Can you discuss the struggles you encountered as a rabbi and communal leader during the civil rights movement?
Rav Zevulun Charlop: There was a time in the Bronx when we had a wonderful Jewish community, with many Yiddish-speaking homes, and excellent public schools available – Clinton High School, and Bronx High School of Science, which had an overwhelmingly Jewish enrollment. The general community was exceptional as well. It was 25% Jewish, 25% Irish, and a strong Italian and German community as well.
But there were minority populations in adjacent and not-so-adjacent neighborhoods who were economically behind. Their young ones possibly suffered most of all from comparatively poor to abysmal education. In order to ameliorate the situation, the city wanted to start bussing these students into our neighborhood, and the neighborhood was very opposed to the move. There was a very powerful and liberal Jewish communal leader who said we have to show our Jewish liberalism and humanity, and we can’t be opposed to bussing. So we met in my eminent neighbor R. Herschel Schacter’s shul, the Mosholu Jewish Center, and the two speakers who represented the community were R. Herschel Schacter and me. The place was packed; there must have been three or four hundred people. We started to espouse the liberal position, to say that if we Jews are allowed into schools, how can we keep the blacks out? And then I told a story:
There was a soldier in the Second World War, stationed in Pennsylvania. He had boots that were old and shoddy, and he had to get them repaired. So he went to a small town in Pennsylvania that had a shoemaker and gave his boots to the shoemaker and said, “I’ll come back for them in two days; can you be finished by that time?” The shoemaker said, “Yes,” and he gave the soldier a ticket for his boots. The soldier returned to his base at three o’ clock in the morning only to discover that he was slated to immediately leave Pennsylvania and go to a port in Brooklyn, which he couldn’t tell anybody because “loose lips sink ships.” Eventually, he was sent off to Europe and he remained there for several years. After returning to the U.S. he became a salesman. At some point, twenty to twenty-five years later, his route was changed, and he suddenly realized: His new route passes through the town where he gave in his boots to be repaired! When he came to that area, he rushed to that town and searched for the shoemaker, who was still there! Upon arriving at the shop, the soldier pulled the ticket out of his wallet and gave it to the shoemaker. Without indicating any surprise or anything unusual, the shoemaker went to the back of the store, stayed there for a few minutes, and when he emerged, he said, “I’m sorry, they’re not ready yet. Can you come back tomorrow?”
With that introduction, I said, “We promised the dignity of man. The Founding Fathers who allowed slavery knew it was a cancer, but they didn’t have any other way of getting this country going. Hundreds of thousands of blacks died in the Civil War, the First World War, and the Second World War. We had the Thirteenth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment and then we had the Warren decision… After all of these things, you want us to say to them, ‘come back tomorrow?’”
The frenzy in the eyes and faces of those Jews was indescribable. The rage in their eyes seemed to cry out, “Traitor!” Here I was, a respected member of the community. R. Schacter essentially said the same thing as me, and they wanted to figuratively lynch us! (Not literally, figuratively.) If you saw the frenzy in that crowd - how the Jews felt betrayed…
Within two to three years, Jews were gone from the community, and with them went the Talmud Torahs and Hebrew schools, and much of the social life of the Jews. Synagogues once brimming were emptying. The Jewish flight from the Bronx was in full force! That’s what the battle cost us.
