They found their calling more than half a century ago, and despite the usual life challenges of the intervening years, they’re still at it when most people are long retired.
Gold standard
In half a century a lot can change in a high school, but one thing has always been dependable at Baltimore’s Talmudical Academy: Mrs. Reva Gold would always be in the office, taking care of “her boys” — from plying them with coffee and snacks to proofreading their essays
By Margie Pensak
Riiiing! It’s 11:15 a.m., and Mrs. Reva Gold, the indefatigable secretary at Baltimore’s Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim Talmudical Academy, gives me a knowing look. “That’s the recess bell,” she warns in her Southern drawl. “It’s going to get mobbed in here!”
Seconds later, several talmidim pile into her office. “Hi, Mrs. Gold! Can I have a Band-Aid?” “Mrs. Gold, is anyone leaving now? I need a ride home.” “Mrs. Gold, can I please use the phone?” “Good morning, Mrs. Gold! Can I have a cup for coffee?” The organized and efficiently run office that serves a middle school and high school suddenly morphs into a friendly, inviting, and warm teenage oasis, as it has for close to half a century. This is just one opportunity for which the students have earned the privilege of using the menahel’s Keurig coffeemaker in the adjoining office.
This spunky, stylish native Baltimorean worked for the city’s Department of Education and for the Air Force before landing her job as the middle/high school secretary at TA. That was back in 1966, when the Vietnam War was in full swing and a gallon of gas cost 32 cents. The current school campus had not yet been purchased, and the 60 or so talmidim were learning in Bnai Jacob Shaarei Zion Congregation.
Shortly after, the yeshivah moved to its present campus.
“When we moved to this campus, I was the first person here. The dorming boys were lined up to get rooms, but this was all new to them, and to me as well. But I stayed to make sure everything ran smoothly… and stayed, and stayed, and stayed, and it has been the happiest time of my life.”
Mrs. Gold is contemplating retiring in July, her 50th anniversary at TA, while the yeshivah is in the midst of a capital campaign for its expanded 11.5-acre campus as the milestone approaches.
Although administrators and staff members have come and gone in that half-century, Mrs. Gold maintains that “everything is the same; nothing has changed. The same intercom system is used to speak to teachers in their classrooms. True, I have a computer now and although some of the high-tech stuff I can do, like answer e-mails, I love to do everything the old-fashioned way. I’d rather write notes to teachers and have them delivered, so I can be sure they get it.”
What makes this great-grandmother stay at the same job for 50 years? “I love the children. I love to help them out. I just feel good with them, that’s all,” responds the four-foot-eight petite flaming redhead with a bun in the back. “I like to take care of the boys and make them happy… I’m not a disciplinarian at all. I’m not strict with my own children. I let the boys get away with murder.”
Mrs. Gold is not only the students’ surrogate mother, she is their bubby, friend, psychologist, nurse, and pharmacist — nurturing them as she provides a sensitive touch for everything from Tylenol and Band-Aids (and pretzels, if need be) to a confidante’s ear. She knows the 150 high schoolers by name, and where most of the approximately 40 dormers are from.
After her hip surgery over a year ago, Mrs. Gold cut down on her hours. She used to get to work at 6 a.m. and officially stay until the end of the school day at 4, although she’d often be found after hours as well. Mrs. Gold used to take her work home with her, especially when she had to get the report cards out (this was before they were computer-generated).
“I come in early to do a lot of my paperwork, because when the kids are here for recess and all that, you can’t do anything,” explains Mrs. Gold, who now opens the office at 7 a.m. and leaves at 1.
The seniors that I schmoozed with in Mrs. Gold’s office told me it’s the little things that Mrs. Gold does on a day-to-day basis, on top of her professional responsibilities, that endear her to “her boys” —everything from plying them with hot coffee, snacks, and hand cream — all of which she insists on paying for out of pocket, even though the school would reimburse her — to helping them fill out driver learner permit forms and proofreading their essays before they submit them. When students come to her upset about not getting good marks, she tells them the main thing is that they are trying; they feel better after talking to her.
“She calls them ‘my boys,’ ” notes Rabbi Yisroel Fuchs, menahel of the high school. “Over the years, she has had an effect on the boys, sometimes even more powerful than their rebbeim and teachers… She’s a mussar to all of us, showing what it means to be dedicated. She’s loyal to the bone, still buying coffee for the last 50 years, out of her pocket.”
Rabbi Menachem Gold (no relation), TA’s former high school English principal who worked with Mrs. Gold from 1987 through 1997, told how Mrs. Gold volunteered to proctor the SATs on a Sunday in 1986. That day, there was a terrible ice storm; the test was postponed and a sign was posted on the school door to announce this. Meanwhile, a mother who was dropping off her son for the test got out of the car and fell and broke her leg. She sued TA, the SAT testing service, and Mrs. Gold, since she was the one supervising. During the trial, Mrs. Gold was badgered by a very tough, aggressive lawyer. She looked at him squarely in the eyes and said, “I just do this for my boys at the TA.”
The warm feelings that the almost-octogenarian has for the talmidim and the TA staff are mutual. You can tell by looking at the several plaques, cards, and gifts that grace her office and the dedicated “TA wall” in her house, from the yearly birthday party they throw for her, and the trip to Israel that she and her husband, Henry a”h, were given in commemoration of her 25th anniversary at TA.
“I always say, when I die, I want everything they gave me packed up and put in my casket,” she says. “Money, I’ll never have — but I have a lot of nachas from this place. I’m going to ask if I can volunteer at TA after I retire. It’s my family.”
Era of the Chaz
Sherwood Goffin was a popular Jewish folksinger of the ’60s and the guitar-strumming voice of Soviet Jewry when he became chazzan at the fledgling Lincoln Square Synagogue, where newcomers would not only learn about tefillah, they would connect to tradition through Reb Sherwood’s powerful voice and sweet niggunim
By Baila Rosenbaum
Life is full of surprises and Sherwood Goffin, long-time chazzan at the Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan, can attest to that.
“You never know where Hashem is going to guide you. I was supposed to be a psychologist,” he says. “Instead I became the chazzan for the most dynamic shul in the world. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. Hashem’s guiding you — you’ve got to let it happen.”
Goffin has a youthful and melodious voice that belies his age. Affectionately referred to as “The Chaz,” he never dreamed he’d spend 50 years of his life as a chazzan.
“I was in school studying psychology, my wife and I were young marrieds, and we needed income — so I took a job as a chazzan in small Bronx congregation,” he says. At the time, Goffin was enjoying success as a Jewish folksinger, doing gigs on weekends and traveling to communities across America to perform. From 1961 to 1995, Goffin sang on major stages around the world, recorded six albums, and was known as the “Voice of Soviet Jewry,” singing at all the major Soviet Jewry and UN Solidarity Day rallies in support of Russian Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1965, Lincoln Square was a new shul on Manhattan’s West Side, bordering on the seedy area then known as Hell’s Kitchen. Lincoln Center had just been built and the once blighted neighborhood of Lincoln Square was becoming a cultural hub, and a magnet for young families and singles who were rapidly filling the new and renovated apartment buildings going up all around. The members of this new shul didn’t have much Jewish knowledge background, and a voice and persona like Sherwood Goffin’s would give the fledgling congregation a positive davening experience.
“I’m really a baal menagen as opposed to a cantor,” Goffin explains. “I don’t have a deep, heavy, cantorial style. My style was light and youthful, and I had been successful in popularizing the niggunim of my rebbe, the Bostoner Rebbe ztz”l of Brooklyn. So after consulting the Rebbe, my wife and I decided to give it a try.”
In those years, there were no other shuls featuring beginner’s minyanim, adult education, or kiruv initiatives. Lincoln Square Synagogue was a trailblazer and it drew in Jews seeking a spiritual home.
“After two years I realized that this had ‘chiyus.’ I put psychology on hold and got a degree in cantorial studies at Yeshiva University,” says Goffin. On the advice of his rebbe, Goffin founded the LSS Feldman Hebrew School, to reach out and educate unaffiliated youth. The Hebrew school was equally successful, growing along with the shul.
In 1995, tired of travel, Goffin gave up performing concerts. His next stop was the world of academia, becoming outreach coordinator for the Belz School of Jewish Music at Yeshiva University, where he had been teaching college-level classes in Jewish liturgy and folk music since 1987. He is the honorary and past president of the Cantorial Council of America, the only Orthodox organization of cantors in the world.
Goffin’s passion is nusach hatefillah and he is universally accepted as an expert in nusach, lecturing widely on the subject all over the US. A regular day finds him fielding e-mails from chazzanim, rabbis, and students with questions about davening and nusach, and he is often asked to speak as scholar-in-residence in shuls throughout the region.
“I’m concerned with the preservation of nusach hatefillah. Nusach is something you can’t change. It’s a mesorah.”
The way we daven has been handed down for generations and Goffin wants to ensure it continues to be handed down accurately to further generations.
Though every tefillah is significant to Goffin, he says that for himself, Ne’ilah is the most enjoyable davening of the year. During this last hour, as the gates are closing, he and the entire kehillah must find a path to beseech HaKadosh Baruch Hu to forgive and to grant a good and healthy year.
“It’s a holy and frightening moment,” he admits. “It’s truly the one time above all that I am totally immersed in my tefillah — undistracted by anything outside my tallis and not worrying about the quality of my voice — just connected to my G-d and His People.”
As a young student of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, Goffin was a ben bayis of Rav Moshe Horowitz, the first Bostoner Rebbe of New York, who passed away in 1985. “The zemiros at the Rebbe’s Shabbos table were an out-of-this-world experience,” he says, but it was the Rebbe’s davening that had the greatest impact on him. As an all-American boy, he had never been exposed to davening of such intensity. “It ran the gamut of emotions — from pleading and desperation to joy and jubilation.” Even today, he feels his Rebbe’s presence beside him at the bimah. “I only know one way to daven — the way the Rebbe taught me so many years ago. It permeates everything I do, everything I sing. The Rebbe ztz”l is alive in my voice and my kavanah every time I stand at the amud.”
About three years ago, at nearly the half a century mark, Goffin decided it was time to scale back. This past year’s tefillos of the Yamim Noraim were Sherwood Goffin’s last. At the shul’s request, he will maintain his office and continue some teaching duties, but will return as chazzan only for Kol Nidrei and Ne’ilah. This Shabbos Chanukah will mark the end of his 50-year tenure at the bimah of Lincoln Square Synagogue.
Although his official term of office comes to a close, Sherwood Goffin is far from finished with his work. “My passion is davening — communicating with HaKadosh Baruch Hu — and my goal is to continue to teach people around the world how to communicate better with Him.”
Booked for Life
Back in the ’50s, Rebbetzin Faigy Kupetz taught a Bnos group on Shabbos and had the same girls in school during the week. But while the landscape of education has changed over six decades, her classroom hasn’t: it’s still about clear thinking, words of inspiration, and lots of love
By Riki Goldstein
When Faigy Segal was a little girl, she played out her dream of being a teacher by putting open siddurim all around the living room and turning the pages for her invisible pupils as she “davened” with them. A daughter of the famed Manchester Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yehuda Zev Segal ztz”l, Rebbetzin Faigy Kupetz tries to work out in which year she fulfilled her dream and actually began teaching. “In 1955 or ’56,” she estimates.
The young Miss Segal taught in the kindergarten of Broughton Jewish Primary School for a year, and then did some private tutoring before accepting a full-time job in Yesodei Hatorah — or “Jewish Day,” as it’s known locally — which was in a building next to the Manchester yeshivah. Nearly six decades later, she’s still at the head of the class.
Back in the ’50s, the idealistic teacher led a Bnos group on Shabbos and taught the same girls at school during the week. “They called me by my name on Shabbos, and Miss Segal during the week. Could you imagine children doing that nowadays?” she laughs.
In those early years, Rabbi Yisroel Ehrentrau was the school’s principal. “I remember him standing in the driveway looking at his watch. ‘Miss Segal, you are one and a half minutes late.’ Well, I learned to come on time, and I try to train my pupils too.”
A few years down the line, Rebbetzin Kupetz took a short break from teaching when her children were little, “and then the school asked me to return to teaching. People said, ‘You can’t,’ but I said, ‘Maybe I can,’ and I went back. With my first wages I then bought a stroller that I could take on the bus, and I put my youngest in the school kindergarten,” says the Rebbetzin, who still has that energetic and upbeat personality and endearingly broad Manchester accent.
Married to eminent Manchester personality Rav Moshe Kupetz, the Rebbetzin’s house is a hub of Torah and shiurim. “When I meet a rosh kollel and he says to me, ‘Mrs. Kupetz, I still remember what you taught me,’ that’s a lot of nachas,” she says.
Rebbetzin Kupetz has taught both boys’ and girls’ classes over the years, and her favorite subject is Chumash-Rashi. “I received my father’s guidance on this, right at the beginning. The first teaching advice he gave me was ‘they have to understand it.’ The way the children learn Chumash is how they will approach other learning, and for the boys, that means Gemara. They have to be absolutely clear on what is happening in the pasuk — who is talking to whom, what is being said. That’s how they’ll come to enjoy learning.” And never underestimate the child’s ability to misunderstand. The Rebbetzin once asked her class the meaning of “Amen” and one boy confidently responded, “It means ‘Cong’ — I saw it in the English siddur.”
Lessons for Living
Rebbetzin Kupetz has always run her classroom with life and energy. Today, she says, “My teaching style has stayed roughly the same, but the responsibility is perhaps greater than ever today. You cannot take even basic emunah for granted today, so the teacher must speak about the Ribbono shel Olam a lot.” And probably every one of Rebbetzin Kupetz’s thousands of students can recall her oft-asked, signature question. “Children, what is the best thing that has ever happened to you?” And the answer, she explains, soon becomes clear to them. “To have been born an erlich Yid, into a family which understands the value of Torah and mitzvos.”
What is the best motivation for students? “An interesting lesson,” says this veteran unequivocally. “Nothing like it.” Stories are a major part of Mrs. Kupetz’s arsenal, and she feels that no educator should be without a good stock of tales. “Shochad also has its place in the classroom, and so does a lot of praise. We have star charts, and I give a small prize to each child whenever he finishes his row of stars. However small the prize is, it’s important to the children because it comes from the teacher. I’ll tell you what I had the other day. My boys were habitually coming late, and I was sick and tired of it. So I told them that the next day was Rosh Chodesh, and I’d be giving out cake. Anyone who was late would remain outside the class and miss it. Lo and behold, every boy was there on time. For a piece of cake! Because it was cake from the teacher.”
Today the school is under the leadership of Rabbi Yonason Yodaiken, and housed in an attractive campus on Bury New Road in Prestwich, with buildings added to accommodate the burgeoning numbers of students. The boys’ and girls’ sections now function as two separate schools on one campus. Yet Rebbetzin Kupetz’s classroom is still set up in traditional fashion. “I like the desks set up in formal rows, two children to a desk. I find they learn better that way than seated at large tables.”
As someone who has been actively involved in chinuch for 60 years, Rebbetzin Kupetz doesn’t deny that children have changed. “It is a different dor, a generation surrounded by materialism which our own children never dreamed of. ‘Things’ have become very important in their lives, and generally this means the children are more demanding and perhaps less able to listen.”
In response, teachers have had to change too. “Of course, we always loved the children. Beneath a teacher’s firmness was always a love of the child. That hasn’t changed. But in the past we were stricter and more distant, while today a teacher has to appear softer and more loving. The love has to be continually shown and demonstrated. The children need it.”
With all the increased luxuries available, there is one thing Rebbetzin Kupetz feels that today’s children are sorely lacking: Sleep. “Children used to have a reasonable bedtime, like seven o’clock for the younger ones, and it was kept. Today they are always tired, and many are not eating the right foods. How can you think straight if you’re tired?”
Rebbetzin Kupetz still does the ten-minute drive through morning traffic to Jewish Day every day, but this year she’s teaching Chumash-Rashi to a group of seven-year old boys, instead of her usual class of girls. “I feel like I’m on holiday without all that marking,” she says. “But I’m still teaching, and I still love it.”
Patience for Patients
Mrs Nechama Ariel came to the US as a refugee, after hiding under the floorboards of a righteous family. Within four years, she accrued a high school diploma, college degree, and a job at Maimonides Hospital — where she’s been a staff celebrity for six decades
By Ahava Ehrenpreis
In 1950, when Nechama Singer — a 21-year-old immigrant and Holocaust survivor — graduated Hunter College with a degree in chemistry, her first job was at Maimonides Hospital. Sixty-five years later, after having been employed as a lab technician, researcher, and later as an interpreter, she’s still on staff part-time, and even the orderlies greet her warmly as “Nechama.” We’re sitting in the hospital cafeteria where Nechama Singer Ariel has invited me for lunch, and it feels like I’m dining with a celebrity — we’re greeted by passersby in the hall, in the elevator, and by people who stop by our table, from senior doctors and administrators to the gentleman clearing the trays.
We returned to Mrs. Ariel’s first-floor office where — dignified in her white lab coat — she gave me both a tour of the memorabilia on her desk and walls, and a walk through her own personal history.
She recalls how in 1942 her father was murdered in a pogrom in their Polish village of Vladimir-Volynski. She and her mother were hidden, initially by a Polish couple and then, for the next 15 months, by a Greek-Orthodox family. They lived in a hole under the floorboards of a room where the cow and goat were sheltered in the winter. Nechama went on to detail how the Vavrisevich brothers Mikhail and Nikolai, then aged 18 and 16, had together with their parents taken them in — with five other Jews — at constant risk to their own lives.
The two brothers bore a huge burden: If there was more smoke coming out of the chimney than usual, the neighbors would wonder why Mrs. Vavrisevich was baking so much bread. If they drew more water than usual from the well, the neighbors might get suspicious that extra people are drinking and bathing. The brothers also dug up enough potatoes and beets for Nechama and her mother to observe Pesach without chometz, and helped them keep Shabbos as well.
Fifty-five years later, in 1997, Mikhail and Nikolai, then 73 and 71, had an emotional reunion when the Ariels — together with the Jewish Federation for the Righteous — brought the Vavrisevich family to New York.
“They stayed with us for six weeks,” says Mrs. Ariel, who sends money to the brothers on a regular basis, mentioning that the emotional reunion made it to the pages of the New York Times. “Mikhail was nearly blind in one eye when they arrived. I took him to Dr. Norman Safra in Maimonides, who operated on him, and I was also able to get medicine for him that would have been very expensive.” It’s all she can do for the brothers who treated her and her mother as humans when they could have been shot on the street.
First and Last Job
When Mrs. Ariel arrived in New York in 1946, she was 17 and didn’t speak a word of English, but was determined to build a new life. “I went to New Utrecht High School in the daytime and took ‘English for Educated Foreigners’ at night. I didn’t even know what the Regents were, but I took them and passed.” She learned that Hunter College was free, and graduated in a year and half in premed and chemistry.
With a coveted college diploma, Nechama looked for a job. “I saw an ad for Maimonides Hospital. When they heard that I was shomer Shabbos they turned me down.” But Nechama was undaunted and when she saw a second ad for a position at Maimonides, she applied again and was hired. This time she didn’t make an issue of Shabbos — she just didn’t show up. “But I always made up the time on Sunday, and I worked all the non-Jewish holidays.” They obviously didn’t mind — within a year she was promoted to the research department.
Nechama married Mr. Harry Ariel, and after giving birth to a son, the couple moved to Israel for two years where Harry worked as a nuclear engineer for Israel Aircraft Industries. When they returned, Mrs. Ariel discovered the Maimonides research budget had been cut, but she secured a position as a physician’s assistant .
At her husband’s urging she took early retirement, but she was still involved with the hospital activities. “I was doing a walk for the March of Dimes with the Maimonides employees, and the head of human resources was trying to communicate with the driver from the hospital, who only spoke Russian. Now, I speak four languages fluently — Polish, Russian, English, and Yiddish — and I can communicate in several others. I translated for her and she said, ‘Why don’t you come work for us?’ ”
And that’s how Mrs. Ariel began her second career in Maimonides. A government requirement that a patient must have someone in the hospital who speaks his language meant that translators were necessary for the large immigrant and foreign population who make use of Maimonides, the largest hospital in South Brooklyn. She trains Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Spanish translators in the skill of simultaneous interpretation.
Mrs. Ariel explains that a translator’s role is much more than giving over the meaning of words. In the hospital, it means sensitivity and diplomacy.
“I was interpreting for a Russian man from Leningrad who took one look at the very tall, handsome young black doctor on duty and said to me, ‘He should be playing basketball. He’s not going to be my doctor!’
“I told the doctor, ‘He thinks you look very young and he also thinks you would be great at basketball.’ The doctor said he should let the patient give him a chance to help him, and in the end, not only was the Russian healed, but they became good friends.”
In the past few years since suffering a stroke, Mrs. Ariel has cut down her work to two and a half days a week, but she’s always on call if needed. And in more than 60 years with the hospital, she’s seen major changes since the days when they wouldn’t hire her for being a Shabbos observer. A few years ago when she and her son, Dr. Yitzchak Ariel (a highly regarded infectious disease specialist in Brooklyn) were walking back home on Yom Kippur night on a route that took them past the hospital. He suggested that they stop so she could rest in the lobby and he would visit a patient. Then a large group of chassidim came out, after having made a Kol Nidrei minyan for someone in ICU. “That’s Maimonides for you,” she says with the pride of someone who’s watched “her” hospital flourish for over half a century.
Milk and Honey
Over the last seven decades, Reb Yosef Herzl’s famous Antwerp dairy has modernized from a few pitchers and a burner to a streamlined production line, but for him, some things never change — he still does the books with pencil and ledger, and no modern technology can take away the heimish quality he’s been safeguarding for years
By David Damen
Reb Yosef Herzl still gets up early every morning and heads for the state-of-the-art Herzl & Gold dairy plant that provides chalav Yisrael products for Jews all over Europe, but for him it wasn’t that long ago (“nu, what’s 65 years?) that this Antwerp dairy consisted of a few pitchers and one burner.
If Reb Yossel considers himself an old-timer in the dairy business, it’s his wife who really holds the record. Seventy years ago, when the dairy was established by Reb Yitzchak Hersch Seidenfeld and Reb Shlomo Leib Gold, Mrs. Herzl — a relative of the Seidenfelds — was then a young girl who had the position of mashgichah in the cowsheds. Four years later, she married Reb Yosef Herzl, who took his place in the partnership after the Seidenfelds emigrated to the United States.
Meanwhile, although nearly 70 years have passed and Reb Shlomo Leib Gold has long passed on from This World, the partnership between the Gold and Herzl families is still strong. While the business began with door-to-door delivery for a few clients, today the company employs the second and third generations of two families and provides fresh milk and dairy products under the name “Hergo” to Jewish homes all over Europe, from England to Greece. And despite all the new competitors that have emerged, many still assert that there is nothing like the home-style flavor of Herzl & Gold, the only dairy in Europe under Jewish ownership.
Reb Yossel and his wife take a sweeping look around the factory. How much has really changed? “In those days,” Reb Yossel recalls, “we would fill pitchers and arrange them in a circle around a burner, and that’s how it stayed all night. In the morning we came to see if the milk had hardened or had just gone sour. Often, the entire batch was sour.
“From there, we would go door to door on bikes that had a cart affixed to the front, selling chalav Yisrael milk. Before then, Jews would go straight to the cow farm, which was not far from here, and would bring milk back themselves.”
Reb Yossel and his partner back then, Reb Shlomo Leib, alternated days between riding the delivery bike and serving customers at the store. The store at the time had very few dairy products — cheese and butter. Today the plant produces dozens of dairy products in contemporary, attractive packages, but Reb Yossel reminisces about how they used to empty out water bottles in order to fill them with milk for customers.
About ten years after production started, it became necessary to build a proper factory. Today’s plant is still on the same site, although the machinery has been replaced several times throughout the years by more advanced, efficient models.
I once asked Reb Yossel where he learned the secrets of the trade, and the answer then was the same as now: “In yeshivah…” In other words, he’s self-trained and has always been in tune with the reactions and feedback from customers in the Belzer shtiebel where both partners davened.
“At first,” Reb Yossel says, “we went to the big factories as mashgichim, where we learned the secrets of the trade. We tasted, we got feedback, played here and there with tastes and additives, until the final product emerged.”
Maybe today that’s not the best way to professionalize your business, but for Reb Yosef Herzl and Reb Sholom Leib Gold, it was how they took a family-based enterprise and turned it into a large industrial concept. The “secrets” may have come from the yeshivah, but the owners have become experts in the entire production process — pasteurization, separation, and chemical reactions. The top floor of the factory features a sophisticated laboratory where packages and products are frequently tested.
Still the Same
Reb Yossel is not a man of change. Despite the many years that have passed, he still maintains more or less the same daily schedule. True, he no longer runs from house to house selling bottles of milk, but he’s at the factory first thing each morning to make sure the production line is running smoothly. From there he goes to the retail store — located adjacent to the famous Kleinblatt Bakery — in order to manage the books, just like he’s been doing for the last seven decades. Papers and pens are still the dominant tools of the trade around here. Reb Yossel is not the type to capitulate to the rigors of computerization.
In recent years, as Reb Yossel has been able to rely on the competent management of the second generation, he’s allowed himself to cut back on his work hours and now spends his afternoons learning in the nearby Belzer shtiebel.
Reb Yossel attributes the factory’s success to the special siyata d’Shmaya that has accompanied him since those days when he was left entirely alone after the Holocaust. He says his rehabilitation was nothing short of miraculous, his gratitude unending for the beautiful family he established, including sons and sons-in-law who are talmidei chachamim of repute. He considers the continued success of the dairy in today’s brutal global economy another miracle in a long chain.
One thing that hasn’t changed in all that time is the dairy farm. “For the last 70 years we’ve been milking there. We’ve cared for generations of cows.”
Reb Yossel doesn’t like to waste time, and our conversation is frequently interrupted by multilingual phone calls, which he responds to in any of the many languages that he speaks fluently. And despite his age and new managers, he’s still clearly in charge.
Has Reb Yossel ever considered leaving the factory to seek another occupation?
It’s a good question, Reb Yossel notes. For several decades, the diamond bourse was the primary place of employment for Antwerp’s Jews. Earning a livelihood there was a clean, dignified job, with built-in success. It was the place where many of Antwerp’s Jews created their wealth.
“But I wasn’t suited for that kind of profession by nature,” Reb Yossel admits.
And he has no regrets. Belgium has been pushed off the top line of the diamond business by India, but there’s no substitute for a cold glass of milk with a fresh cheese Danish.
