My son Chaim wrote a beautiful article about his father, Rabbi Joseph Katz, z”l, in a recent issue of the Where What When, and I got many comments from readers as well as requests to write my own memories of our life together. As you might imagine, life was very different when we started out in the mid-1950s.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Although
Telz yeshiva had already been established, the Orthodox community was small; I
had only two frum friends, and in the absence of a high school for girls
we attended public school. After high school, I moved to Williamsburg, where I
worked as a secretary during the day and attended Bais Yaakov Seminary’s
evening program.
Meanwhile, Rabbi was teaching in a Talmud
Torah. He was also attending Brooklyn College as well as the Mir Yeshiva and
received his bachelor’s and semicha at the same time. (By the way,
the Novominsker Rebbe, zt”l, was a fellow student at Brooklyn College.) How
did we meet? The head of the Talmud Torah was my brother’s (z”l) uncle
by marriage, and his wife made our shidduch. By the time we were
married, Rabbi was working on his master’s at Columbia. We had a private joke between
us that the only reason he married me was because I could type and was able to
type his papers.
In the late ’50s, we were offered a
job to teach in the Israel Ben Zion Academy/United Hebrew Institute in Wilkes
Barre, Pennsylvania. It was not easy leaving family and moving to a small town in
the middle of the Pocono Mountains, but Hashem thought otherwise. Our goal was
to teach these children and families Torah and what being Jewish and Judaism were
all about. The rest was up to Hashem.
Rabbi Katz taught fourth- and sixth-grade
boys and girls, and I taught first grade. In fact, just as we sat down to shiva
last month, one of my “little first graders,” who is quite popular in his
community, called to be menachem avel. This is going back 67 years!
It was unbelievable that he would be the first of our students to call. The
school grew. My husband would spend his summers recruiting students for the
next school year, and it worked!
Everyone involved in the
religious life of the town worked together. When you are far away from
family, you depend on each other for all things regarding Yiddishkeit. Wilkes
Barre was not what it is today. To buy meat, we had to either go to New York or
order from Scranton, from where it was delivered on a weekly basis. There was
no pizza shop, no shomer Shabbos bakery, no restaurants, unless
we wanted to travel to Scranton, where there was one kosher restaurant.
We had our four children while
living in Wilkes Barre. It was not easy for them growing up because all the
children of the rebbeim and rabbanim in town were labeled as “the
Rabbi’s children, so they can get away with anything.”
*
* *
The years flew by. In 1972,
catastrophic Hurricane Agnes hit. The water in our house rose from the basement
to the second floor – about 18 feet. We had a great many books and sefarim,
and we had to shlep them upstairs. But Hashem works in mysterious ways,
and everything is bashert. Wherever we stopped pulling the books from
the shelves in our study, that is where the water stopped. We were lucky;
others, not so much. It all depended on where you lived with respect to the
Susquehanna River. At the United Hebrew Institute, the water rose over the
roof.
After living through such a mabul
(flood), one can understand what it means when we daven “mi bamayim u’mi
ba’eish – who [will die] by water and who by fire.” We know firsthand what
water can do to people’s lives. To make a long story short, the community was
rebuilt. It took a few years, and life went back to normal. We marked community
life by “before the flood” and “after the flood,” just we now say, “before
Covid” and “after Covid.”
Many children became frum
under Rabbi’s tutelage and went on to yeshiva. Afterwards, however, they found
it difficult to come back to Wilkes Barre because of the lack of frum infrastructure.
This made it difficult for the town to grow in Torah and mitzvos. This
situation continued after we left, except for one fortunate incident. When
Rabbi became principal of the school, he hired a Lubavitcher teacher, who
is still there to this day. When his son grew up, he came back to Wilkes
Barre and opened a yeshiva for young boys. Can you imagine tzitzis
flying and long payos in the city of Wilkes Barre!? Well, it happened,
and I can say that it was because of Rabbi’s hiring this young couple that a
Lubavitch community developed in the city. Today, there are about three shuls, two
mikvahs, a pizza shop, a shomer Shabbos bakery, and a school with over
200 children. I think they also have a girls school. So, although we left many
years ago, I believe that Rabbi had the zechus to see this
community develop just because he hired one teacher!
* *
*
So, how did I start my “Ask the Shadchan”
life? you might ask. I made my first shidduch while I was living in
Williamsburg and not yet married. Yankel Levin was the brother of my
sister-in-law, a”h, and I fixed him up with a friend of mine. This
couple lived in Baltimore for many, many years until they made aliyah a while
ago. That was the beginning of my “career.” When we were in Wilkes Barre, we
had a young unmarried chazan who, of course, hung out at our house. I
was chalishing (eager) to make him a shidduch. It happened that a
frum chasana was held in Wilkes Barre with young people coming in
from New York, and – you guessed it – I fixed him up. They must have
grandchildren by now.
After 24 years, we felt it was time
for us to leave Wilkes Barre. We did not know what to do, so we asked daas
Torah and were told to leave. At that point, two of our children were
married and two were in yeshiva. There was a short-lived stint at a day school
in Annapolis, where they asked Rabbi to become principal. After two years, the
school closed, and Rabbi got a job working for the Board of Jewish Education in
Silver Spring. He accomplished quite a bit there, but it wasn’t until after he
left and was offered a position in Baltimore that he really became involved with
college students.
At that time, there was no Hillel
on the college campuses. However, Jewish Collegiate Services, under the
auspices of the Associated and the Jewish Community Center, had a college
program, and they asked Rabbi Katz to join them. A few years later, it became
Hillel of Baltimore, and Rabbi was the chaplain on all the college campuses. His
greatest enjoyment, however, was working with the Hopkins students. You see,
these campuses really did not have “Shabbos” in the beginning, when Hillel
started; we therefore started inviting the frum students for Shabbos.
They looked forward to coming since they couldn’t spend Shabbos on campus, where
they didn’t even have a minyan. Our kiruv life began here. We invited all
kinds of students to our home, and they saw how Shabbos should be. We had
future doctors, lawyers, biochemists, psychologists, and more, all preparing
for their futures and gracing our table.
Some of them frequented our house
almost every Shabbos, and some of them who met at our Shabbos table got
married. There are too many stories to write, but just so you understand, being
with these young people drove me to try my hand in shidduchim. It
was so different in those days. You put two people together – no resumes and no
pictures! You asked about the family, and then the couple went out. There were
no questions about what kind of tablecloths they used on Shabbos or having to
send a picture before the mother let them go out.
It was fun being with these young
people, which also kept us “young.” Rabbi Katz was very close with many of them,
working with them either in learning or just teaching them. Many of them became
frum and are, to this day, outstanding members of their communities.
*
* *
I could go on and on, but I would
just like to add a postscript, since people are approaching me and asking me
about some of the statements that Chaim made in his article. Rabbi Katz and his
family rarely spoke about their years in Germany. I can just add a few
thoughts.
Members of the family left for
America in 1937, but my father-in-law said he would not be able to raise a frum
boy in America, so he refused to leave. He ended up being arrested in 1939, on
Kristallnacht, for three months. There is actually a picture in the Holocaust
Museum where you see the people running, and right in front was someone who
looked like Rabbi’s father. I did not say anything to anyone in the family, but
one of the children called me and said, “Ma, I think I saw Zeidy running in the
picture of Kristallnacht in the Holocaust Museum.” I answered “We
did too, but I wanted to see if anyone else would notice it.”
Rabbi was seven years old when the
issue of money came up in 1939, so he really was not able to understand that
whole transaction. Chaim found out about this from Yad Vashem, when they looked
up our family history and mentioned this to him. Yes, Rabbi was nine years old
when he wandered by himself in Portugal – don’t ask why, because we don’t know
– and his father came after him and found him. Imagine nowadays letting a young
boy of nine wander through the streets. They left on the last ship from
Portugal and arrived in New York in September 1941. No one can believe it,
but yes, it is true; we have the passport to prove it. Yad Vashem also could
not believe this, but when Chaim brought them the passport for proof, they
included it in their archives.
Rabbi was an only child, and there
was so much mesiras nefesh on the part of his family to live a
true Torah life. Maybe that is why his father was blessed to live to see
the beginning of generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all shomer
Torah umitzvos. Going through the hardships of life, one doesn’t always
understand until much later – perhaps even in a future generation – how the Yad
Hashem was always present.
