My life was blessed to have been able to see hesed being
enacted daily by my father Abraham.
He was born in Woodbine, where his parents were founders of an
agricultural village established in 1891 in New Jersey for Jews fleeing to
freedom from the pogroms of Czarist Russia.
After high school, Abraham left his
birthplace and his parent’s home and moved to New York where he met my mother
Jeanne, a rabbi’s daughter born in Boston.
As the Great Depression was approaching, Abraham turned down admission
to university and a pro baseball contract at a time when a player’s wage was
meager. Instead of realizing his dreams,
he ran a housewares store in Brooklyn to support his extended family.
Jeanne told of the days when her parents and their five children
shared a single roll as their sole meal of the day. While courting Jeanne, Abraham gave her
unemployed father funds to open a Hebrew bookstore to feed his family. After marrying Jeanne, he gave his
brother-in-law, a young rabbi, money for the down payment on a building to
convert to a storefront synagogue with living quarters above. His brother-in-law named it Congregation Beth
Abraham after my father. When Jeanne’s
father passed away, his wife with her two unmarried children came to live in my
parent’s three-room apartment in Queens when I was seven and my sister
five.
Abraham took them in with opened arms. His hesed flowing through our crowded
apartment transformed it into a welcoming home of love and tranquility. The
daily acts of giving and sharing with compassion and caring between my parents,
sister, grandmother, aunt and uncle seemed to extend the walls of the small
apartment we all shared. Every word
spoken in our home as I grew up was spoken with affection, thoughtfulness, and
consideration.
After my father worked for forty years in his store in Brooklyn, he
moved with my mother to Florida. He
joined “Operation Grandfather,” a Federal government sponsored program in which
retired people volunteered to work in elementary schools teaching reading and
math to disadvantaged children on a one-to-one basis. After taking courses in child psychology and
educational methodology, he worked in the program for ten years. When I would visit Florida and walk with my
father in the mall, I enjoyed seeing excited African-American children call out
“Grandpa Abraham,” run into his arms and hug him tightly.
From my book Through a Bible Lens, pages 97-98
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