Where What When

To Live and To Die in Israel

More than two years ago, a 99-year-old Baltimore woman became one of the oldest people ever to make aliya to Israel. My mother, Mrs. Gilbert Cummins (a”h), who was known affectionately by friends as Brownie, her real name, died several months later in Israel, but only after G-d’s hand was displayed in a chain of events that even the most extreme non-believer could not chalk up to mere coincidence.

Her aliya ended a 60-year chapter of quiet dedication by her and my father, Mr. Gilbert Cummins, a”h,, towards maintaining and improving Orthodox Jewish life in Baltimore.

“Gil and Brownie,” as my parents were known, built a house 67 years ago on Fallstaff Road. The development at that time comprised three short streets that were surrounded by forest, except for a 40-acre farm that bordered the back yards of the northern side of Fallstaff Road.

The neighborhood comprised well-to-do and generally secular Jews, some of whom maintained nominal ties with Reform temples but brought up their children with a minimal exposure to Judaism. Each of my parents came from a family whose lifestyle of financial and social status relegated Jewish observance to ceremony and left little room for Jewish education.

When my older brother Arnold reached the first grade, it was Mom who insisted that the family join a Reform temple in order to give him some semblance of Judaism. They joined Har Sinai, which at that time was the most extreme Reform congregation and was on the present site of the Rambam school.

A dramatic change in their lives occurred in 1947, when my father’s father died, and with Brownie’s encouragement, he wanted to say Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. The only alternative was to go to a synagogue where daily prayers were said. Dad tried Chizuk Amuno synagogue for a few weeks until the congregation decided to shun Orthodoxy, and so Gil Cummins found himself at Beth Jacob. Befriended by the late Rabbi Uri Miller, my parents remained there, despite friends who said, “We know Gilbert. He never will go Orthodox.”

They were wrong.

My parents began a very slow but sure move towards Judaism and became the “odd couple” of Fallstaff Road. Their steps as baalei teshuva continued even until their last days in life.

At that time, Beth Jacob was the closest synagogue to Fallstaff Road, except for Shearith Israel, which also was known as the German shul or the Glen Avenue shul. Dad, later to be accompanied by my older brother and myself, left his car near the shul every Friday afternoon and made the one-a-half-mile trek back at night, back and forth on Shabbat and back again in the afternoon, rain or shine.

He became active in the synagogue and in the Orthodox Union, helped establish the Baltimore chapter of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, and was the innovator and founder of the Kosher Dining Club at Johns Hopkins University, for which he found contributors, such as the Kolker family. The project later branched out to include all of the local colleges, and it attracted Jews who wanted to meet other Jews, resulting in several marriages.

Mom became active in Hadassah and was a president of the Baltimore chapter and a national vice-president, all the time fighting to maintain kashrus at all Hadassah functions.

Most amazing was their change in lifestyle from one of materialism to the modest life of Orthodoxy that concentrates on Jewish values.

They became interested in Israel in 1960, making their first of many trips there. By the time Dad died, in 1999 at the age of 91, when he was working as an administrator for the restored B’nai Israel shul, my sister Frances and I were living in Israel. Our parents visited us once a year for Pesach but resisted the idea of moving to Israel. Yet in their later years, both of them stated several times that Israel is the only proper place for a Jew.

After our father died, Mom remained in her multi-story Fallstaff Road home, scaling the steps every day. All of that changed on the eve of her 99th birthday, on the last day of 2005. She broke her hip, and it became clear that she would not be able to return to her home without a live-in assistant and major changes in the house, an impractical and emotionally impossible solution.

From that day, “coincidences” followed each other, substantiating the Pirkei Avos adage: “One mitzva leads to another mitzva.” The first coincidence was the timing of a visit I made from Israel, when I just “happened” to arrive while Mom was in the hospital, not knowing of her condition before planning the trip. Within a very short time, she already had recovered from her operation and was in rehabilitation at Levindale. When the staff broke the news that she no longer could live independently, Mom said the only thing she wanted was to see her grandchildren in Israel.

That touched off what must go down in history as the quickest aliya process ever recorded and one that Hashem orchestrated by toppling seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The decision to move to Israel was made in late January, and three weeks later, Mom was on the plane, with 65-years-worth of furniture and belongings having been given away, thrown away, sold, or packed on its way by boat. During the same period, the house was sold.

The biggest obstacle was the clock. Medicare was not prepared to continue paying for rehabilitation after there was no significant improvement in her ability to walk, and Mom was slated to be released in early February, at the latest.

However, there was no way that clearing out the house and selling it and making passport and travel arrangements could be done in a few days. Moving her to an old age home would have been psychologically devastating because she had already undergone excessive trauma. The fear was constant that an old-age home, even for a week, would drain away any desire to exercise and destroy any hope of moving elsewhere.

However, Brownie startled the Levindale staff and began making such remarkable progress that Medicare decided to continue her period of rehabilitation. Nevertheless, arranging her aliya papers and renewing her expired American passport remained overwhelming barriers. The pressure increased as the release date from Levindale approached. The Israeli embassy could not complete the aliya documents, the lift could not be shipped, and the plane ticket could not be ordered without a passport, which we were told would take four days, even if we paid extra to expedite the process.

The clock ticked away, threatening to create a domino effect on the schedule, because none of the lengthy steps could be taken out of order. A phone call to then-Congressman Ben Cardin’s office did wonders. Within several hours, my older brother Arnold was told to be at the Passport Agency in Washington the following morning at 11 a.m. to pick up the passport. With the document in hand, he completed a rush act to the Israeli embassy before the office closed and gathered all of Mom’s aliya papers, which could not have been transferred earlier without the passport. The shliach (immigration agent) later said that never to his knowledge had the documents been approved so quickly.

In the meantime, Arnold and I tore through the attic, two floors, and a basement, going through love letters, 1939 Saturday Evening Posts, and long-playing 33 1/3 records.

If we could not get the lift on the boat right away, it would not get to Israel until after Passover of that year, leaving Mom totally cut off for more than two months from her tangible memories. A sudden “last-minute” change in the sailing date enabled the shipper to load the lift on the boat out of Baltimore just about the same day we feverishly completed packing.

After the movers came to take everything for the lift, including the furniture that was chosen to fit a would-be house in Israel, Arnold kept up contact with a friend and lawyer, Mr. Irv Fishbein, who facilitated the sale of the house with dizzying speed.

The sale had to be expedited in order for Mom to sign the contract, and the entire process, from the decision to sell until the signatures were inscribed, took less than three weeks, a feat that must be one of the fastest Northwest Baltimore real estate transactions in history.

In Israel, Hashem’s guiding hand prevented things from moving too quickly in the wrong direction. Our sister Frances, who lives in the Nevei Aliza neighborhood of Ginot Shomron, had found a nearby house where Mom could live with an assistant. However, she did not want to close the deal without my looking at it, despite my insistence that she rent it right away. I had chosen which furniture to bring based on the layout of the house as she described to me on the phone and via emails.

I returned to Israel for a week and checked out the house. Frances and I conferred and immediately concluded that it was totally unsuitable. A decision was made on the spot that Mom would live temporarily with Frances and her husband Ralph Goldstein.

The most amazing “coincidence” was the return trip to America with my wife Debbie. As a nurse, Debbie was to accompany Mom back to Israel, as she needed professional nursing assistance for the trip. We boarded an Israir flight from Tel Aviv, but when we arrived in New York, the customs agents told Debbie she could not enter the country because her British passport, although it had not expired, did not contain the new bar code that was required since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Following 90 minutes of tension, under the steely guard of very officious and not-so-warm policemen, the agents said they understood our predicament and that since the passport was valid, Debbie could stay in the country. She was fined $65 for the audacity of not knowing that she needed a bar-coded passport, and the airline was fined $3,300!

Had we taken an El Al flight, Debbie would not have been allowed on the flight, because El Al uses a bar-code reader, which Israir did not have (although they must certainly have one today following the stiff fine). Without that slip-up, there would have been no way of bringing Mom to Israel on her scheduled flight, and no place for her to stay after being discharged from Levindale.

The last “coincidence” involved a neighbor, Frank Storch. Arnold and I, with Debbie at hand, had brought Brownie the evening before to the house where she lived for 65 years to say farewell to close friends and to the house. We had packed her luggage and carry-ons and placed them in the car. The dog had already been taken to a kennel. Debbie brought Mom to the back door, when she suddenly held on to the doorposts, saying she was not budging.

Everyone was confounded. Using force would be disrespectful and emotionally harmful and was out of the question. Staying put was obviously a non-starter. The plane was not going to wait for her. Suddenly, Mr. Storch arrived out of nowhere with a banner of the city of Jerusalem and its emblem. That broke the ice, and Mom and Debbie stood at the opening of the door, smiling and holding the banner. Mom made the trip very nicely, and soon after her arrival, Dad was flown to Israel for reburial (The original burial was done with a condition that he be buried in Israel in the future, because that was their stated wish).

After a short time in Israel, it was clear that Mom needed a house for herself and her Filipina aide. In another daring move, which was completed in record-breaking time and against all odds, ground was broken adjacent to our house in Beit Yatir, located in the southern Hevron Hills between Hevron/Kiryat Arba and Arad.

A young neighbor with construction experience agreed to build the two-bedroom addition, with a private entrance, using only Jewish labor. He and his workers invested their heart and soul into the project with high-quality construction, and they finished in a remarkable nine weeks, including foundations and the roof. The success was marked by another series of “coincidences,” which I won’t detail. Suffice it to say that the contractor and suppliers did somersaults to have the house ready ahead of time, or so we thought.

The day before what was to be Mom’s first day in her new house, we invited the children of Beit Yatir to a ceremony to fix the mezuzah on the house. However, Mom suddenly suffered severe stomach pains at a farewell gathering in Ginot Shomron. Hashem had guided her to Israel, where she saw her husband reburied and was able to live for several months with two of her children, and frequently see most of her grandchildren – and, yes, build a house.

Thirty-six hours after her stomach pains began, she died while being treated at a hospital. Beit Yatir’s Rabbi Avi Smotritz said at the burial, “Don’t think for a moment that you missed the boat by not completing the house in time. The opposite is true. Hashem rewards us for our efforts, not for our achievements.”

Our parents, Gil and Brownie Cummins, left behind efforts as well as many achievements. They worked day and night to make the city better for Jews. They fought to improve relations with the non-Jewish population and labored to keep peace with often dissenting streams within the Jewish community, at the same time striving for life according to the Torah. They were true baalei teshuva, and Mom questioned and learned to do more mitzvas and observe more Jewish laws until her last days.

Brownie Cummins died two years ago on the ninth of Tammuz, and Gilbert Cummins died on the 12th of Menachem Av, nine years ago. May their memories be for eternal blessings.

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Article List - July 2008