Where What When

The Rabbi Neuberger I Saw Part 1

At the shiva house, I mentioned to Rabbi Sheftel Neuberger, that I was thinking of writing something about his father. “Please do so,” he said. “We’d like that very much.” I said, “I am afraid to do so because what I write may not necessarily be politically correct.” To this, Reb Sheftel made two replies: 1)“Nothing you write is politically correct” and 2) “That’s exactly what we want.”

Well, here goes. After having written this essay, I see it is more about me than about Rabbi Neuberger. That is due to the fact that I am writing a personal, even emotional, account of how he impacted me and mine, not some detached “objective” (ha!) evaluation of a third party. What I offer here is not a biography but an angle of vision, sometimes out of focus, perhaps, but sometimes very sharply focused indeed. Like the nearsighted person that I am, I cannot know the Rabbi Neuberger who operated far away, beyond what I could see. But the Rabbi Neuberger who interacted with me and my family, close at hand where I could see – about that person I can indeed write something.

When people used to ask me, “How long have you known Rabbi Neuberger?” I would answer, “Since before I was born.” Although it sounded like a wisecrack, it wasn’t. You see, I am the child of a second marriage, a not uncommon phenomenon for children of Holocaust survivors. My father had a wife and child in Lithuania, who perished in Dachau. My mother had a husband and son in Czechoslovakia. The husband hid in one gentile house, my mother and her newborn son in another. The gentile in the husband’s house informed on him; the gentile in my mother’s house did not. The Germans put the husband into one of those cars where they hooked the exhaust pipe inside, so he was dead before the car went two blocks. Mother and child survived by hiding in various non-Jewish places, including a kind of Protestant monastery, where they had many close brushes with exposure and death (the Gestapo was located in the next room), and where the Christians who were hiding her tried to convince her to convert to save her soul. (They meant well, leshitasam; after all, they did risk their lives to hide her.)

In short, your typical average Holocaust story.

Baltimore was full of such people when I was a kid. Each one had a story that could be turned into a book or movie, but there were so many that they lost value due to “inflation” – a bizarre application of the law of supply and demand. Besides, people, Americans, including frum Jews, felt uncomfortable with the entire subject of the Holocaust, and they did not want to hear about it, certainly not from survivors. A lot of it had to do with the unexpressed, and perhaps suppressed, guilt which thinking American Jews felt, a sense of guilt that was entirely justified; after all, when all was said and done, American Jews failed their fellow Jews in Europe miserably. We all know that. And American Jews, including those who lived in Baltimore, did not want to be reminded of that.

Well, in my case, my mother was stuck in communist Czechoslovakia until the end of 1949, when she came to the U.S. and lived for a year or so with a brother in Minneapolis: a nice enough city, but no bastion of Yiddishkeit, certainly not in those years. My mother had another brother in Baltimore, and he nudged her and her child to move in with him and his family until she agreed and did so. That was quite uncommon, but you know how hashgacha (divine providence) works.

Anyway, she arrived in Baltimore and was directed by her brother to enroll her son in a school called TA. So within days of her arrival, she found herself in the office of the “Executive Director” (don’t you love those titles?), the late Rabbi Heiman. It turned out that Rabbi Heiman had been a shul rabbi in Minneapolis and knew my mother’s brother there very well. To my mother’s anxious question about tuition and money, Rabbi Heiman responded with his famous words, “Pay what you can, when you can.”

I say famous words because this was an era when hundreds of penniless refugees came to Baltimore (among other places), and the people who ran TA entertained certain quaint notions about how a Jewish school is supposed to be run. For one thing, TA defined itself as the “public school” of the Jewish community. In other words, regardless of a family’s level of observance, if they wanted their son to receive a day school education, TA took him in. This included many who could not afford to pay. No child, it was felt, should have to go to public school because of lack of money. True, the school was always in financial crisis, but that was considered an unfortunate but perfectly natural state of affairs. So the words “pay what you can when you can” rolled easily and often off Rabbi Heiman’s lips in those years. On the other hand – and this was by no means a secret – people like Rabbi Heiman were able to secure quite a bit of money from Reform, Conservative, and other non-frum Jews who understood that they were helping to maintain an institution that served the broad Jewish public. Many a non-frum Jew has had a cheilek (share) in the limud hatorah of Jews in the Baltimore mosdos – which is food for thought.

Incidentally, another quaint notion of that era was that the limudei kodesh – “Hebrew,” as it was called in those days, as opposed to “English,” the term for all secular studies; to this day, the phrase “secular studies” or “Torah studies” jars on my ear – should be conducted in Yiddish. It was not considered learning unless it was in Yiddish. In those years, Rabbi Samson was fighting a vigorous rearguard action to maintain Yiddish instruction in the face of the mounting tide of English-only American boys who constituted the overwhelming number of students. That’s how my father became a rebbe in TA in 1947. Basically, his interview for the job with Rabbi Samson went something like this:

Rabbi Samson: “Do you speak English?”

My father: “Not a word.”

Rabbi Samson: “You’re hired!”

Anyway, after her interview with Rabbi Heiman, my mother went home. As soon as she got in the house, she had a phone call. “It’s Rabbi Neuberger, from the yeshiva!” She was all nervous: a newcomer to the city with no connections or acquaintances. What did Rabbi Neuberger want from her?

“Mrs. Levinger, I want to welcome you and your son to Baltimore.” How did he know? Her brother whispered that Rabbi Heiman was Neuberger’s brother-in-law. Heiman must have said something.

“But so soon?” my mother whispered back, covering the phone with her hand.

The voice on the other line continued. “Mrs. Levinger, I understand you were an executive secretary in a firm in Europe. I want to offer you a job as my secretary here in the yeshiva.”

“But I don’t know English. I was a secretary in German-language firms.”

“Oh, I see…well...well…I need, uh…that’s exactly what I need, a secretary to handle my German correspondence.”

“What German correspondence?”

“I’ll explain tomorrow. Can you come for an interview at ten o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll see you then. You enrolled your son in the TA, right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

As she hung up the phone, she asked her sister-in-law, “The yeshiva needs a German-language secretary?”

Her brother answered, “It’s Neuberger. He wants you to be in a religious Jewish environment, both for your sake, as well as for your son.”

“But I don’t even know him. He does not know me. People don’t do things like that.”

“Well,” said the brother, most people don’t. But Neuberger does. He’s a very unusual person. “You’ll see.”

By the next day, Rabbi Neuberger had his story worked out and explained that the yeshiva had students whose parents lived in Europe – Switzerland, Scandinavia and places like that – and they needed to be corresponded with. “And anyway, soon you’ll pick up English, and you can help in the office. Don’t worry.”

Within a short time, Rabbi Neuberger introduced my mother to his wife, Mrs. Neuberger, and to her mother, Rebbetzin Kramer, who lived with them. Mrs. Neuberger was an unusual person, as well, a true aristocrat – not the aristocracy of frippery and vapidity, but of noblesse oblige. As my mother was to discover, Mrs. Neuberger was also of the emor me’at ve’aseh harbei (speak little, do much) type.

Not long after my mother started working in the yeshiva office, Rabbi Neuberger drove 12 blocks down Garrison Boulevard to Maine Avenue, to the home and shteibl of Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Hertzberg, where my mother davened on Shabbos; it was the shul to which her brother belonged. Rabbi Hertzberg was a Belzer chasid from Poland whose followers had acquired a house for him in Forest Park. He and his family lived “over the store,” that is, the shul, which was located downstairs.

Rabbi Hertzberg, too, was a most unusual person. In those years he gave himself over completely to the refugees and survivors who streamed into the city, many of whom “came to dinner and stayed, permanently,” or for long periods of time, anyway. He and his wife raised money, organized marriages, housing, and a thousand other things for these people – not for fanfare but like real chasidim, leshem Shamayim.

It so happened that Rabbi Hertzberg was distantly related to my mother, though there is only one person in California who really knows how…and he’s forgotten! But it did not matter: A karov is a karov.

Well, Rabbi Neuberger went to see Rabbi Hertzberg to suggest a shidduch, that is, he wanted Rabbi Hertzberg to work on a shidduch between two refugees: “Mrs. Levinger and Katz.”

That would be my father. Having barely survived Dachau – 80 pounds at the time of the Liberation and at death’s door for another half a year – he had come to America and eventually to Baltimore to teach at the TA and be a shammas at a shul in Forest Park. The shul was the original site of Ner Yisroel. When the Rosh Yeshiva Rav Ruderman arrived in Baltimore, he had trouble finding a building for the yeshiva and finally hooked up with a shul that had purchased a tall former orphanage. The building had a number of floors, much more room than the shul needed. The shul agreed that if Rav Ruderman served as their shul rabbi, he could have the rest of the building for his yeshiva. The Rosh Yeshiva remained the rabbi there for about a decade, by which time the yeshiva built its campus on Garrison Boulevard and the shul got a new Rav, Rabbi Binyamin Bak. When my father came to Baltimore, the shul was still in the old building, so he lived in one of the many empty floors. That’s how things were in those days.

Now my father was a Litvak who had learned in Litvishe yeshivos, so it was not surprising that he hung around the yeshiva in his spare time and was befriended by Rav Ruderman, who was very kind to him, one of the few Lithuanian Jews to survive the war. (Did you know that not a single Jewish child in Latvia survived the war?!) Through the Rosh Yeshiva, my father got to know Rabbi and Mrs. Neuberger, who immediately began looking to fix him up.

This was not so simple. Like many, my father was emotionally scarred by the war and the camps. After all the horrors they witnessed and endured! Even after the war was over, the nightmares and the depressions weren’t. Like Noach after the Flood, they struggled to adjust to life after churban (utter destruction). My father came to Baltimore hating every gentile (except Blacks). He knew it was an emotional, not a rational, reaction, but he could not help it. All of his buddies who survived with him became not frum. Who could blame them?

A vignette from that era: My father came over on a ship in late 1946, an old boat where half the passengers were Jews, survivors like himself, and the other half were Germans! Yes, ex-Nazi goyim. How they were admitted into America I do not know, but there they were. The first night on the ship, dinner was served, and the passengers were horrified to discover each other. Jews immediately huddled on one side of the room, Germans on the other. The Jews sat down on one side of the very long table, the Germans on the other side facing them. Fifty Jews and 50 Germans stared at each other with violent hatred. The Negro stewards were blithely unaware of the potential war in their dining room. Each passenger was served a grapefruit half. In the middle of the table were a series of sugar bowls, one bowl between each pair of passengers; one bowl between each Jew and German.

Who would take first? Who would break the tense silence? After a minute, a German stuck out his hand to grasp the sugar bowl. The Jew opposite him thrust his fork deep into the German’s hand. A riot broke out, as the two groups lunged at each other across the table with knives, forks, and chairs, screaming, gouging, and biting.

The Negro stewards were more than shocked; they were clueless. Why the riot? They ran into the kitchen and emerged with dozens of bowls of sugar. The passengers were introduced to the American way of ending a fight: There’s plenty for everyone.

By the time order was restored, there were bleeding wounds and broken bones all around – and one dead German. The ship’s captain, a former naval officer, declared that he was not going to arrest a Jew for killing a German, not in 1946 he wasn’t. So the man was buried at sea, the victim of “an unfortunate accident.”

It was in that frame of mind that my father and thousands of other Jews arrived on these shores in the late forties and early fifties. It was a frame of mind that made American Jews uncomfortable and unsociable. The Associated Jewish Charities hired a bunch of full-time psychologists to provide free counseling for the refugees and washed their hands of all other responsibility for their welfare. And so it was that, like so many others, my father was advised to see happy movies, particularly Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals, to help them out of their gloom. Small wonder that he found more ease of mind in the company of people like the Rosh Yeshiva and Rabbi Neuberger.

Anyway, as you can see, all the principals knew each other, and when Rabbi Neuberger brought up the idea of this shidduch, Rabbi Hertzberg exclaimed, “Vi kumt a daitch aza einfal – Where does a German Jew get such a good idea?!”

Actually, it turned out that it was Rebbetzin Neuberger who had thought it up. Like her husband, she preferred to do her good deeds behind the scenes. When my parents became engaged, she and her mother threw a bridal shower, and they gave my mother all kinds of gifts for a new household. One month after her marriage, my mother wrote the Neubergers a letter thanking them for all they had done. A few days later, Mrs. Neuberger called her up to say, “You know, Lenka, my husband has done all kinds of favors for many people over the years (this was over 50 years ago!). This is the first time anyone took the trouble to say thank you.” This was said laughingly, not bitterly. She was much too big for that.

My mother continued to work as Rabbi Neuberger’s secretary until I was born. So you see what I mean when I say that I knew Rabbi Neuberger before I was born, and that like many of my peers, he was there at our brisses, bar mitzvas, and weddings. As a boy growing up in Forest Park, Rabbi Neuberger was the only adult at Ner Yisroel who would always come up to me, shake my hand, ask about my parents and about what grade I was in, things like that. Mrs. Neuberger was one of the only adults who would talk to me as if I were an adult, especially about world politics. I remember discussing the Vietnam War, which was raging at that time, and the Middle East situation, and I was 11 years old!

A piquant postscript to these memories: A decade ago, my mother, in her eighties, decided to make aliya. She went to the aliya office in Rockville to fill out the necessary official forms. The Israeli lady behind the desk was a typical pekida, one of those mindless bureaucrats that have driven three generations of Israelis insane. She asked my mother, “What evidence do you have that you are Jewish?” My mother stared at her in amazement. Exactly how many eighty-five-year-old-religiously-observant-Yiddish-speaking-East-European-born-wives-and-mothers-of-Orthodox-rabbis are there who are not Jewish?

None of that mattered. “You need documentation.” What kind of documentation? A kesuva? “No, not sufficient. Documentation.”

Welcome to Medinat Yisrael! A half-million Russian goyim were being brought to Israel at that time, and my mother was being refused aliya because of insufficient “documentation”! And all this delivered in an insufferably sneering tone.

I was home at the time, working in my office, when I got a phone call from Rockville. “Hi, Ma, how’s the aliya stuff going?” Well, she proceeded to tell me in an agitated voice as my mind raced. “Ma, hold on this line for a minute, don’t get off. Let me see something.”

I picked up another phone on a different line and called the Ner Yisroel number. You never know with Rabbi Neuberger, sometimes you can get through right away. Yup, got lucky this time, and the booming voice on the other end said, ‘HELLO?’”

“Rabbi Neuberger, Dovid Katz. I know this sounds crazy, but my mother is at the aliya office at Rockville, and they do not believe she is Jewish; she needs something called ‘documentation.’ You know it’s hard for her to travel around. What should she do?”

Within a few seconds there comes the booming voice: “ROSE, take a letter, ‘To Whom It May Concern, Please be advised that Mrs. L. Katz, whom I have known for more than 40 years, is Jewish, and is to be congratulated for emigrating to Eretz Yisrael. (signed) Rabbi Herman Neuberger.’ Fax this letter immediately to the aliya office in Rockville.”

“Thanks a lot, Rabbi Neuberger.”

“Give my regards to your mother.” CLICK.

In Rockville, 10 minutes later, the sneering pekida gets the fax, stares at it long and hard, gets up, and takes it to the back room to the supervisor. Three minutes pass. Out comes the supervisor, waving the fax. “How do you know this man?”

My mother, in her slow, deliberate speaking voice, begins to explain. After 30 seconds the supervisor barks at the pekida, “Zeh beseder – it’s okay.” The pekida, who, like all bureaucrats, hates being outflanked, angrily stamps the forms, muttering, “Vell, it’s a lucky thing for you that you know this man!”

Indeed.

• * *

See PART TWO For The Rest of The Article

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Article List - December 2005