For the “crime” of betraying the Soviet state, the Colman family, along with most refugees from Poland, was put on a train headed for Siberia. “Even the conductor didn’t know where we were going,” Coleman says. Like prisoners bound for concentration camps, they were transported in cattle cars, although treated somewhat more humanely; when the train stopped at a station, they were given food, and no one died from maltreatment.

The train traveled farther and farther east, into areas more and more sparsely populated. At one point, they were transferred to forest country, and transported down a river on barges constructed of felled logs. Further down the river, they disembarked and were brought to the labor camp by wagon. Samuel’s father stopped, looked around in the dark, and exclaimed, “We’ll never leave here!”

“Don’t talk like that!” his mother chided. “The war will end, and we’ll go to Eretz Yisrael!”

“I admired my mother, because she was an optimist,” says Colman, who was six years old. “At the time I resented my father for giving up so easily. But I later learned that he had a kidney condition, so he suffered from our situation more than most.”

The men were put to work as loggers in the woods, and Mrs. Colman worked in the kitchen of the children’s home. While her two sons were often cold, they didn’t go hungry. His father’s prediction that they wouldn’t leave turned out to be true, in his own case; he passed away in the camp within the very first month.

Once the Germans attacked Russia in 1941, the Poles suddenly found themselves on the right side of the war. The Colman family and the other Poles were given permission to leave Russia. They left for Kyrgyzstan in Soviet Central Asia, where relatives were living.

While Kyrgyzstan had a somewhat milder climate, they barely had enough food as the war dragged on. The Soviet economy created surpluses and shortages, but mostly shortages.
“But Hashem sent us little miracles,” Colman comments. “We had a surplus of tomatoes, which my mother liked and we didn’t. We, her sons, would down the soup she brought home, not understanding she needed it for herself.”

In an environment where religion was anathema, Mrs. Colman subtly managed to instill a sense of Yiddishkeit in her children. She couldn’t do anything overtly, like light Shabbos candles, for fear her sons might go to school and talk about it. Yet she always communicated religious values; her highest praise for someone was to call him pobozhny, “G-d-fearing” in Polish.
When the Red Army pushed the Germans out of Ukraine, the Colman uncles, who’d owned lumber plants in Poland before the war and had expertise, were ordered from Kyrgyzstan to the Ukraine to help in that enterprise. The entire family went, and it was there that they heard the war had ended. In January of 1946, Polish citizens were granted permission to return home.

You Can’t Go Home Again

The Colman family returned to Poland, only to find it was no longer a home for them. The grandparents who’d been alive when they left had perished in Auschwitz. The Poles weren’t happy to see the Jews come back; a postwar pogrom in Kielce killed 40 people. The family went to Cracow, but it was so dangerous to visit the smaller villages that Mrs. Colman went to Jordanow only once, accompanied by a nephew in an army uniform.

At the time, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Rav Yitzchak Halevi Herzog, was arranging for transports of young people to Palestine. About 1,000 children, including Samuel, his brother, and a cousin who survived among peasants, took a train that went through Czechoslovakia to eastern France. Mrs. Colman, worried about her children being held back at borders or encountering other snafus en route, cleverly arranged to meet the children’s train in Czechoslovakia and continued with them to Strasbourg, France.

Mrs. Colman dearly wanted her sons to get a good education, and by now Samuel was over bar mitzvah age. Eretz Yisrael at the time had limited options for education, and people had to pay to attend high schools. Hence, she encouraged Samuel to stay in France where the education was free. She found him a Jewish school in Strasbourg, and the family stayed there — for a few years. “My family had been on the run, so I hadn’t had any Torah education since I was six,” he says. “The teachers were very clever; instead of beginning our Chumash study with parshas Vayikra, as is traditional in chadarim, they began it with Kedoshim, which talks about how Hashem protects the Jews and takes the side of orphans and almanos. At the time, I felt so downtrodden, and it made me feel Hashem was protecting me.”

His mother remarried and went to live in Israel with her new husband and younger son, while Samuel stayed in France to continue his schooling. He enrolled in an ORT school in Paris to become an electrical technician. “I saw which people survived during the war and what sorts of skills were valuable, which is why I chose that field,” he says. He stayed in a group home near Versailles, where the director made sure there was a Jewish atmosphere with Shabbos observance and Torah study. “That’s where I learned to lein,” he says.

At age 19, Samuel aged out of the group home, but no provisions were made to ease his transition into independent living. Looking for a Jewish environment where he could obtain room and board, he decided to ask the rabbinical college if he could live there, offering to pay them the stipend he was getting as a fourth-year student in ORT. They were so impressed that they offered to take him as a student. He declined: “I never considered my future to lie in the rabbinate.”

The college then offered to train him as a chazzan, although he objected that his voice was a good one, but not excellent. “Your voice is good enough,” they decided, and allowed him to enroll in classes in piano, voice, Hebrew and chazzanus, while simultaneously working as a technician. The result was that he learned proper Hebrew pronunciation, and became, in his own words, “a nice baal tefillah — not a great one, but nice.”

In 1954, aged 21, he decided to join his uncle in New York to continue his education, as there weren’t programs in Eretz Yisrael that would have allowed him to work while earning a university degree. At any rate, when he visited his mother in the Holy Land, he found that the Israelis were seeking chalutzim, not engineers. “I went to Sde Eliyahu, where there were many French olim, and saw people with higher degrees working on farms,” he says. “It wasn’t for me.

Having spent most of his school years in France, he arrived in the US identified as a French Jew. Nevertheless, he immediately gravitated toward American peers. “I didn’t consciously make a decision to hang out with the Americans, but the truth is that wherever I went, I gravitated toward the natives instead of the immigrants,” he says. “I think it helped me integrate better.”
HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Association) helped him find work, and he enrolled in Brooklyn College for a degree in electrical engineering. “The small companies cared more about competence, which I had, than a degree,” he says. “But jobs with large corporations required a diploma.” After eight and a half years of night school, he finally earned his. He still considers this a great achievement, but was disappointed that the degree didn’t do more for his career.

“Had I known, I wouldn’t have pushed myself to finish as fast as I did,” he says. “Yet one of my friends, who dropped out and went into business instead, later told me, ‘Maybe my bank account is larger, but you got a good education.’”

In the meantime, Samuel met the sister-in-law of a friend from shul. She was a survivor of Bergen-Belsen and from a Klausenberger family. But he was deeply disappointed when, after making inquiries, he was told she was only 14! He waited until he heard, two years later, that people had begun proposing shidduchim for her. At that point he stepped up to the plate, and the two were married when Shifra was 17, settling in Crown Heights. Her chassidic family requested that he exchange his gray hat for a black one, but that seemed a small price to pay for the girl he wanted to marry.

Samuel received a job offer shortly afterward to work in Stamford, CT, and off they went. But Stamford in the late 1950s had no Jewish infrastructure; the closest shul was two miles away, and they were the only Jews in the neighborhood. “We thought we could adapt, but we couldn’t,” he says. “After two years — as soon as we could afford to buy a house — we moved to Monsey.”
Jumping into Democracy The Colmans were now the proud owners of their first home — except they almost lost it.

“The local government had misinformed us about how much we’d have to pay in taxes,” Judge Colman explains. “They weren’t honest, because they were in cahoots with the builders. We found ourselves way over our heads in taxes.”

They managed to resolve their financial issues, but Colman wasn’t happy with the way things were run locally. In protest, he started a civic association. That morphed into a Democratic Club, which helped put a Democratic administration into office. Before he knew it, he was running for a part-time position as a Rockland County legislator. He won and thus began a long career in politics.

Terry Cohen, who’s editing Colman’s memoir, speculates, “Sam lived under so many unfair, repressive regimes that he wanted to bring fairness to others.” Colman’s wife Shifra was supportive of the move into politics, but admits it wasn’t always easy for her. “He had to be out in the evenings a lot or away in Albany,” she says.

In the early days in Monsey, few people believed a shomer Shabbos Jew could get elected to public office. “I told them that the voters who are anti-Semites don’t like any of us, shomer Shabbos or not,” Colman says, adding that most voters were not anti-Semitic. “I also said I would push hard to make sure yeshivos received their fair share of education tax money — not what the law allowed, but what the law insisted on.” He told the school board, “We Jews support you! For us, an educated public means less anti-Semitism.”

He served a few terms, becoming chairman of the legislature. And he tried hard to help his constituents; for example, when he learned of a widow who was living in her car because she’d skipped property-tax payments — having been unaware they were due — he changed the law to make sure people received notices whenever there was a problem. He was also active in establishing public transportation and day care in the county, after noticing plenty of able-bodied people who were willing to work but simply unable to get there for lack of transportation and/or child care.

Following this, Colman was elected to the New York State Assembly. This was a full-time job, and he spent 18 years in this position, becoming deputy majority leader.

“People would call us to ask for help, sometimes late at night,” Shifra recalls. “When Sam was away they assumed I’d serve as his secretary, instead of calling the office during business hours. But he was so dedicated; when I’d call him with the information he always got on it right away.”

During the Reagan years, Colman flew to Bitburg, Germany with a group of legislators to protest Reagan’s attendance at a cemetery known to include the graves of Nazi war criminals. Later, when Hillary Clinton ran for office as a New York State senator, she met privately with New York legislators to garner credibility. During the meeting, Colman challenged her about Jonathan Pollard’s excessive punishment. “I told her, ‘Pollard was sentenced unfairly, not as an American, but as a Jew,’  but she blamed it all on Senators Lieberman and Moynihan, saying they hadn’t objected.”

He then approached Senator Lieberman, in an attempt to get him involved, but Lieberman couldn’t be swayed; he told Colman he shouldn’t get himself involved in Pollard’s case. (The Algemeiner Journal carried a transcript of that conversation.)

After several terms in the Assembly, Colman decided to try for the next level of service, running for the position of county executive of Rockland County. But dirty politics destroyed his campaign: a rogue district attorney arrested his volunteer campaign treasurer on false charges and threatened to indict Colman as well. Colman was obliged to engage lawyer Nat Lewin to protect himself against an indictment. “Sam was innocent, but we had to borrow money and mortgage our house to pay for all the litigation,” Mrs. Colman says.

Bloodied but not knocked out, Colman returned to service in the New York State legislature. While he and his treasurer were vindicated, he had been badly burned by the experience and wanted to make sure other people wouldn’t be subjected to the same unjust tactics. “I worked hard in my last years there to reform the judicial system in New York,” he says. “Most prosecutors are honest. But some, out of ambition, abuse their power. When a grand jury meets, only the DA is there, not the defense. As they say in the business, ‘A DA can indict a ham sandwich.’”

When DAs accuse someone unfairly, they get off with no consequences, whereas the accused stands to lose his reputation even if he’s innocent (people usually assume indictment means guilt). Colman worked to change the law so that judges must tell jurors their job is not just to prove that someone who’s guilty should be prosecuted, but to make sure no one innocent should have to undergo trial. Today, a handbook for jurors that he helped create clearly states that jurors also have a duty to protect the innocent.

After 18 years of service, at age 70, Assemblyman Colman became Judge Colman, running unopposed for the position of judge in the Town of Ramapo. As a municipal judge, he dealt with misdemeanors — “Nothing that would require more than a year in jail,” he says. But since his court was the only court open after 5:00 p.m., he also got emergency cases of small claims, landlord-tenant disputes, family disputes, and criminal arraignments (including one for murder). He enjoyed his tenure and tried introducing new methods of dispensing justice, such as ordering mediation for disputes, or education and community service for vandals.

“There were two kids who did damage to the Holocaust Center of Rockland County,” he recounts. “They could have been put in jail, but they were kids who didn’t understand what they were doing. In their case, justice was better served by making them repaint the Center and learn something about the Holocaust. This sort of creative sentencing has to come from the judge, since the D.A. and the plaintiffs are only interested in punishment.”

Jenny Besh, who was the director of mediation for Westchester County for 19 years, says, “I dealt with many judges, but none were like Judge Colman. His mindset was all about restorative justice: Who was harmed, how can you repair it, and how do you prevent such incidents in the future?” Judge Colman would ask the defendants themselves for suggestions how to repair damages, or suggest they use mediation (which is optional and voluntary).

Mrs. Besh recalls that Judge Colman was very progressive, bringing an engineer’s problem-solving mindset to the bench. When young offenders were involved, he especially believed in trying to get them help early enough so that a life of crime would be staved off.

Believing that people should never stop evolving, he trained to be a mediator himself and obtained his license. “Everyone respected Sam,” Mrs. Besh says. “They sensed his essential goodness, even when they themselves lacked it.”

Colman served as a judge for eight years before hanging up his robe. Now retired, he keeps busy with writing, daf yomi, kollel, pitching in with his wife’s bikur cholim work, and running a book club that reads nonfiction works.

For all his impressive work for the community, he claims his proudest achievement is his family: three children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them solid Torah families. He still finds it miraculous that he managed to hold on to Jewish observance despite being thrown from one end of Europe to Asia and back again, and has the satisfaction of knowing that he did his best to pay forward all the good that was done for him.

“When people read my memoir, I want them to see that you should go after your goals,” he says. “You become successful and happy by overcoming obstacles and achieving results. Even if it means making less money, a person should lead a meaningful life, following mitzvos, and doing for his country and the world.” He entitled his book Lifted From the Trash Heaps, after a pasuk in Tehillim (113:7), for he believes Hashem lifted him from dire straits to a full and fulfilling Jewish life.

Sitting in his office, surrounded by family photos, books, and memorabilia of his career, Judge Colman is living proof that his formula for the good life is right on target.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 747)