A  Remarkable Coincidence or Going Back Seventy Years

   I spent most of last week in New York, probably my last visit to the place where, as a 12-year old, I began my life in the US on March 10, 1939. On this NY visit, (son) Mark and (daughter) Ellie, were together for the first time since forever, just by ourselves, sans familles.  One thing I wanted to do on that trip was to go to the house to which my family moved in 1941 and where I lived all through high school: 4037 77^th Street, Jackson Heights. That was also the address to which my letters to my parents were sent during my year in the Navy. We had been the first tenants of our apartment (5D, I believe), since the building had just been completed. (That suited my mother who was not happy with the cockroaches in the elderly Manhattan building we had previously occupied.)

   From looking at the apartment house—not transcendently interesting—we went on to the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, not far away, though I didn’t remember it to be so close to our house. The building we found was correctly labeled, but quite different and more modern and much smaller than the one I remembered. I was puzzled and the three of us were talking when a couple came out and engaged us in conversation. It turned out that he was the president of the synagogue and told us that, with a congregation that had become much smaller, the original building had been sold and this more modern, small multi-purpose building replaced it.

   I told them that I was not only a member of the synagogue choir during my years in high school, but conducted it on Friday nights, when Felix Alt, the adult director, was playing the organ, facing away from the singers. I was more generally active in the Jewish Center and once actually wrote a long “refutation” of a sermon the Rabbi, Theodore Friedman,  had given.  I wish I still had a copy. Because Brooklyn Tech, my high school, was then all boys and because, as an all-city school the students came from many neighborhoods, near and far, the Jewish Center was the locus of my social life as well.

   Our conservation continued as we went inside the building, where we faced an impressive brass plaque listing a considerable number of members of the congregation who had served in World War II, with a star next to those who had fallen in the war. And there I was, in alphabetical order: WEINGARTNER, RUDOLPH H. in splendid raised letters in bronze, just under a half inch high. That plaque was probably put there sixty or more years ago—but knowledge of its existence only reached me a few days ago.

   Looking at the house I had moved into seventy years ago did not particularly affect me. The unexpected encounter with the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, however, most definitely made me ruminate about my many hours spent there very long ago.

  

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