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Today is September 26th, 2023. My name is Joshua Furman. I'm the curator of the Joan and Stanford Alexander South Texas Jewish Archives at Rice University.

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I'm joined today by David Bell. David, how are you? Doing well. Excellent. It is an honor to be with you to chat about your family's history. So let me start by asking you to tell us when and where you were born.

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I was born on September 12th, 1949, in Houston at St. Joseph's Hospital. Great. And, um, can you tell us, um, your parents’ names and the names of any siblings you have? My parents were Edith and Meyer Bell,

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and my sister's name is Roslyn. Uh, still goes by Roslyn Bell at this point. She's three years older than me, and she lives in New Jersey. Fantastic. Tell us about your family's roots in Texas, starting on your

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mother's side. Your mother, Edith, with the Kornblith family. So I will do that. And I'll start a little bit before that with my grandparents, if that's okay. So my grandparents on my mother's side were Isaac and

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Bessie Kornblith. Bessie Kornblith's parents also came to America. Their names were Gittel and Pinchas Sussels. Although I've seen documentation that Gittel became Gertrude and Pinchas

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became Paul. So we can use either terms. But my great grandparents did immigrate to the United States, as did my grandmother Bessie, and all of them are buried here in Houston. Um, my great grandmother.

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I'll start with, uh. I'm going to cheat a little bit because some of the dates I don't remember exactly, but Gittel Sussels my great grandmother was born in 1838, uh, we believe in Hungary.

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And she was Gittel Baldinger Sussels was her name after she got married. She died in 1934, which makes it interesting because she lived to 96, which is fairly remarkable in that era to live almost the entire century. And there was a document that I found just very recently that

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Gittel Sussels, when she passed away, was the oldest living Jew in Houston. If it's true or not, I can't be sure, but there was an article that said that her husband, Pinchas Sussels, also known as Paul, was born in 1850 and he was born in Austria-Hungary in a town

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called Saravazo. It is now Romania, and what I want to say is what you've noticed is that if Gittel was born in 1838 and Pinchas was born in 1850, that's a fairly unusual circumstance that the wife would be 12 years older than the husband.

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So I did a little bit more research, and I found another document that said that Gittel was born not in 1838, but in 1852. So we have competing narratives on Gittel birth. I think maybe the 1852 might be more correct.

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It certainly is more logical that she'd be two years younger than her husband, rather than 12 years older. In any case, they ultimately made it to America. Now let's move on to Bessie Sussels Kornblith.

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That was their daughter, my grandmother, and she was born in Hungaria Saravazo, the same city that Pinchas lived his life in. That particular town is now in Romania.

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She was born in 1879 and arrived in America in 1891 at the age of 12, presumably with her parents, but I'm not sure about that. When she died in 1974, she was 94 years old, very similar to her mother.

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And what we've been told is that she was the oldest living member from Beth Yeshurun at that time, so that's fairly remarkable that both of them were the oldest of oldest, a slightly different category, but still lived to a ripe old age. Those are some very good genes.

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Very, very good genes. I hope we replicate them. So Bessie Sussels, married Isaac Kornblith, uh, he was born in Galicia, in the Austrian Empire, in a town called Baranov, uh, from what I could tell.

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Again, these are from documents, ancestry documents and other documents. He was born in 1870, making him nine years older than her. He arrived in America in 1889 and they were married in 1897. She was 18 years old.

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So of my four grandparents. I'll get to my father's side in a minute. But of my four grandparents, only Bessie Kornblith was a meaningful part of my life because I was born in 1949 and my paternal

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grandparents died before I was born. And my maternal grandfather, Isaac Kornblith, died when I was one year old, whereas Bessie lived another 25 years until 1974. Bessie always lived with us.

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Uh, she lived with my parents, lived with her when they got married, and she lived with us when my parents bought their first home and her husband had died. And she lived with us for the rest of her life. So my mother and my grandmother were pretty inseparable for all their life.

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Now, Bessie Kornblith was an interesting person because she was the quintessential matriarch of a family, that she had multiple children, 6, I believe, and many, many grandchildren and great grandchildren. And every one of my cousins who are still living and those who are not

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still living always remember, uh, Grandma Bessie as the matriarch very, very fondly. Rosalind, my sister and I called her Bubby, whereas all the other grandchildren called her grandma. Uh, but she lived with us, so we had the privilege of having her.

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Isaac Kornblith was a businessman. We believe he owned a tire shop. Uh, they built a home in 1917, uh, on the corner of Dallas and Chartres, which is essentially right behind the George Brown

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Center where that is today. That house actually stood until a few years ago. We the family sold it in 1970. Had we kept it a little bit longer?

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Uh, it would have been fortuitous financially, because the neighborhood became very popular, particularly when they put a convention center right next door to it. But be that as it may, uh, the house still stood for a long time. It was owned for a while by a electric company.

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There was a bakery there. Uh, there was a residence there for a while. And at the end of the day, uh, it was a very, very important homestead for the whole family.

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We referred to it as 2002, because 2002 was the address on Dallas Avenue, and my mother used to say that she and all of her sisters were courted on the patio or the porch, the veranda, the front porch of the building of the structure.

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It had a wide, uh, front porch. And their suitors, hopefully their ultimate husbands, would court them on the front porch. Now, there may be some, uh, hyperbole to that, but nevertheless, I can

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imagine the image. Meanwhile, just one story worth telling. In 1997, 25 years ago or so, we decided to have a centennial anniversary of the marriage of our grandparents, Bessie and Isaac Kornblith.

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They were married in 1897, and in 1997 we had what was effectively a family reunion, which for a family that always saw each other reunion didn't really quite make sense. But we wanted to commemorate the 100th anniversary of their marriage, and as part of

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that evening, we actually went back to the, uh, building at 2002 Dallas Avenue. And the people that were living there were a little confused, but they did let us in to walk through the house for a moment to see it.

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For the older cousins, my generation, it was very nostalgic and very, very meaningful for our children and some of my cousin's grandchildren weren't that interested in that. Right. That's a great story.

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So that's the Bessie and Isaac Kornblith story. Isaac Kornblith was an officer at Beth Yeshurun. I believe he was Vice President, uh, a very, very highly respected man. Um, like I said, he was a businessman.

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He, uh, was known as a strict disciplinarian, according to my mother. And I'm going to guess he was not meaningfully involved in the day to day care of his children. I doubt that he changed a diaper. I doubt that my father changed a diaper.

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And my wife, Judy will say that I only changed a few diapers, but at least the progression the arc is in the right direction. But Isaac Kornblith made it to America. Bessie Kornblith made it to America.

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They met here, got married, and we're all the beneficiaries of that. Was Bessie a good cook? Do you remember any of the dishes? Oh my gosh, absolutely.

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She was, uh, in fact, in in my childhood and even young adulthood when my, uh, grandmother always lived with us, uh, my mother always said that it was her mother that taught her everything how to cook and was the master of the kitchen.

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And my mother was also a very, very wonderful and gracious hostess, and she cooked very well. Our home was the central address for the extended family, partially because my mother was prepared to do it, and partially because my grandmother was, uh, living with us and people wanted to come to

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see her. We had both Seders at our home. We had half the family over one night and the other half over the other night. But my grandmother had multiple children in town. I mean her, her adult children and their children.

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And so even though she lived with us, she wanted to be able to see her, her other daughters and her one son and their families as well. Great. Okay, so tell us now about your father. Um, Meyer was born in New York.

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So how did he get to Houston? And maybe a little bit about the extended Bell family. So Meyer Bell, my father was born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1907, and he lived a very full

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life. He died in 2001, so he died at the age of 93, I believe. Um, and he was in New York for his formative years. He was one of nine siblings.

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Uh, let's talk briefly about his parents, because they're somewhat unknown to to most of us. But his father was named-- his father had several names, but his father we think of as Israel David Bell. You can figure it out where I got my name.

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Uh, but I found papers that called him Israel Bielokofsky. Something like bielokfsky. That's not exactly right. But my guess is it was Bielokofsky in the old country and it became Bell in the new

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country. I'm not 100% sure of that, but Israel David Bell might have changed his name at one point to Jacob Kofsky, which is interesting. You go from Israel to Jacob, which is the opposite.

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Or actually, maybe he was Jacob first and then he went to become Israel. But Jacob to Israel is from the Bible. But why do I think his name might have also been Jacob Kofsky? Because we found a wedding invitation, uh, for my oldest aunt, my

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father's oldest sister, aunt Grace, that said, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Kofsky invite you to the wedding of their daughter Grace. Well, who's Jacob Kofsky? I thought his name was Israel David Bell.

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It's one and the same. It changed a little bit. The mystery is still there. Names were very fluid in that era. Very, very fluid. His wife was named Rose.

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Her maiden name was Eisen. My sister Roslyn is named for our grandmother, Rose. Uh, so Israel David Bell and Rose Bell, born in the old country, came to New York, had many, many children, I

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think nine. And all of my father's family stayed on the East Coast except for my father. And I'll get to that story in one moment. But, um.

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Israel David Bell was, uh, I believe, a peddler at one point and maybe a small businessman at another point. He died in 1924 when my father was 17. My grandmother died in 1938.

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Roosevelt in 1938, when he was again 15 years older. But she died in 1938. I wasn't born until 1949, so they were never particularly. We didn't hear a lot about them.

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And we are sorry about that. That of all of my cousins who are still living, their recollections are also somewhat faded. Uh, in the last three years, my sister Rosalyn and I were able to find their, uh, graves in the cemetery on Washington, the

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Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn. And that was a meaning. We knew that they were there, but we hadn't been there ever since I was a little kid, and I used to go with my father. And so we went there about three years ago.

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Uh, so they that is my father's parents. My father went to night school at NYU and got what we would call today a business degree. It was called in those days the School of Commerce, and he became an accountant.

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In fact, he became a certified public accountant, a CPA, which he always explained to me was a cut above just a regular accountant because he was allowed to perform certain tasks that regular accountants were not allowed to perform. Um, he started and stayed with the Internal Revenue Service

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for a little over 30 years, beginning in New York City. Then he was transferred to Oregon for a brief period of time, uh, made his way to Galveston, interestingly enough, and then ultimately to Houston, and it is in Houston where he met my mother.

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He moved to Houston, I believe, in 1936, so he would have been just under 30 at that point in time. By the way, my mother and my father were essentially the same age. My mother was born in 1908, my father in 1907. So they were effectively the same age.

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Uh, my father worked for the IRS for over three decades. His, uh, most important position, his final position, which he held for most of the time, was supervisor of the field Audit division of the Internal Revenue Service.

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Uh, I used to say that other people's parents owned a grocery store and that they got their food for free, and other people's parents owned clothing stores, and they got their clothes free. I said, my father works for the IRS and we don't pay taxes.

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Well, in fact, the opposite was true. He was a stickler. I'm going to spare you all the stories about how absolutely crystal clear and squeaky clean he was about taxes.

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He did not only our taxes, but many of our relatives taxes. And he did many other things for many other people in the world of financial advising. He helped some of my friends, uh, create their accounting systems for their bookkeeping systems, for their businesses or their professions.

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He was forever on the boards of seven acres in Beth Yeshurun. Uh, always in the financial realm. He was treasurer of Beth Yeshurun, probably for 20 years, and he was a very strong fiscal conservative.

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He wanted us to be very careful before we spent a lot of money. And the joke was that he would come home from a Beth Yeshurun board meeting and I would say, how many 32 to 1 votes did you have today? Because he was the opposition of major expansion plans, but he

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was trying to be cautious and trying to be conservative. So my parents lived first at 2002 Dallas Avenue with our grandmother. At that point, my grandfather had died, and then in 1953, we

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moved as a family. The four of us, Meyer, Edith, Roselyn and myself and my grandmother Bessie to our first home as our family on Oakdale. Oakdale, pretty much the intersection of Oakdale and a street called

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Sampson. Back you up a second, surely. Do you know how your parents met? Yes. Thank you. And thank you for reminding me. I wanted to say that, um, so daddy worked for the IRS, as

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did Aaron Farfel, who was a professional colleague of his. Daddy was new to town, Aaron was already here, and Aaron was already married to his wife, Esther Farfel, who was, um, my mother's first cousin. So Esther and Aaron decided that my

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parents needed to meet, and they arranged for them to meet at synagogue. This is how the story is told. And and that's pretty much all I know about it. Uh, they got married August of 1944.

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This is my parents now, Meyer and Edith. And my father was shipped off immediately within the next two weeks, I believe, for his army service. And he was in Europe for about nine months. From what I could tell. He often said he was in the battle of the Bulge, but he was not in

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combat. He was pretty much in support and communications from what I could tell. Although communications wasn't exactly a walk in the park, communications was a pretty integral part of the war effort. Uh, he didn't talk about it, so I really don't know much about that experience.

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But they met and married in 1944. My mother was 36 years old when she got married. My father was too, uh, Roselyn was 36 when she got married, and I was not married at the age of 36.

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And everyone became very nervous because the year came and went and I didn't get married. I got married four years later, and it was absolutely worth waiting those extra four years. And so, uh, they moved into this house. Thank you for allowing me to talk about their wedding.

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They moved into this house on Oakdale, and we lived in there in that house from 1953 to 1958. That was, uh, hardcore Riverside, if you will. That was the Riverside neighborhood.

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Uh, it was probably 3 or 4 blocks away from McGregor, which is the epicenter of Riverside Terrace area. Uh, the Beth Yeshurun Synagogue on Southmore and Tierwester was the, um, the major institution in the neighborhood, uh, five

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blocks away. We didn't walk, but we could have. And we were there for five years. I was basically from the age of four to about nine. And then the neighborhood began to migrate.

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As the story and the narrative is well known from Riverside to southwest Houston. In our case, my father decided that we would want to live in Meyerland, although I wanted to live in Woodshire because all of my friends were there and I thought I would have a better baseball game pick up in Woodshire than I could in

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Meyerland. He said, let's move five minutes further out to Meyerland, and I think that we'll be happy we did that. But we didn't have a house and we sold our house on Oakdale before we bought the house in Meyerland.

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It was about an 18 month period. We went to live in what was the bottom floor of a duplex owned by Aaron and Esther Farfel, who had lived in that home for many, many years but had just moved out to their new home.

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And their first floor was vacant, and they graciously gave it to us to live there for that 18 months. Uh, I went to McGregor school for one year in the fifth grade, and then when we moved to Meyerland, I went to Lovett and Kolter for the rest of my

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elementary years, Johnston and Bellaire for my middle school. It was then called Junior High and Bellaire High School for high school. Now, I did fail to mention that my first four years of my elementary education were at Beth Yeshurun Day School.

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It had a different name in those days. It was called Foundation School, but it is the precursor of what we know today as the Beth Yeshurun Day School, and our cohort went for four years. We were the second class.

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The kids that were one year ahead of us were the first class of the first grade. Because kindergarten was still considered nursery school in those days, first grade was the first year of elementary school and we went for four years, whereas

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the students before me, a year before us, they went only two years. Why? Because they didn't have enough kids to make a third grade of that particular cohort. Whereas our cohort, which started with 21 and it dwindled each year,

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but the minimum to make a class was ten. And we actually went for four years. And in the fourth year we had ten. And that was as most as we could sustain it.

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And it was a function of what? Tuition was necessary to afford a teacher. So what was the curriculum like at the school in those years? So I think it was fairly traditional.

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The the word that never resonated with me because I didn't know what it was, although it's come back into vogue now, was phonics was a subject we got graded on. And I always said, what is phonics? And my parents didn't know what phonics was, but they said, as long as you get an A, it's

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okay. No, I'm kidding about that. But the the curriculum was, uh, reading, mathematics, some science and social science and phonics, and a dabble of Jewish studies in Hebrew, although I cannot remember the form in which that took,

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I'm imagining that it was mainly. There was a time that they used in those days called customs and ceremonies, which was the blanket or the umbrella for, uh, religious observance in the religious schools of those days.

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So we had a lot of, a lot of curriculum centered around the holidays, not too different from today. Um, and I think that the teaching techniques were appropriate for the time. I don't think that they were, uh, way ahead of their time or way behind their time.

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It was a solid education. The, uh, ten people that graduated with me in the fourth grade include some very, very, uh, accomplished adults today. And the class before me, also some very accomplished adults

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and very committed Jews. So if you're asking about the argument that day school is important for Jewish identity, those two classes were probably pretty strong evidence that that was indeed the case. Now, this is really a pioneer moment for Jewish day school in Houston.

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Absolutely, absolutely. And don't forget, this is Beth Yeshurun on Southmore. This was, uh, 1955 to 1959. Beth Yeshurun didn't move to Beechnut until 1962.

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So my first years of day school were in the old building on Southmore and Tierwester. And I remember several of my teachers, Golda Geller, who became Golda Baker, was our first grade teacher and way into her adulthood. She she died a few years ago, way into her adulthood.

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Whenever she'd see me, she would turn to whoever we were with and said, I taught him in first grade. She took great pride in having, uh, been a part of our early years. Uh, so that was that was, uh, Beth Yeshurun day school.

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Beth Yeshurun Foundation school. Uh, it probably bears telling that most of us had September birthdays. Why is that important? In other words, we could not get into the public schools because you had to be six by

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September 1st. So of the 20 or so kids that were in the first grade that year, I noticed that everybody had September 3rd, September 12th, September 21st, all these September birthdays. Was that an anomaly?

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No it was the parents did not want their kids to have to wait another year to start school. So they sent them to Beth Sharon Foundation School also, hopefully for other positive reasons, right. Hopefully to get a good Jewish education, but there was this other mitigating factor as

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well. Exactly. That's so interesting. What other memories do you have of the Riverside area from your childhood? So places you'd go to meet friends or play, shop. For sure. We had this home on Oakdale, very modest,

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1400 feet. Uh, one room was air conditioned, which was amazing to think of that now. It was not our bedroom. It was a den. Uh, so a very small house for five people.

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Because my grandmother lived with us. My sister and I shared a room for that in that particular era. Um, the neighbor, who was primarily Jewish but primarily Jewish, doesn't really mean 70 or 80%.

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It probably means 30 or 40%. Uh, it doesn't take a majority for a neighborhood to take on the character of a Jewish neighborhood, but the people that lived down the street from us, those families were dear friends of my parents.

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And their kids were my buddies. Uh, we played ball outside in the street. We, um. Did normal things that kids do.

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We didn't have a very large world outside of our neighborhood and outside of the synagogue. What do I mean by that? We didn't eat out very much in those days. If we went out to eat, it was a big deal, and it was usually to someplace like Weldon's

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Cafeteria, which sounds just like it sounds, which is just like it sounds. Um, I would say that my parents were very frugal and conservative financially, particularly in the early years of my childhood. And then things got better as I got older, and we had more creature

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comforts later on in life than we did in the first decade of my life. The neighborhood was, um. Was a solid neighborhood, but I was I was a kid and I don't remember that too much about it. Uh, but I have fond memories of it.

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And I will drive by that house on Oakdale every now and then, just to remember where I grew up. I had an aunt and uncle that lived 3 or 4 blocks away, and their street was Riverside. Their house was much bigger.

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Their children were older than mine. They were out of the house by that time. But my aunt and uncle had an air conditioned house. So we were frequently their guests on Saturday afternoon to escape the

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heat. This was Esther and Max Lewis. Esther was my mother's sister. So the Susseles/Farfel's had lived on Labranch, and then they moved out, uh, to to a different neighborhood.

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After that, it was not the Farfel house. Okay, so this was. This was the first years. And then just to carry the story further, in 1958, we moved to a home, that temporary rental facility of my

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cousins on Labranch. In 18 months later, we moved to Meyerland on a street called Braesheather in December of 1959. So essentially the beginning of the 1960s, we were not the first

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ones on the street, but we were among the first ones on that particular section of Meyerland. We moved in, I think, December 29th, 1959, and there were a lot of empty lots still on Braesheather, on both sides of Milbury and the other side of South Rice was undeveloped totally at that

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point. So we were not an early Meyerland resident totally because there had been earlier homes closer to Meyerland Plaza in the 1955 to 1959 range. But for our particular quadrant of Meyerland, we were among the first homes to move in.

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So this was a major quantum leap in creature comfort and amenities for us. I was ten years old. I suppose at that time I had already gone to public school for

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one year to McGregor when we lived on Labranch. And then I went to Lovett and then Kolter for my fifth and sixth grade in, in Meyerland. Uh, that was a very good time.

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Made new friends, uh, began to prepare for my bar mitzvah, uh, which was in 1962, and went to Johnston Junior High School, which was the neighborhood, uh, junior high school at the time. So I guess now's a good time to tell the Bar Mitzvah story that Josh is getting ready to

00:29:12.220 - 00:29:27.120

ask me, because my Bar mitzvah was August 24th, 1962, and anybody who knows me knows what this story is going to be. But basically, the building on Beechnut was being delayed and nobody knew when it was going to open.

00:29:27.840 - 00:29:45.060

It was supposed to open early in 1962. Then they told us May of 1962, and it kept on being put off and put off and put off and sure enough, August 10th, two weeks before my bar mitzvah, they called my parents and said, okay, we're opening up on August 24th.

00:29:45.340 - 00:29:58.070

You're going to be the first bar mitzvah. Well, that was a big deal. I mean, I was 13 years old. I didn't really appreciate what a big deal it was, but I used to kid. I still kid that there was 1500 people there that night,

00:29:58.210 - 00:30:10.980

1450 to see the new building and 50 to see Howard Rubin and me, who were the b'nai mitzvahs for the night. But it was pretty cool. And even today, I get a little bit of, uh, imagined

00:30:12.740 - 00:30:26.440

notoriety out of that, uh, factoid that we opened the synagogue at my bar mitzvah in 1962. Was that hard for you? I mean, when you were a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah kid, you're practicing on certain bimah, and the room.

00:30:27.040 - 00:30:41.420

And, you know, the acoustics and this and that. I was nervous about my voice cracking because boys at 13 voices crack. And I was assigned the kiddush, which was the primary singing part for that night.

00:30:41.420 - 00:30:52.980

And there was one note that is higher than the others. He I think it's the word is Tehillah. And I could never hit the he on Tehillah. But I did it okay. Nobody could tell.

00:30:52.980 - 00:31:06.110

I was always worried that I was going to be off key or off tune. I didn't have the best voice in those days. I still don't have the best voice, but it was daunting. It was daunting to look out and the synagogue wasn't totally ready.

00:31:06.210 - 00:31:15.260

The the auditorium wasn't finished. Only the sanctuary was. They didn't have all the railings in. They did open the doors, which they do now.

00:31:15.260 - 00:31:31.670

Occasionally when they have a big crowd, uh, and filled a good part of the second half of the, of the whole edifice. And it was daunting. And I remember after the service we were going to the reception, the reception was not in the Pulaski Auditorium because that was not finished, and

00:31:31.670 - 00:31:46.390

also because they had the sanctuary chairs. And in there for that night, they took us over to what is now Stein Hall, which is the smaller lounge for the reception. And I was having trouble getting from the bimah to the reception, and there was too

00:31:46.390 - 00:31:56.840

many people. And then I remember somebody say, move away, move away. This is the bar mitzvah boy. Let him go through. And and that I got there and so on. My recollection of my bar mitzvah.

00:31:57.070 - 00:32:08.660

It was a wonderful moment to have done that. We read the Torah, Howard and I. And it was it was it was a glorious moment. Talk a little bit about your memories of Rabbi Malev and

00:32:09.770 - 00:32:23.030

Cantor Wagner. So Rabbi Malev and Cantor Wagner were the primary, uh, clergy of my boyhood. Um, Rabbi Malev was very, very scholarly, very, very stern, very erudite.

00:32:23.140 - 00:32:33.950

He quoted Shakespeare, uh. Easily. Uh, but for a kid, he wasn't the most intriguing and fascinating rabbi. He was old school, if you will.

00:32:34.580 - 00:32:48.730

Cantor Wagner was a solid cantor. Uh, I didn't have a personal relationship, frankly, with either one of them. But they were the Rabbi and Cantor, and they were held in great esteem. Uh, Rabbi Segal arrived in 1965.

00:32:48.730 - 00:33:03.520

I was 15 years old. He was young and vivacious and exciting and funny. And he injected a lot of enthusiasm, particularly among young people. Uh, and early in his rabbinate, he did a lot of really innovative things, actually,

00:33:04.050 - 00:33:16.010

his entire rabbinate, he did a lot of innovative things. But when he first arrived, my cohort said, wow, we got a rabbi that's cool, a rabbi that can relate to us. So we were very happy about that.

00:33:16.520 - 00:33:32.460

Cantor Wagner was a very fine cantor. I don't remember much about his personality, but he was he was a solid, solid individual in every way. Yeah. People have told me, and you may or may not remember this, that Rabbi Malev and Rabbi

00:33:32.460 - 00:33:47.610

Segal didn't necessarily see eye to eye ideologically. And you'd have competing sermons from one week to the next where Rabbi Segal would speak on a topic, and then Rabbi Malev would give the opposing viewpoint. Do you remember. I have heard that.

00:33:48.190 - 00:34:04.460

I have heard that. I don't know if it was quite that stark of a point counterpoint phenomenon, but Rabbi Segel did often address much more controversial current topics than did Rabbi Malev, who would be more, as I said before, scholarly and biblical and erudite.

00:34:04.950 - 00:34:13.860

And Rabbi Segal was much more contemporary. Uh, I don't think that they butted heads. I think that they worked reasonably well together. They were actually only together for eight years.

00:34:14.910 - 00:34:26.560

Rabbi Segal arrived in 1965. Rabbi Malev died in 1973. So it was a fairly brief period of time that the two of them were together. . So, okay, I want to come back to something you said

00:34:26.560 - 00:34:42.870

earlier that you were interested in living in Woodshire because maybe some of your friends were moving there, but your father said, no, no, no, we're going to go to to Meyerland. Do you have a sense of why your parents gravitated to Meyerland? I thought, I think I want to be careful how I say this.

00:34:42.890 - 00:35:02.620

I think he believed that he was going to get more house for his dollar in Meyerland, and that it was a better value, and it had actually, I think he believed it had greater, uh, stick-to-itiveness greater, uh, long term even resale value, although he lived his, the entire

00:35:02.620 - 00:35:17.810

remainder of his life on in that home on Braesheather. But I think he believed that Meyerland uh, and in fact, it's interesting now that you mentioned it, because Meyerland's identity was still being developed, whereas Woodshire was pretty much filled in by that point in time.

00:35:18.730 - 00:35:31.310

The Meyerland homes were a little bit bigger, a little bit newer. And my father never drove. It's an important point to put in this. He always took the bus to work downtown and he always said, look, I can ride the bus for

00:35:31.310 - 00:35:47.100

five more minutes. It's one more stop on on Beechnut Boulevard to get to the bus. So he didn't see it as an appreciable difference in terms of location. And I'm notwithstanding the floods of

00:35:47.860 - 00:36:02.210

2015, 16 and 17, Meyerland probably did hold its values greater than than did Woodshire. And Woodside also was in that same category of of a neighborhood. That was a very fine neighborhood.

00:36:02.210 - 00:36:14.790

I don't mean to disparage either one of them. And like I say, I wanted to live in Woodshire because I thought I could get a quicker baseball game in Woodshire than I could in Meyerland. But in the end, I was very happy that I ended up in Meyerland

00:36:16.450 - 00:36:35.850

Who were some of the other Jewish families living on that block of Braesheather at that time? Okay, so let's see if I can remember who some of them were, uh, in the early years, uh, in fact, moving in on the very same day we did were Leonard and Joanne Rosenberg. Uh, they moved onto a cul de sac of what's called Braesheather

00:36:35.850 - 00:36:48.680

court. Uh, I'm now going down the street. There was a Bill Spitz lived down 4 or 5 houses. A man named Joe Cohen and his wife, Sonia. Uh, there was Doctor Leon Phillips.

00:36:48.680 - 00:37:02.170

There was Aubrey Farb, lived on a cul de sac called Cadman. Uh, there was, uh. A handful of others. And then on the next block, I'm trying to give you people that were original owners,

00:37:02.170 - 00:37:13.740

not people that moved in in sort of a second or third wave. Uh, there's a wonderful man named Marvin Romarin who died very young, who lived on a street called Endicott. Bill Morgan lived on Endicott.

00:37:14.510 - 00:37:28.960

Uh, Bill Morgan, who we all know now, uh, lived across the street from me when I was a kid. Uh, he and his very fastly growing family at that time. Uh, a family named Golding, Rube Golding. They lived down the street. So there were.

00:37:29.410 - 00:37:41.230

I would say the block was 30% Jewish. Just that same number again. Uh, and we had no problem getting a baseball game in Meyerland, either. On the streets. There were a couple of empty lots, and that's where we were able to play

00:37:41.330 - 00:37:58.680

our ball. Uh, uh, those were some of the people that I remember on Braesheather. Now, if you go over a couple of blocks, you have that famous, uh, circumstance on Glenmeadow where almost the whole neighborhood was, uh, Jewish. And Melvindale was able to recreate who lived in which house for about 10 or 15

00:37:58.750 - 00:38:12.480

houses on each side of the street. That was anomalous. I don't think that most streets were not that fully Jewish, as was Glenmeadow. Interesting. Okay, tell us about the clubs, youth groups

00:38:12.480 - 00:38:26.560

activities that you were involved in. So originally in junior high, I started in USY, which was the synagogue youth group. But my love and my goal and my aspiration was to get into AZA, which was the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization, which I did.

00:38:26.990 - 00:38:39.730

The minute I turned 14 and I, uh, lived a very happy and full life as a teenager, uh, active in Bbyo, which is the whole organization. Aza is the the boy's part of it.

00:38:40.360 - 00:38:56.890

I was in a chapter called Cyrus Adler Aza, which had a long and storied tradition of leadership locally and nationally, and it was a wonderful experience. Uh, I ended up holding many offices, including the position

00:38:56.940 - 00:39:09.530

called District Aleph Godol, which was President of the area that went from Texas to Tennessee. So a seven state district. There were seven districts in the entire United States, and I was the President of one

00:39:09.530 - 00:39:24.070

of those seven districts. Now, two of my friends, Danny Brenner and Zane Segal, were also presidents. Danny was the international president, Zane was the regional president of Texas and Oklahoma. So the three of us were very active in AZA.

00:39:24.830 - 00:39:42.810

We spent our summers at camp in B'nai Brith in the Poconos, uh, at a wonderful leadership training program run by, uh, a very important man in my life, Daniel Thursz, who was a social worker. He was Dean of the College of Social Work at the University of Maryland during the year,

00:39:43.280 - 00:39:57.380

and he ran this camp in the summer. Uh, he was a very formidable force, very strong, very, uh, charismatic in every way. And he really was an important role model, not for me only, but for all of us.

00:39:57.490 - 00:40:09.460

In those days, the camp was an enlightened camp. It was not part of any movement. It was not part of conservative the Ramah movement. It was not part of reform, the URJ, it was part of B'nai B'rith.

00:40:09.460 - 00:40:24.110

So it was interdenominational. But we had a wonderful opportunity for speakers in the summer that many other camps didn't get. There was one summer that in the space of a week, we had Mordecai Kaplan and Elie Wiesel

00:40:24.480 - 00:40:41.470

come to our camp to speak to us as 15 year olds. And that's that's pretty heady stuff to have people of that ilk and other not quite as well known, but other prominent adult Jewish leaders that would come to this camp. It still holds a very, uh, warm spot for me because it was

00:40:42.250 - 00:40:58.390

the source of many, many friendships that I have to this day. The organization had its international convention there, and then we would go to the leadership programs, sometimes for three weeks, sometimes for seven weeks, for several summers, uh, in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

00:40:59.390 - 00:41:18.770

And that was a very important part of that at Bellaire, At Bellaire High School I was involved in a handful of reasonable organizations: the Student Council, the National Honor Society, the Math Club. Probably 3 or 4 more that I'm not remembering at this point,

00:41:19.510 - 00:41:33.850

but Bellaire was a terrific high school. We had the best teachers because I was in what was called the major works track, and so they assigned the better teachers to the more advanced classes, and it was a very solid high school education.

00:41:33.850 - 00:41:50.930

I was always concerned when I went to college, was my high school preparation going to be the equivalent of the students that were coming from schools in the northeast? Let's say, for example, was Bellaire High School holding its own, and it held its own beautifully, at least in the major works track.

00:41:51.100 - 00:42:06.590

I was very happy with that education. Bellaire was, uh, it's a different building today than it was then. It's actually been redone twice, but it had about 3000 students. It was a very large school, and, uh, it was uh,

00:42:07.750 - 00:42:21.380

it was a very positive experience. Talk about Bellaire High School from the perspective of a Jewish student in particular. You just showed us an essay that you had written probably as a college student. We think looking back right at at Bellaire High School.

00:42:21.380 - 00:42:33.790

But earlier, as you know, in Houston Jewish history, most of the Jewish kids had gone to San Jacinto High School. That's a generation before yours. Right? And then Bellaire High School kind of supplanted it as the primary destination for

00:42:33.850 - 00:42:45.370

Jewish kids. Like to be a Jewish student at Bellaire in those days. So the first thing I would say is it was a somewhat self-segregated Jewish environment.

00:42:45.960 - 00:43:00.090

Most of our friends were Jewish. Most of the people we sat around the lunchroom table with were Jewish. It is probably a source of some regret on my part that we did not make more friends of people of other faiths.

00:43:01.230 - 00:43:18.310

The exception to that was in our classes. In these advanced classes, there was obviously non-Jewish and Jewish students. And so some of my better friends, best friends that were not Jewish, came from my classes, but in the social environment it was Jewish

00:43:19.100 - 00:43:35.140

pretty much exclusively. And if you were to go beyond the, uh, there was a whole part of Bellaire that most of us had nothing to do with or no knowledge of. It was things like wood shop and metal shop and, uh, some semblance

00:43:35.140 - 00:43:47.340

of agricultural studies. It was on the other side of the building, and you just didn't see too many Jewish students taking those kinds of classes. So the Jewish kids kind of congregated around the same flagpole in the morning,

00:43:47.760 - 00:43:59.140

kind of saw each other. We didn't, I didn't I won't say everybody didn't. I didn't date a non-Jewish girl. I do remember one time our AZA chapter had an interfaith seder, and we

00:43:59.140 - 00:44:16.240

felt liberated because we could bring a non-Jewish girl to the interfaith Seder. And there was one I wanted to do that with for a long time, and I was finally able to do that. But by and large, our dates were always within the religion, not for everybody, but for me and for my close circle of friends.

00:44:16.870 - 00:44:37.660

Uh, that was true. Um, Jewish students were respected at Bellaire High School. Um, there was one school of thought that said Bellaire made its reputation on the backs of their high quality Jewish students. And I'll just mention one, one episode that gives a

00:44:37.660 - 00:44:53.070

sense of that. There was a assistant principal, a man named Ivy Hollister, who was primarily the disciplinarian. He was the one guy that took care of bad behavior. But he also, uh, came up to me one day and said, David, I want to see you.

00:44:53.960 - 00:45:05.380

And I said, uh oh, what have I done? I haven't done anything wrong. But he asked me to his office. He said, um, somehow he learned that I was president of AZA when I was a 12th grade, the district seven.

00:45:05.700 - 00:45:20.790

I was going to miss a lot of class on Friday to travel to other cities, and he was worried that the teachers were going to give me a hard time for absences. And he says, David, any time you need to be gone, just let me know and I'll grease the skids for you.

00:45:20.930 - 00:45:34.180

I'll take care of your absence. It will be excused, which is a sign that they were proud of Jewish students and proud of what we brought to the school. And it was also a very, very lovely gesture on his part, because everybody was afraid of

00:45:34.180 - 00:45:46.590

this man and he was coming to my defense. I remember that very, very distinctly. That's an incredible story, David, and it really contrasts with what some other folks have told me about Bellaire High School, especially Harlan Andrews.

00:45:46.960 - 00:45:56.560

Was Andrews the principal when you were there? Andrews was the principal. And now that you're speaking my memory. Andrews was known as having some harboring some anti-Semitic

00:45:56.710 - 00:46:10.010

inclinations. I never experienced it personally. I never experienced any anti-Semitism as a youngster. But there were people that said that Harlan Andrews was not a a lover of the Jews. Um, the teachers were.

00:46:10.640 - 00:46:25.010

The teachers that I had were very warm and gracious and and so on. But but I have heard that, and I can't deny it or corroborate it either way. Yeah. What about were there black students at Bellaire when you were there? So the answer is zero.

00:46:25.820 - 00:46:43.300

And I had to go back and think about this, but I did. I asked a couple of people, but we were totally a segregated school. I did not have my first really good black friend until after college, I am embarrassed to say, even for years at a very

00:46:43.300 - 00:47:01.920

liberal university on the East Coast, that had a reason number of people of color. I did not manage to make good friends with any of them. It took me to graduate school before I made my first really solid black friend, and I told him that when I was 25 years old, I said, I can't believe this, but you are my

00:47:01.950 - 00:47:19.940

first really good black friend, and that at Bellaire there was no opportunity for it. So I can excuse myself. At Brandeis, a different story, and I should have done better on that on that regard. Um, but Bellaire was another thing, is that the terms Hispanic was

00:47:19.940 - 00:47:33.100

not even in vogue in those days. There were clearly a large population of Hispanic people in Houston, Texas, even in the 1950s and 1960s. Uh, there was, of course, some demographic challenge.

00:47:33.620 - 00:47:52.820

They were often considered to be white in certain, uh, allocation of resources and certain way that schools were ultimately desegregated and so on. But, uh, I didn't have Hispanic friends either at that point in time, through the age of 18, a real a real, uh, deficiency in our education.

00:47:54.120 - 00:48:11.720

All right. Well, tell us now about how you ended up at Brandeis University instead of at UT, like most of your peers, I'm sure, right. Well, I had a healthy fear of UT. I didn't think I could make it in the world of fraternities and sororities, and I didn't

00:48:11.830 - 00:48:29.790

really want to play that social life, and I wanted to go to a school that was in a different part of the country. In fact, as I spent a lot of my adult life advising kids on college selection, I always came back to one central thesis, which is that one of the best things you can

00:48:29.790 - 00:48:43.340

do choosing a college is learning how to negotiate a different regional environment than the one that you grew up in. And I said, If it's Boston, then you're going to learn how to live with snow, and you're going to learn how to live with mass transit, and you're going to learn how to

00:48:43.340 - 00:49:00.860

live with having 30 or 40 universities, all in a very concentrated area. Boston was very attractive to me for all of those reasons. The hub of college life in America. And Brandeis was a school that really I didn't know that much about.

00:49:00.940 - 00:49:18.550

But as I grew to know more about it grew to love more and more. In fact, I probably have greater feelings of positivity toward Brandeis as an older adult than I did when I was 18 to 22. When I was 18 to 22, I was doing my best to get through my classes, make

00:49:18.550 - 00:49:31.550

good grades, make friends, and so on and so forth. But I didn't have a full appreciation for the value of a liberal arts education that I do have that appreciation for now. So I went to Brandeis. I was there for four years.

00:49:32.620 - 00:49:42.540

A whole lot of my friends were in the Boston area. We spent time together. We made friends with each other's friends. We did all the things you're supposed to do in college in terms of weekends.

00:49:42.540 - 00:49:58.620

It wasn't a big football environment, but we would go to the Harvard games or occasionally even a game of another school. Brandeis did not have Division one athletics, but I had wonderful faculty members, wonderful teachers, very small classes, very committed to

00:49:58.660 - 00:50:17.300

undergraduates. And the Brandeis experience was a very positive one. I ended up taking a lot of courses in Jewish studies, which were actually so much more sophisticated than anything I had ever done in Jewish scholarship before. Then I took courses in philosophy and history from nationally

00:50:17.660 - 00:50:33.880

recognized Jewish academicians, and I also took a lot of courses in a field that was just beginning to burgeon at the time, called American Studies, which I ended up being very close with a number of their faculty members. So it was a very solid education.

00:50:33.880 - 00:50:50.620

My major was psychology. And when I graduated in 1971, I thought about two possible tracks. I was either going to go for a degree in a school of education, or I was going to go to law school. I actually applied to both types of schools and got into

00:50:50.620 - 00:51:07.080

both types of schools, and decided that I would not go to law school immediately, because that was going to be a three year program. And the education program that I found at Stanford, I could get a master's in one year. And I said, that's pretty cool to get a master's in one year, and then I'll

00:51:07.080 - 00:51:22.240

decide later what I want to do, which is exactly what happened. I went to Stanford for one year as got my master's degree, and then came back and decided at the age of 23, it was time to go to work. For a while I didn't want to stay in school again and again and again.

00:51:22.240 - 00:51:37.990

I'd been in school since I was four. I wanted to do something different, and that's when I ended up at the University of Houston, uh, as my first job in 1972. And it was my only employer for my entire adult life.

00:51:38.170 - 00:51:55.550

When I retired in 2010, which was 38 years later, uh, University of Houston was the only institution from whom I ever received a paycheck. So I was very, very anomalous in that regard. Most of my colleagues jumped around from one university to the next.

00:51:56.000 - 00:52:12.880

I stayed at the same place in the same city for my entire career. I do not regret it one bit, because it turned out to be a very good decision, and I was able to observe the university grow from a pretty modest place to a pretty powerful place over those almost four decades.

00:52:12.880 - 00:52:29.880

Tell us a little bit about some of the different roles at the university that you had. Sure. Now, just for the record, I worked at U of H for three years and for the first period, and then I went back to Stanford and got my doctoral degree. That took about a year and a half, and that was the end of my education.

00:52:30.140 - 00:52:49.350

I got an Ed.D. in university administration, which is actually what I ended up doing, but I did all of my, uh, education outside of the city of Houston, four years at Brandeis, three years at Stanford, and I did all of my employment inside the city of Houston. So a very clear cut distinction there at the University of Houston, I

00:52:49.350 - 00:53:08.250

began as the, uh, basically, I'll call it, it was called departmental administrator, but it was chief operations officer for the Department of Psychology, which is a very large department with 1500 undergraduates, 150 graduate students. And I was the person that ran their budget, their schedule, some of their

00:53:08.310 - 00:53:17.810

extracurricular programs. I did everything for the department except teach, which is what the faculty did, the the teaching and research function. I supported those operations.

00:53:18.330 - 00:53:35.280

I was in that job only one year, and I got, uh, attracted to a position as assistant to one of the vice presidents of the university, a man named Alan Commander. He was the vice president for public affairs, which was a euphemism for governmental relations.

00:53:35.830 - 00:53:50.540

So he was the university's chief lobbyist. And so I was his right hand person. He did the lobbying, I did the support work for his lobbying effort. I then left University of Houston, went back to Stanford, got my

00:53:50.540 - 00:54:09.010

degree, and then came back to U of H in 1977, I believe, and went to work in the Academic Affairs division of the system, which was the organization that was comprised of all four universities, U of H, Clear Lake, Downtown and Victoria.

00:54:09.710 - 00:54:29.660

And I was basically an academic planner, an academic, uh, programmer, not programmer in computer sense, but I, I held many, many different tasks. But I was for most of my career, I held the title of assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs and assistant vice president for academic affairs for the

00:54:29.660 - 00:54:46.890

University of Houston System and the University of Houston. And my primary responsibilities were program development and review, which means that a unit of the university would want to add a degree program in a field, let's say a master's degree in computer science, and that required approvals from all the various

00:54:46.890 - 00:55:00.060

levels up through the state. And I was the conduit for that approval process within the university. A second thing I did was I represented the university at the coordinating board, which is the state higher education agency.

00:55:00.670 - 00:55:18.030

And the third thing I did in the last 15 or so years, I effectively and sort of fell into this, became the chief internal executive recruitment officer. I ran over that period of time, probably 40 or 50 searches for deans, vice presidents and presidents at the University of Houston.

00:55:18.160 - 00:55:33.350

What that meant was we would constitute a search committee. We would, uh, advertise nationally, we would recruit, we would interview, and we would finally pick a person to be in that position. And every now and then we would hire an executive, a external consultant.

00:55:33.840 - 00:55:44.190

But more often than not, we would do it internally. That was the internal staff officer that did that. So I was at U of H for like I say, 38 years. I retired in 2019. No.

00:55:44.310 - 00:55:58.220

Excuse me in 2010. Uh, and have been retired now for 13, 14 years. Fantastic. That's quite the career. Um, I want to go backwards a little bit chronologically and ask you to

00:55:58.220 - 00:56:14.370

talk a little bit about someone that I know was special to you. And we have a collection of his professional papers here at the South Texas Jewish Archives, and that's Aaron Farfel. Tell us about Aaron. So as I mentioned earlier, Aaron was originally with the

00:56:14.370 - 00:56:29.810

Internal Revenue Service, as was my father. Aaron left IRS early and went out onto his own business ventures. He became a very, very successful, but more important than being successful, he was extraordinarily respected in the community.

00:56:30.850 - 00:56:47.650

His word was as good as gold. He was sought after for advice from all political leaders and all business leaders. He was a truly a legendary figure, and he was a very important in many civic developments, including bringing Major League Baseball to

00:56:47.650 - 00:57:05.540

Houston and including many other major big picture items about the growth and development of the city of Houston. So he was a businessman, but he was a philanthropist and a community leader in every way possible and incredibly

00:57:06.210 - 00:57:20.960

soft spoken. He didn't speak loudly. You had to lean over to listen to him speak. And he was revered, worshiped by all my cousins. That would be the generation below him, because my mother and his wife were first

00:57:20.960 - 00:57:36.220

cousins. So we were the the next generation. And as we grew up, uh, whenever we would visit, all the adults would be in one room and all the kids in another, Aaron would be in the other room and he would talk to us. He loved young people, and we gravitated toward him in every way.

00:57:36.220 - 00:57:49.800

Uh, uh, in many respects larger than life, uh, and the things that he was able to do. But he was an incredible family man, uh, very attuned to the needs of the entire family.

00:57:50.440 - 00:58:09.440

He had his own family and Esther's family and many others that he took very special care of. And then he became the chairman of the board of regents of the University of Houston. So we had a period of time, I think he was chairman of the board from 1963 to 1979.

00:58:09.440 - 00:58:21.880

That may not be exactly right, but about a 16 year period. And I went to work at U of H in 1972. So I had about a 6 or 7 year period. I was gone part of that time, but I overlapped with him, and I would always see

00:58:21.880 - 00:58:35.210

him at board meetings and other places, and I was very careful not to abuse my privilege with him. We would talk about the university privately and family gatherings, but not particularly a whole lot at the university.

00:58:35.800 - 00:58:50.330

But he was, uh, he was like legendary in the university, had many leaders and some were more respected than others. But Aaron was at the top of the list in terms of the respect. Even today, uh, the name is still well known.

00:58:50.580 - 00:59:06.840

He endowed an award in Esther's name for the single most outstanding faculty member, uh, that's given at the end of the year. Each year it carries a very, very handsome stipend. And to win the Esther Farfel Award at U of H is a big deal.

00:59:07.600 - 00:59:18.080

Now, notice it was not the Aaron Farfel Award. He named it for Esther. Another example of his, uh, his modesty, if you will. Yeah, that's really nice.

00:59:19.050 - 00:59:34.730

Um, tell us about, um community institutions and projects that you've been closely involved with in the Houston Jewish community. So because I've been here for my adult life, I evolved a a pattern or a strategy.

00:59:34.730 - 00:59:46.380

I wouldn't have called it a strategy then, but I identified organizations that were near and dear to me that I thought I could make a difference in, and that I had a special affinity for. And they came under a couple of major categories.

00:59:46.960 - 01:00:04.910

I was interested in organizations that helped young people. I was interested in organizations that were educational in their nature, and particularly the area of educational access and equal opportunity. And I was interested in areas having to do with

01:00:05.740 - 01:00:22.280

Jewish identity and history, in this case mainly the Holocaust. And of course, as that translated here in Houston to a Holocaust museum. So those were the overwhelming themes. And everything I did was not in one of those buckets, but most everything I did was in

01:00:22.280 - 01:00:41.120

those buckets. The two organizations that I devoted the greatest amount of time and attention to were ADL and the Holocaust Museum. I was president of both organizations, uh, years ago, actually at the turn of the century, 1998 for ADL and 2002 for Holocaust Museum.

01:00:41.940 - 01:00:54.470

Uh, I was about 50 years old at the time. Uh, ADL was an advisory board. It's a national organization, and most of the decisions come out of New York. But I was the chairman of our regional advisory board.

01:00:55.120 - 01:01:05.450

Uh, the museum is a different story. It was totally local. It was totally under our auspices. And I started before there was a museum.

01:01:05.450 - 01:01:19.780

I actually started in the mid 1980s. So it's been almost 40 years that I've been involved in the museum. Uh, I was chairman, as I said, in 2002, but I've been involved, and I'm one of a handful of people.

01:01:19.780 - 01:01:36.540

Not the only one, but one of a handful that was involved early and is still involved today. So I'm sort of the historian or conscience or institutional person. Uh, and at this exact moment, I'm vice chairing our search committee for

01:01:36.980 - 01:01:53.150

our new CEO, which is a wonderful committee and a wonderful opportunity to help shape the next, uh, decade or the next generation of the museum. So how did I get involved in it? I had no Holocaust relatives, no survivors that I know of that were,

01:01:53.820 - 01:02:08.260

uh, that we lost in the Holocaust. Now, I say that we know of it because undoubtedly we everyone had somebody. And it's how far back you can go in the, in the tree and how you can branch out. But we had a few friends my parents did that were survivors.

01:02:08.900 - 01:02:27.790

Uh, one in particular, a man named Maurice Oringer, uh, who was a very gentle man. He died the day I graduated high school. So he died fairly young, but he lost his family in Europe, came back to was, uh, resettled to Houston and married my mother's

01:02:27.820 - 01:02:42.780

best friend. And they were married for 20 years. Well, uh, he never talked about it in those days. People did not talk about the Holocaust when I was a kid, and we would go to their house. I once saw a picture of a woman and a child, and I asked my parents, who is that

01:02:42.780 - 01:02:55.340

woman and who is that child? And they pretty much hushed me up and said, uh, we don't talk about it. Or, uh, that was Uncle Morris's family in Europe. The one sentence, perhaps, and that was it.

01:02:55.340 - 01:03:12.750

And I was not encouraged to ask any more questions. Uh, I then heard Elie Wiesel speak at camp B'nai B'rith when I was 15 years old. As I mentioned earlier, I started studying the Holocaust a little bit. And then when the opportunity came to create the museum here in Houston and I was

01:03:12.750 - 01:03:22.760

fairly young, I was in my 30s, I got involved on the first committee and the planning group and so on and so forth. And, uh, as they say, the rest is history. We've built two buildings.

01:03:22.760 - 01:03:42.330

It's a major thriving institution, uh, with tremendous amount of support. In fact, whatever metric we would have ever imagined for the museum when we started 40 years ago, 35 years ago, we've surpassed it today with a brand new building that is just magnificent and educational

01:03:42.330 - 01:03:56.330

programs that are cutting edge across the country. So why did I choose that? I just felt like Holocaust education and the lessons that it taught had the greatest opportunity to impact young people.

01:03:57.090 - 01:04:09.380

The lessons of moral courage. The lessons of empathy. The lessons of faith, the lessons of personal responsibility. So not just the horror of the Holocaust, but the lessons that you can derive from the

01:04:09.380 - 01:04:21.070

Holocaust. I thought it had great potential to be an important vehicle in our public schools. And in fact, in the early days, it was very hard to get teachers to teach Holocaust. It was audacious.

01:04:21.110 - 01:04:34.040

It was it was frightening. It was daunting to think that people would even pay attention to that. Now, 30, 40 years later, it's a pretty solid part of the curriculum. So we've been validated in that respect in many ways.

01:04:34.860 - 01:04:51.670

So that was Holocaust Museum and ADL. I've also I paid my dues at most of the major establishment organizations for brief periods of time, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, on the boards of Jewish Family Service, on the board of American Jewish Committee Federation.

01:04:52.180 - 01:05:08.570

I did 12 years at Emory Wiener in the early part of this century, when it was starting its high school, and then in the last ten years, I was attracted to a new organization called Emerge, which is not a Jewish organization. It's my best example of a non-Jewish activity.

01:05:10.000 - 01:05:26.790

In fact, very few Jewish people involved in it. But it's an organization that helps very talented, under-resourced people think about going to selective universities and to equip them with the tools, the SAT preparation tools, the interview technique tools,

01:05:27.250 - 01:05:40.060

and the psychological makeup to be able to compete and thrive at these universities. And we've been very successful. We have about 3000 students in the pipeline now at high school and college and alumni

01:05:40.130 - 01:05:56.800

level, and it's been a wonderfully rewarding program for the last 8 or 10 years. So between the museum and Emerge, that's how I stayed out of trouble in 2023. That's great. Um, I would be

01:05:56.820 - 01:06:13.700

remiss if I did not ask you, as a lover of Texas Jewish history, to talk about your role in the, um, film West of Hester Street, which is a kind of reenactment of the Galveston Jewish story.

01:06:14.120 - 01:06:22.630

So how did that come about? So I'll give you the elevator version of that. But it was wonderful. And it actually grew my interest in Texas Jewish history.

01:06:22.630 - 01:06:36.820

And now is the time to give a plug to you and your staff for the incredible work you're doing here at Rice. And again, another example of how Houston's Jewish community adds institutions. It is so robust and so thriving.

01:06:37.880 - 01:06:50.370

We didn't have the South Texas Jewish Archive ten years ago. We have it today, and it's thriving in every way. But in 1983, a filmmaking couple out of Dallas named Alan and Cynthia Mandel put an ad in the Herald.

01:06:50.950 - 01:07:07.420

They wanted to interview people that had come in through Galveston during the Galveston Plan. Galveston Plan brought immigrants to America through the port of Galveston instead of through the Lower East Side. It actually went on for about seven years, 1907 to 1914, and

01:07:07.470 - 01:07:24.990

only about 10,000 people actually ended up coming through Galveston. But it's a very interesting chapter in American Jewish history with lots of layers of inter Jewish, I don't know, disdain. The Russian Jews were disdained by the German Jews anyway.

01:07:24.990 - 01:07:37.860

That part I won't talk about, but this movie that Alan and Cynthia wanted to make, they wanted to interview people that had come through. Well, it was 1980 and to have been born in 1907 to 1914, so had gone through it.

01:07:38.140 - 01:07:51.670

And to still be alive and to remember it is a fairly narrow window of people that were eligible to be interviewed. But my uncle, Max Lewis, who I mentioned earlier, was one of those people. He had a, uh, he come in through Galveston.

01:07:52.090 - 01:08:01.480

He had a perfectly sharp memory at that time. And I told him, uh, I'd like him to be interviewed by this couple. Would would he be willing to do it? He said, sure, David, whatever you want me to do.

01:08:01.570 - 01:08:13.110

But before I put them together, I took them out to dinner to make sure that they were kosher, that they were legitimate, and that they knew what they were doing. And we became fast friends. Immediately they went and interviewed Uncle Max.

01:08:13.410 - 01:08:23.490

The next day we had dinner. The next night they said, we can make the whole movie about your uncle. His stories were so clear, so perfect in every way. But of course they were not doing that.

01:08:23.490 - 01:08:40.970

They were interviewing many people and they ended up making a docudrama, an hour long docudrama that premiered in 1983. Uh, the narrator who did the voice over was Sam Jaffe, uh, who you might remember. And I actually helped travel that movie for about a

01:08:40.970 - 01:08:52.400

decade. Whenever Alan and Cynthia couldn't do a gig, they'd called me and say, do you want to go to Chicago? Do you want to go to San Francisco and introduce the movie? I said, sure, I'll do that. So we became very good friends.

01:08:52.400 - 01:09:04.910

They, uh, the movie still holds its own. It's still a wonderful movie. And, uh, it's it's an important chapter in American Jewish history. Uh, and it all happened because of that.

01:09:04.910 - 01:09:16.640

Oh, one more story. So the movie gets made. I take my big clunky VHS machine over to my uncle's apartment. He's now in his 90s, I think, and Uncle Max, I'm going to show you the movie

01:09:17.400 - 01:09:32.100

because it tells many of the same stories that you told them. But by the way, the whole movie is not about you. He said, okay, David, I understand, I understand. So we're watching the movie, and in the movie the character lands in

01:09:32.100 - 01:09:42.290

Galveston, but he gets immediately transported to Corsicana. Corsicana is about an hour from Dallas. He says, David, I didn't go to Corsicana. I said, I know!

01:09:42.630 - 01:09:56.180

Remember Uncle Max, it's not all about you. And he said, okay, okay. But it's a it's a great story and it's a wonderful tribute to his life story for his children and grandchildren to to know that story about West of Hester Street.

01:09:56.700 - 01:10:09.900

Yeah, that's a great story. Did you have a cameo in there? I had a cameo, but you have to really be looking. It was less than a second. Lonnie Schooler and I were extras coming off of the boat, which they filmed in Galveston

01:10:09.900 - 01:10:21.880

one day, and they dressed us up in these really heavy black pants, jacket and hat. And we're we're really pretty miserable. It's hot as can be in Galveston that day.

01:10:22.690 - 01:10:35.560

And we started eight in the morning and about 3:00 in the afternoon they're still doing these film takes. And and we're getting madder and madder because we want to go home. And finally they do one run and they said, okay, now you look like immigrants.

01:10:35.560 - 01:10:50.680

You're shvitzing, you're irritated, you're angry. And that's when they took the the footage that ultimately made it in the film. So, uh, you will not find me unless you know exactly where to look for me. And the duration of my appearance is less than two seconds.

01:10:51.470 - 01:11:03.880

So that's a cameo, I suppose. That's fantastic. So you have lived almost your entire life in Houston, Texas. You've seen the East Coast, you've seen the West Coast.

01:11:04.470 - 01:11:22.290

You left and you came back and you settled here, and you, uh, married and have a family and all of that. What makes Houston such a special place to live and a special Jewish community in your mind? It's a great question and I've thought about it a lot.

01:11:22.870 - 01:11:41.550

Um, it's certainly different in 2023 than it was in my formative years. Um, I like to say, and I think this is true, I do travel a good bit or I used to more than I do now, but I'm pretty familiar with other communities. Houston has a reputation for being incredibly warm and gracious and

01:11:41.730 - 01:11:56.840

open and welcoming to newcomers. I think we have some of the most robust Jewish institutions in the country, and even in the last decade, we have rebuilt our JCC, we built our Holocaust museum, created the South Texas Jewish Archive.

01:11:58.120 - 01:12:17.990

Uh, so institutions are popping up frequently. The Orthodox community is absolutely exploding in Houston because many reasons. But it's a very welcoming environment for Orthodox Jews, and I've always felt like it was a really wonderful place

01:12:18.670 - 01:12:34.530

to grow up, to raise my family. The ease of mobility you can get around. It's a sufficiently robust community that you don't feel like you're out in the hinterlands. Our JCC Book Fair is about the best one in the

01:12:34.580 - 01:12:51.770

country. Our film festival is right up there, so we do not come up short in cultural activities whatsoever. And it's a it's a wonderful place, I think, to be Jewish. Uh, we have had, as has everyone, a very challenging decade.

01:12:52.290 - 01:13:09.880

And this is why the cup is both half full and half empty. If you could turn the clock back to the spring of 2015 before the first flood in Meyerland and other places, things were going very, very well. Uh, I lived in a home in Meyerland, believe it or not.

01:13:09.880 - 01:13:25.470

I grew up in Meyerland, and then I bought a home and raised my family in a different home in Meyerland, although on the same street, Braesheather and I pretty much felt like I would live out my life on Braesheather. Uh, but the skies had other ideas and we suffered

01:13:26.440 - 01:13:40.540

horribly in May of 2015, uh, our personally, we were, uh, not able to stay at our house. Um, two more floods occurred in 2016 and 2017, 2017 being the most devastating for the largest number of people.

01:13:41.810 - 01:14:00.980

But you take those three episodes, then you superimpose Covid, which came 2 or 3 years later after that, uh, the political environment in America since about 2016, in terms of polarization and nastiness and the lack of consensus and

01:14:01.740 - 01:14:19.130

the ubiquity of gun violence in America, particularly in the schools. And I've been saying now for several years, I would hate to be a child in America today because I don't know what the future holds for me. Those four things, weather, climate change in this case, uh,

01:14:19.630 - 01:14:36.940

health, uh, the Covid circumstance, gun control or gun violence issues, not gun control, but gun violence. And then the political polarization, those four factors combined to make it a tough place for a young family to raise not just Jewish kids, but any

01:14:37.170 - 01:14:49.400

kids. And it saddens me profoundly. I mean, I'm 74 years old. I'm largely immune from most of those circumstances. Although we did have to rebuild, not rebuild, but move into a new home, which we

01:14:49.400 - 01:15:06.440

were very fortunate and able to do. Uh, but it's been a tough, tough decade for many people, for most people, much worse than Judy and I had. But, uh, it's a stark reminder that, uh, all is not perfect.

01:15:06.440 - 01:15:23.630

And, you know, the cup is half full and half empty and and so that's sort of my, my concern today in Houston's Jewish community, we're still thriving. We're still doing wonderful things, but it's tougher and tougher. I think, uh, Jewish literacy is uneven.

01:15:23.690 - 01:15:43.820

I think most of our kids, even the ones that are getting Jewish educations, it's not quite as serious and scholarly a Jewish education for the most kids that I would like it to be, it's not most kids don't really know too much about, uh, ancient history or Jewish history or even modern

01:15:44.240 - 01:16:01.160

Jewish history. Uh, and the level of observance, uh, in families is, is modest. I mean, synagogue attendance is high, but, we have learned rabbis and not particularly learned congregants in many of our synagogues in the non-Orthodox community.

01:16:01.610 - 01:16:11.730

And that's that's a source of sadness for me. Um, but I'm optimistic. I think things have the potential to rebound, and hopefully they will. And the ingredients are there for it.

01:16:12.470 - 01:16:31.390

And I continue to be bullish about Jewish life in Houston and in America and hope that with some of the efforts of people not just myself but people like me, that will continue to do things, I have to speak about one thing that you didn't ask me about, but it would be horribly remiss if I didn't mention

01:16:32.270 - 01:16:44.210

my nuclear family of my adult life. I married Judy Rosenblum in 1990, so we're married 34 years. Almost. Uh, our two daughters are twins.

01:16:44.300 - 01:17:02.110

Elena and Amelia are 30 years old now. Uh, They both went to, uh, Jewish day school through elementary school. Elena went to Emory Wiener and Amelia went to Hspva. Elena went on to Washu, and Amelia went on to Northwestern.

01:17:02.560 - 01:17:17.590

Uh, they live out of town now, much to my chagrin. But they're a very happy and thriving in their professional lives. Elena is a management consultant. Amelia is a teacher of art and music and movement for little children in

01:17:17.610 - 01:17:32.600

Chicago. And is getting married in about four months, six months, something like that. Uh, and we're very happy about that. Uh, very, very happy about that. And Elena's, uh, has a very significant relationship that

01:17:32.780 - 01:17:48.170

is coming along beautifully also. So even though we're 74 and not yet finished our work, we we have prospects of finishing that important task that Jewish parents all have. Very nice, David, thank you so much.

01:17:48.280 - 01:18:06.370

Not only for this interview, but for your many years of friendship and good counsel and support. To me personally, I'm very grateful. Well, you're a very special person, Josh, and I'm happy to take a minute to to sing your praises. Uh, you created something from nothing where it did not exist.

01:18:06.420 - 01:18:19.660

And I got excited about it the first time I met you and started sending you everything that I could find. So I have a little bit of, uh, uh, what is it? Uh, meat on the bone in this organization.

01:18:19.690 - 01:18:36.300

We will miss you terribly, but I know that you're moving on to another wonderful opportunity for you, and that you're not going to be that far away. And you, you did make a major contribution to Houston. And I'm thrilled that you saw fit to give me a few moments to talk and

01:18:36.730 - 01:18:56.140

create a, uh, a legacy piece for my family and my friends. And I wish you the best in all your future endeavors. That's very kind, David. Thank you so much.