A Richer World

As we celebrated the bounty of the earth on Thanksgiving just a few days ago, we also might contemplate those who left this bountiful world in the last few weeks and left it richer.

The Jewish world lost a host of important people recently. As the year begins its final countdown, it seems appropriate to look at the contributions of some of them.

necrologycohenLEONARD COHEN, poet, songster, composer, leaves behind a well curated body of work that shows up in unexpected places.  Though not prolific considering the length of his career, Cohen’s works have been recorded by scores of artists hundreds of times. Hallelujah alone exists in more than200 recordings by different artists. Raised as an Orthodox Jew and always identifying- and observing- as a Jew, Cohen also was an ordained Buddhist monk. However, Jewishness runs through many of Cohen’s best songs along with references to other world religions.

Cohen began his career as a writer and was even described by one critic as “probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.” In the later 1960s, he began to devote his time to a career as a folksinger-songwriter.

A Canadian by birth, Cohen was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He also received other awards for his music and writing. He never married though he had several long-term relationships and left 2 children and two grandchildren. He said of one relationship with the mother of his children  that cowardice and fear prevented him from marrying.

The full impact of Cohen’s influence will probably never be measured. But it extends even to  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks as seen here shortly after Cohen’s death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s3kQSZ_Qxk

necrologyeliachYAFFA ELIACH was defined by her study of Hasidism and her identity as a Holocaust survivor. Though young when the Holocaust destroyed her childhood village of Eishyshok, the village lived with her and through her.  No one who has visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC can fail to be affected by the towering walls of photographs of people going about their business in an ordinary town-people and town which no longer exist.

Eliach’s research,  methods and dedication to making the Holocaust visible and accessible to all preceded the national effort by decades. She pioneered interviewing survivors and established the first Holocaust Center at Brooklyn College where she taught. She was also a member of the Advisory Board of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust.

Eliach was also a graceful writer whose Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust was based on stories from her students at Brooklyn College, most of whom were either survivors or children of survivors.  So well thought of was this book that famed scholar Gershom Scholem called it “the Midrash of the Holocaust.”

necrologygruberRUTH GRUBER traveled the world as a journalist when most women were expected to stay home and raise families.  Gruber, a pioneering journalist, who saw much of 20th century history close up, died in November at the age of 105. Both an author and a photographer, she combined her talents to be a “witness” as she called herself to historical events that affected Jews around the world.

She was the author of 19 books. Her first about Virginia Woolf was  written at 19 and was based on her doctoral thesis at the University of Cologne where she was the youngest person to receive a PhD degree. Her last was her 2007 autobiography.  Her career spanned more than 70 years and was  intimately involved in the events of Europe and the Middle East.

At a request from Franklin Roosevelt, in 1944 Gruber escorted nearly 1000 refugee Jews from Europe to the United States where they stayed in Oswego, NY until after the war.  This feat resulted in her book Haven: the dramatic story of 1, 000 World War II refugees and how they came to America. She chronicled the  story of the Exodus, the ship loaded with Holocaust survivors from Europe that in 1947 was turned away from landing in the then British Mandate.  She wrote two books about the incident which became the inspiration for the novel Exodus by Leon Uris.

Gruber covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials and escorted Eleanor Roosevelt on a visit to the young nation of Israel. As a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune,Tthe New York Post and The New York Times, Gruber saw first-hand modern Jewish history…and still had time to marry and raise a family.

necrologyneusnerJACOB NEUSNER’s name may be familiar to Brown University graduates of a certain age. Ordained as a Conservative rabbi, Neusner spent most of his career in academia at Dartmouth, Brown, University of South Florida and Bard.

A prolific author, with over 900 books credited to him, it is claimed that he translated most of the important books of Judaism including the Jerusalem Talmud. However, Neusner’s methods and philosophy were criticized by many  including Sol Lieberman, his former teacher, who claimed that Neusner’s Jerusalem Talmud belonged in the “waste basket.”

Despite, the controversy over his work, Neusner made a real difference in the study of Judaica at the university level.  Always a scholar, even after hundreds of books he said of himself that “No serious inquiry into the classics of Judaism can start without a systematic retranslation of those classics, time and again, for age succeeding age: All learning begins in the naked encounter with the unadorned document, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Document by document, all of it, all together, but, alas, step by step. After 20 years of work of a sustained and systematic order, I am still crawling.”

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3 thoughts on “A Richer World

  1. Hi, Aileen,
    Presenting these four extraordinary individuals together was a wonderful idea. Thank you for a very enjoyable article.
    Natalie Baff

  2. Aileen, you’ve highlighted four people who each in their own way have touched my life. It is so important our community acknowledge their impact on our world, even though they may have not reached celebrity status that would merit a cover on People magazine.

    Leonard Cohen has been a poet who has touched my heart and soul since my adolescence, and he has continued to inspire and challenge me until the last days of his life. Seeing him in concert recently, he embodied dignity, joy, and a yearning for a spiritual connection that will stay with me. His final CD and interviews communicated his ability to maintain his sense of self and presence.

    May his memory and the gifts that he gave us continue to be for a blessing.

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