Holocaust survivors, who through grit, guile, and luck survived, while their parents and siblings didn’t.

My father had real luck. He was in a labor camp when three prisoners escaped. As a deterrent for any future attempts, the Germans shot every tenth prisoner. My father was number 9.

My parents were married in Landsberg, Germany, a displaced person camp. Ironically, that’s where Hitler was imprisoned after a failed putsch attempt, where he wrote “Mein Kampf.” My brother Abe was born there. But my parents languished in the camp for four years before they were allowed to enter the United States. I was born here, three months after their arrival.

They arrived penniless, with no prospect of employment. Though they were fluent in Polish, Yiddish, and German, they were illiterate in English.

Years later, I asked my mother why, under those difficult circumstances, they decided to have me. She thought about it for a moment and replied: “You weren’t planned.” But six years after the “accident” they planned and delivered my sister Lillian.

Like other survivors, they found employment and bettered themselves economically. They engaged in upward mobility. In my case, geographically too, as we moved north from the tenements of the Lower East Side to the Bronx.

Beginning in 1959 through college, I lived in Pelham Parkway, a vibrant Jewish neighborhood with half a dozen synagogues, Bronx House, a JCC, two kosher restaurants, kosher butchers, and a Jewish cultural milieu.

Abe and I always had jobs delivering meat and groceries from kosher butchers and supermarkets. We played street games with friends: stoop ball, stickball under the subway trestle, and football on Pelham Parkway, where select trees became first downs. “These were all improvised activities, not planned by parents. Frankly, this instilled in us a sense of greater initiative and spontaneous social interaction.

I had a good singing voice, so I was enrolled in the Oscar Julius choir. Lessons were taught in his penthouse on the Grand Concourse with an elaborately dressed doorman gracing the entrance of the building. My mother took me there by bus and went to the Ascot Theatre nearby to see a movie while I endured the lessons. My mother also took me to the premiere of the movie “Exodus” in 1960 at the Bronx baroque theater named Loew’s Paradise. The great investor and philanthropist Leon Cooperman told me he was an usher at that theater.

When I was 12, I started going to a chasidic shtiebel for Shabbat services, even as my father was the president of the Young Israel of Pelham Parkway. When the rebbe asked what high school I planned to go to, I answered Yeshiva University High School in Washington Heights. He expressed surprise and counseled me to go to a more rightwing yeshiva.

When I discussed this with my father, he said: “I have tolerated your dalliance with the other shul, but I’m paying the tuition, and you’ll be going to YUHS.”

After recounting this to the rebbe, he lambasted my father. After reminding him of the Fifth Commandment, I never returned.

The four years at YUHS, with its dual curriculum and classes ending at 6:15 that entailed taking two buses each way were the most grueling academic experience I encountered, even counting college and graduate school.

For my bar mitzvah, I read my haftorah and led musaf services at the Young Israel. That night the reception was at Clinton Plaza on the Lower East Side. It was like a wedding with an elaborate smorgasbord, a cantorial rendition in the chapel, with the bar mitzvah speech to follow before dinner.

I had written my bar mitzvah speech and committed it to memory. So my parents walked me down the aisle in the chapel to the podium where I was to deliver the speech after the cantorial display. I began with: “Today is a day of double significance.”

Suddenly, my friend’s father flashed a shot from his camera, causing me to forget the entire speech. I hesitated and ended the agony by thanking everyone for coming. I saw the grimace of embarrassment from my parents and brother unfortunately captured in photographs.

Moments later my father persuaded me to sing some “Oscar Julius specials.” I literally sang for my supper. I’ve given hundreds of speeches and lectures since then  but have reflexively avoided flash cameras.

Zachor or remembrance is a key pillar of Judaism. We have Yizkor, the recitation of names of the deceased every Shabbat service, the kiddush honoring the yarzheit of a loved one and the like.

But the most enduring form of memorial is establishing an endowment, when your loved ones are memorialized annually by a program or initiative. After my parents died, Abe, Lillian and I established the Eli and Miriam Kleinman Fund for Jewish Education, housed at the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest. We have sponsored programs highlighting klezmer music with a Polish twist, lectures, and movies. At the JCC last September we funded the movie “Munich,” directed by Steven Spielberg. The director of the JCC’s film festival, Stuart Weinstock, artfully showed the salient highlights of the film, exploring how revenge after a massacre affected the protagonists and resonates with today’s headlines.

I lost my beloved wife, Gail, 15 months ago. My column about her life and good deeds appeared in these pages shortly after her death. She was passionate about Israel and promoting interfaith relations. In conjunction with our shul, Agudath Israel, JTEEN, and the JCRC of the federation, I established the Gail S. Kleinman Endowment for Interfaith Israel Education. The annual income of this fund will  be used to train Jewish junior and senior high school students to talk about their Jewish narratives in front of their non-Jewish peers as part of the civics curriculum. This will inform non-Jews about Judaism, holiday celebrations, the importance of Israel as the Jewish homeland, and the like. In addition to promoting better understanding of Jews, it will instill leadership skills for the participants as they face a hostile college campus. To date, seven students have been recruited for the first cohort, including our granddaughter Marlee.

These endowments will remind the next generation of the heritage left by their ancestors. For me it’s a living legacy for Beth, Brian, Howard, Alicia, Xander, Marlee, and my other relatives and friends.

When he was confronted by doubters of establishing a Jewish homeland, Theodor Herzl proclaimed: “If you will it, it is no dream. “

This motto can also be applied for establishing living legacies or endowments.

If you include bequests and endowments in your will, you can make dreams come true.

I did for my beloved parents and wife.

Max Kleinman of Fairfield was the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest from 1995 to 2014. He is the president of the Fifth Commandment Foundation and consultant for the Jewish Community Legacy Project.

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