By: Aaron (Tzvi Avigdor HaKohen) Goldblatt
It hurts to look at him. You walk into the spacious den room and look upon a shell of a man. He has deep-seated wrinkles, a wizened physique, and tortuous limbs that rest on a mammoth hospital bed. He seems as though he has always been this way, only able to operate one side of his mouth and one side of his body in the proper manner. It’s hard to believe that in this shell lies the brilliant, eminent Rabbi Dr. Herbert W. Bomzer, a New York City religious leader renowned for his oratorical genius and iron wit. You just don’t see it, so stark is the contrast, and a tear bubbles out of your eye and traces a meandering path down a florid cheek. But then, the shape before you jerks slightly and you are able to see a pair of piercing, glittering burnt umber eyes that stab through your own and seem to gaze thoughtfully upon your naked soul. These are eyes that blaze with the steely intelligence of an erudite scholar who finished through the Talmud three times with heavy study and who actually turned down an invitation to the esteemed MENSA organization. You gasp as you realize that the man’s still in there. But he’s trapped. And he can no longer tell his story. But, if you peer closely into those eyes, you may see a man who lived a vigorous and joyous life in the big apple. You may see a wise and caring leader who lovingly guides his people through heartbreak and hardship. You may see the flinty courageousness of a warrior who risked his freedom to enter Soviet Russia on a mission to keep the weak embers of Jewish faith burning. But before all that, you may see a boy. A young Chaim Ze’ev, traipsing through the streets of East New York. Before we go visit that Depression era youth and hear his story, we first must travel back to the 1920s in post World War I Europe. More specifically, we shall zoom in on the snowy towns on the Polish-Russian border in Galicia. We shall join the father of our protagonist, the eighteen-year-old Philip Bomzer, as he rushes into the home of the esteemed Jewish leader of the village known as Kapitchinitz- the Kapishinitzer Rebbe (“Rebbe” was a term of respect used for spiritual leaders of the Hasidic Jewish movement). We see him rush inside the house, stand beside the Rebbe, wringing his cloth beret in icy-cold fingers. “Yes?” the Rebbe inquires. “What is it you need?” “Rebbe,” Philip nervously “I have come to ask if it is wise for me, my mother, and my siblings to emigrate to the New World.” The Rebbe’s features contort into a mask of rage. “America??? It is a Godless place! The very stones are not kosher!” “Yes Rebbe, but please realize that during the last war, my family was forced to hide in the frigid forests to escape the German invasion. Now, the Polish and Russian armies are looking to draft able men. I am especially attractive as a prospect to them considering that I speak both Russian and Polish. I will be conscripted for over 30 years!” At that time, most Jews didn’t leave the army alive, and if they did, they retained no semblance of their original cultural heritage. “Go then! But forget not your roots…” the Rebbe intoned. Philip walked out with his back ramrod straight and his head held high. Yes, he thought to himself, this will be the beginning of a new chapter for the lives of my family. And so it was. Kind of. I wonder if he ever regretted leaving. Philip left with a heavy heart to the US in the early 1920s. He began his immigrant life by joining a society. At that time, the many different towns that people rooted from used to form little organizations with their fellows to assist them all in making a living in an alien environment. Philip was from the shtetl (an Eastern-European, Jewish village/town) of Suchoshtov in southern Poland, who had a society called the Landsmenshaft that would allow for people already longer settled in NYC to facilitate the attainment of jobs and apartments for the non-English-speaking émigrés. In time, Philip met the beautiful Yetta Kleinman from the Tarler town in northern Poland, and they were happily married. By the 1930s, the two of them were raising four children in a religious Jewish household in East New York. As you probably know, the 1929 Stock Market Crash began the infamous and horrifying time in NYC and the world at large known as the Great Depression. It was a gloomy period during which the pecuniary system of the US crashed and joblessness and hunger swept the nation. Gone were the jazzy, glitzy days of the Roaring Twenties. Gone was the wealth, the dancing, the music. People just needed to make what little cash could be reaped from the barren, arid wastelands of the American economy to allow their families to survive. This is the stage upon which our lead is born. On August 16th of 1927, a baby popped into the world. He was named Herbert W. Bomzer, or Chaim Ze’ev ben Meshulum Shraga Feivish (if you think that’s bad, my Hebrew name is Aharon Tzvi Avigdor ben Dov Aryeh HaKohen, as you saw above), and was born into a poor, immigrant household. Young Chaim was a very precocious child; he was a whiz in mathematics and science from an early age and also was quick to learn complex Talmudic law. He attended Jewish religious day school for elementary school, but for high school graduated the well-known Townsend Harris High School. After high school, he was offered a full scholarship to an elite math/sciences academy, but his mother turned it down to instead send him to Yeshiva University, a hybrid between religious learning and a secular education, where he studied to become a rabbi and attain his Doctorate in Jewish Education and Administration, as well as a Master of Arts in Jewish History and Philosophy. His mother pulled the dean of YU aside, and told him in no uncertain terms “Take care of this boy and, in time, you will find him taking care of you.” The dean heeded her words and Rabbi Bomzer actually ended up as a dean of YU. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Chaim grew up in a time when ten dollars was a fortune and money was very hard to come by. His father used to work long hours and many different jobs, just to keep his wife and four kids afloat. This duty was made excruciatingly difficult by Philips religiosity. You see, back in those times Judaism and its faith were not truly accepted by the mainstream US culture. In those days it was deemed unacceptable to ditch work on late-Friday and Saturday. Philip usually found some work in the window-washing field, and very often Philip would approach his boss on a Friday afternoon, to have the following dialogue. “Have to head home early for the Jewish Sabbath, Frank,” he’d say. Frank, a massive, brawny, pot-bellied bloke would turn towards Philip and say, “Better see you tomorrow, bright and early boy!” Philip would squirm uncomfortably under Frank’s glare. “Well, y’know Boss, about that…” “WHADDAYA MEAN YOU DON’T WORK SATURDAYS!!! LISTEN GOOD SONNY, IF YOU DON’T COME BACK HERE TOMORROW MORNING, DON’T COME BACK AT ALL!!!” So he didn’t. At one point in the thirties, Philip held over 40 jobs in just one year! This was in the time before real welfare and unemployment stipends (the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt had not yet begun) so to say times were tough would be an understatement. Things took a turn for the worse when, in 1946, Herbert’s mother died from a malady that could’ve been easily cured by penicillin. Though penicillin had been discovered nearly thirty years prior, due to the family’s indigence and the troubles of the times, it wasn’t available to her. For a while after, things began to improve with Philip beginning his own window cleaning business with money made in the summers. Then, while Herbert was attending college as a full time student, his father developed jaundice and required intensive surgery. He called a meeting of the family, and explained to them in no uncertain terms that if they wanted a home and sustenance, they would need to have someone take his place washing windows. Back then, there were fewer regulations in the business world, and had he hired another person to do the job for him, that guy could very well make off with his clients and company. At that point Herbert was 19, and the rest of his siblings were either too busy or too young. So he volunteered to do his father’s rounds. To this effect, he had to wake up at 2 a.m. every morning (or night, I guess…) and go around to mostly stores and wash their windows until they dazzled. Can you imagine a young Herbert humping out of bed bleary-eye, with networks of blood vessels painting the whites of his eyes a florid pink. He jumps into the dingy bathroom, washes up, throws on a pair of work-clothes, and makes his way onto the dark streets of East New York. He rolls along a cart full of squeegees, mops, sponges, and crusty buckets brimming with murky, foamy water. He reaches a Bar and Grill, and as he blinks the sleep and mucous out of his eyes, he dips a sponge into a bucket and begins to clean the soiled display-window. Suddenly, the oafish owner of this most respectable of establishments marches onto the street and begins to vomit out a deluge of obscenities directed at this poor boy trying to do his sick father’s job. “Listen here kid, where the **** is that god****ed washer! I just had the new *****ing display installed and because that son of a ***** wasn’t here, the windows have been covered in ****! Where the **** is he???” The boy, who grew up in an insular religious household and has never before heard such a revolting manner of speech before, gapes for a moment, then in a strangled voice says “I’m so sorry my dad’s very sick-” “ARE YOU ****ING KIDDING ME??? SO WHAT, LET HIM COME SICK AND CLEAN THEM!!! Are you going to now? Good. But make ****ing sure that every placard is put exactly where it was!” When the boy decides to use chalk to mark off where each placard was the owner immediately bursts a blood vessel. “WHAT THE **** DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING???” “Sir, I’m just marking where the placards-” “AHHH, we got a COLLEGE boy here, you think you’re so ****ing smart???” That night, the boy goes to his father and says angrily, “That guff, the language he used, why do you deal with him?” Philip groans, then exclaims “Oh him? Ha. I hear the same thing every day.” “So why do you take it Dad?” “Well, from him I get two and a half dollars a week (back then, this was much more than now; 10 dollars was almost like 100 nowadays), so he may not be worth it. But, his friends are all other clients, and were I to drop him, they would drop me. That’s 15-20 dollars a week!” Philip gives a throaty, world-weary chuckle then intones softly, “Chaim, this is a good life lesson, for business and also for when you are one day a rabbi: you will always encounter nasty people in life, and if you get worked up and throw in the towel, that’s when they’ve won. You have to stick it to the end, and come to take what you need from each of these people. This advice settled in the boy’s heart, and remained with him for all of the rest of his life in the city of the rude. This story was one hundred percent true, as heard from Rabbi Bomzer himself, though he just used the words “four-letter expletives.” I may have gotten carried away… East New York was also a very dangerous time to be a young Jew in the early/mid-1930s. One day, Herbert shows up from the subway with his large, black kippah prominently displayed on his head. The Dean, a Rabbi Dr. Belkin, stood agape and asked in an awed voice “Herbie, why aren’t you wearing a hat???” “Rebbe, I don’t have a hat.” “So, why didn’t you take off your kippah? You wore that through East New York, Brooklyn, and Washington Heights? Herbie, do you have a death wish?” You see, in those days, it was very common for a Jewish boy to have rocks hurled at him for exposing his cultural heritage in public in the city. Rabbi Bomzer used to describe the snowball fights that would go down between Jewish and non-Jewish kids in the neighborhood of East New York. “HA! ‘Dirty looks’ you think it was? How about suddenly being clocked in the head with a snowball! Then, when you fall to the ground and there’s blood pooling by your feet, you suddenly realize that there were stones and ice shards packed tightly in that little clod of snow. In East New York, in Washington Heights we didn’t have ‘snowball fights,’ we fought dangerous battles! But, oh no, we weren’t going to take that sitting down. We’d crouch low, and find some nice stones to reciprocate…” While still an undergraduate student, Herbert met the love of his life, Leona Abeles, may she live and be well, and they were happily married for some 60 years with six children and many grandchildren and great grandchildren. Post-college, the now Rabbi Bomzer began his long and illustrious career as a rabbi and Jewish educator. He first worked as the rabbi of the synagogue the Young Israel of Williamsburg for four years. He then went on to found the synagogue known as the “Young Israel of Ocean Parkway,” where he held a position as a pulpit rabbi for over 40 years! He took on a position as a Dean of the YU religious study program, and taught over 3,000 students for 50 years! In 1985, he was conferred an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from YU for exemplary communal service. He received semikha (Rabbinic Ordination) from great leaders Rabbi Joseph B. Soleveichik and Rabbi Moses Feinstein. His specialty in Jewish law was conversions to Judaism for non-Jews (a highly unusual circumstance, considering that Judaism is, by definition, not in any way a proselytizing religion, i.e. we do not seek to convert the masses), and he was renown for his erudition and expertise in this regard. He wrote two books on Jewish law and history, The Chosen Road and The Kolel in America, both of which were lauded by The Jewish Press. He served twice as the president of the Rabbinical Board of Flatbush, once as the president of the Halakhic (Jewish Law) Committee of the Council of Young Israel Rabbis, and was a board member of the Rabbinical Council of America. He was very politically active and outspoken about many issues, such as anti-Semitism in NYC and other vital issues, and he was actually one of the people who brought about the political career of Senator Chuck Schumer by aiding him in securing a seat in the city council at the very outset of his political career. Rabbi Bomzer also was actually a part of the prison system, as he served as the chaplain of Ryker’s Prison in NYC for 15 years. During that time, he ensured that all prisoners, both Jewish and not, were as comfortable as possible- receiving the proper accommodations and respect that every human being inherently deserves.- and he did his utmost to aid every person on their path to reconstruction. Rabbi Bomzer and the Prison Warden are walking through the austere, stone hallways of the prison’s underbelly. The Warden seems agitated- it has been a long, long career keeping broken people locked away- and he is tired. So very tired. He turns to the Rabbi, and queries, “Rabbi? I have a question: honestly, what’s the difference between us and them?” The Rabbi ponders this for a moment, and then utters a few words that remain with the Warden until this very day. He says, “they’re just visiting, my friend. Passing through. But us, we are the lifers.” We have taken this on as a profession. Our job is to be sure that this is just a transitory place for these most unfortunate of people. We are the ones who have dedicated our lives to rebuilding and helping others. We are the ones who stay. Rabbi Bomzer for a long time maintained a very close relationship with the famed scholar Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, also known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe used to send missions of his disciples into the then-Communist USSR to keep the Jewish faith alive in those dying communities. Communism was inherently an anti-religious movement and many Jews were forbidden there from keeping the most basic of their ancient traditions. Rabbi Bomzer and his wife managed to sneak into Russia in 1987 under the guise of being lecturers on “Jewish Culture,” and while there he disseminated to the Russian Jews many religious articles that he disguised as clothing and trinkets. They were interviewed and searched at the Moscow Airport for six hours until they were finally allowed in. Overall, he built two mikvot (ritual baths), oversaw six conversions, taught over 100 men and women more about Judaism, wrote five divorce documents, officiated religious marriages, and most importantly reassured them that their freedom, through the policy of glasnost, was coming soon! This went on to occur! The Lubavitcher Rebbe thanked Rabbi Bomzer profusely in a letter, and wrote “there was no trip so successful until Rabbi Bomzer went to Russia.” Rabbi Bomzer also became very well known for his speaking ability. He was a skilled orator and a very naturally funny person. He had a really wicked sense of humor. When he married his wife, he proclaimed to her “I may never be able to give you much, but I will always make you laugh!” His speeches were very well attended and widely spoken of due to their verve and wit. He actually used to instruct other Brooklyn rabbis on how to give over sermons, and many of his sermons were actually republished in the Rabbinical Council of America’s sermon guide for newer rabbis. He was very often invited to programs at hotels to speak over the holidays, and he had one very popular speech dubbed “Humor in the Torah (the Old Testament).” He always had a speech on his mind, could speak literally off the cuff, and was often quoted as saying “I have never, ever turned down an opportunity to speak.” He was also very literate and well read. He was an avid reader of poetry, especially that of Emily Dickinson who he often quoted in his sermons, literature, and philosophy. He always had a funny story or anecdote that always elicited laughter from whoever he was with. He was a joy to be around. But then, in the later years of his life, tragedy struck. While on a plane, Rabbi Bomzer was stricken with an ischemic stroke that left him with severe motor deficiencies and great difficulty speaking. It was tragic to see someone so vital and full of life trapped in so limiting a situation. In a cruel twist of fate, the man who helped so many out of imprisonment became a prisoner in his own body. But you know something? He was still there. He still spoke as often as he could, he used to try to teach whenever possible, and remained a presence in the family for the remainder of his days. For, at the ripe old age of 85, my great grandfather Herbert W. Bomzer was laid to rest as his soul left this world. Sorry professor, but I’ve stayed out of the essay for long enough. Though my Zeidy (“grandfather” in Yiddish) was already older when I met him, I actually had a personal relationship with him. I still remember a time when I was very young, and we were at a family gathering, and he lifted up a pen, and pointed at me- his first great grandchild- and proclaimed, “This pen goes to the one who made me great!” I remember when we drove to Albany in a car together, just him and I, and when it began to hail balls of ice the size of baseballs, and a pounding, clicking noise filled the interior like close range machine guns, he moved the back of the car under an overpass so I was protected leaving himself to weather the elements (pun most definitely intended). I remember watching him go from “just fine” to “handicapped” in a matter of days. Heck, every Sunday morning I went over to where he stayed and I would help him say the morning prayers. I would put tefillin (phylacteries, little black boxes with straps that Jewish men wear while they say the morning prayers) on his paralyzed left arm and he’d always be watching. I was just a small kid, one of his many hundreds of kids and grandkids and great grandkids, and I had a personal relationship with him. You know why? Because that’s the kind of person he was. He was the person you meet the first time and just irresistible and intrinsically like, he treated everyone like a peer and an adult, and he loved to joke around. He was so down to earth. So normal. He loved watching reruns of Star Trek under a blanket while sprawled out on his chintzy couch in his small, cozy house in Brooklyn. He loved everyone, no matter what. And not a day goes by that I don’t regret not getting to know him better. Because, it's sad for me to realize that I’ve been shocked by so many of the things I found out while researching about him and his life, talking to his wife, kids, and grandchildren. My grandfather was a New Yorker to the bone, but he wasn’t your average one. Not by a long shot. Don’t believe me? He has his own Wikipedia page. If that doesn’t prove anything, I don’t know what does.
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Binny LewisBinny's passion for discovering his family history has taken him on a journey. Over the past few years he founded and lead the first JGS on a college campus, the Family Discovery Society at Yeshivs University. Having traced his family back hundreds of years with tools like JewishGen & MyHeritage, he has instructed dozens of University students to do the same. |