My family and I just passed the shloshim of my father, Herbert A. Kelman, MD, a”h. During the shiva, as I shared with friends and family my father’s challenges and life achievements, I also discovered fresh anecdotes of his life from his surviving friends and colleagues. Sadly, not too many of them remain; after all, he was the last of his generation, passing away at the ripe old age of 95! My daughter Naomi shared with us an interview she penned about his life as part of a college course. Upon reading it, I was amazed at how many particulars of my father’s life I had forgotten or had never known, even though I thought I knew all the details of his long life.
Born on June 7, 1924 in Detroit, Michigan, to an Eastern European immigrant father and American mother, his early life was clearly less challenging than that of my wife’s Holocaust-surviving parents. Still, the trials of growing up frum in the 1920s and 30s in Midwest America were quite formidable and are a part of the American Jewish Orthodox experience that is underappreciated.
What follows is his story, often in his own words, based on my daughter Naomi’s interview with him, with an emphasis on those circumstances and experiences that molded his religious outlook and created the strong Torah foundation that carried him through life.
* * *
When my father’s father Abraham Kelman came to America from Bessarabia with his five brothers in the early 1900s, it was to escape the rampant anti-Semitism that had taken hold of Eastern Europe. They grew up in the small town of Orgeyev, outside Kishenev, the same shtetl from where the renowned William Friedman, future master code-breaker and dean of American cryptology, hailed. They witnessed the infamous Kishenev pogroms of 1903 and 1905. My grandfather survived one attack by hiding in a gentile’s basement. My father said that hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in those pogroms but, the number was actually in the hundreds. The ensuing fear that gripped the Jewish community contributed to the mass migration of Jews to America.
Abraham landed in the port of Baltimore, moving on to St. Louis, where he labored as a shoemaker, and ultimately to Detroit, where he joined his brothers in “dry goods.” He was a simple peddler with a rudimentary education but with great hopes that his children would receive better Torah and secular educations in their new country. He himself was not learned, never having had the opportunity to study in a yeshiva or gymnasium in Europe.
The beginnings of yeshiva education in Detroit started with Yeshiva Beis Yehuda, which was founded in 1917 and by 1925 boasted 25 students. My father and most of his friends, however, did not have the opportunity to study there. Instead, Torah study and religious life were rooted mainly at home and with other religious families and friends at shul. Formal Jewish education was relegated to after-school Hebrew schools with all their associated problems.
As my father tells it, “I went to public school and got out at 3:30 p.m. Then I went to cheder from 4 to 6 p.m. every day except Friday. It was for boys and girls, and it wasn’t Orthodox. It was called UHS, United Hebrew Schools. I remember learning Navi. My teacher was part of the Haskalah movement and was a very strong Zionist who hated religion. I remember how my older brother (Chili, the future lawyer) always use to argue with him.”
My father was fortunate to learn with his father’s brother, Uncle Isaac, who had managed to obtain a yeshiva education while still in Europe. Uncle Isaac held regular Talmud sessions with his sons and nephews. My Dad earned the title of the “chnyuk” of the family (doesn’t every family have one?) and learned with Uncle Isaac when he could. Dad was very self-motivated and studied the relatively easy-to-read Hebrew of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch on his own, but more advanced learning was out of his reach. Later in life, he regretted not following his cousins to study in New York yeshivos.
When asked to cite significant events of his childhood, my father recalled life-threatening events that he felt had a great impact on his life outlook. He was hit by a car, suffered serious ear and skin infections, and just missed being blown up by an explosive car battery, all before the age of 12. The tenuousness nature of life and health were ingrained in his psyche from an early age. Perhaps these early life experiences led to his strong belief in Hashem and the need to depend on Him for everything in life.
* * *
One of my father’s major influences growing up was Rabbi Hugo Mandelbaum. An entire article in the WWW could be devoted to this unique individual. Born in Summerhausen, Germany, in 1901, he was gifted in mathematics and science and received his Ph.D. in geophysics while in Germany. Yet he learned in yeshivos and developed into a brilliant talmid chacham with a passion for teaching Torah. He clearly followed the approach of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, combining Torah and Derech Eretz into one persona. Before leaving Germany, he published two textbooks on Jewish studies that were used in day schools throughout central Europe. He taught hundreds of students at the Talmud Torah High School in Hamburg, Germany, and later in Shefford, England. When he arrived in Detroit in the mid-1940s, he was associated with the Yeshivas Beis Yehuda and was instrumental in setting up the curriculum and training young men and women in secular and Jewish studies. In 1948, he joined the staff of Wayne State University eventually rising to the rank of professor of geology.
The impact he had on my father’s generation was immense. They had never set eyes on such a unique person: an accomplished Torah scholar and educator who at the same time was a master of the worlds of math and science. He inspired my father to emulate him; more than that, my father recognized the need to pass on these values to his own children.
When I was six years old, I remember strolling on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, from 75th Street to 90th Street on the way to davening at the Young Israel. While we passed the A&P, the treife chazir market with its deliciously sinful smells, and while taking in all the sights and aromas of this bustling boulevard, my father would turn to me and bark, “Quote the sentence!” That was my cue to recite, “Vishinantam lrvanecha vedibarta bam…uvelechtecha baderech.” But instead of Torah, he taught me what he knew well, which was science. He would pump me with questions like “What are the five forms of energy?” What followed was a life lesson that has lasted a lifetime: the supreme importance of Truth. And the Torah represents Truth. G-d revealed the Truth in His Torah, but man has the power to reveal Truth through science. Thus, to my father, Torah and science were equivalent. With this logic, he argued that studying science is as important as studying Torah.
These lessons on the way to shul left an indelible mark on me and my thinking and remain my most cherished childhood memories of my father. Only years later did I realize that his vision of Torah im Derech Eretz came directly from the influence of Dr. Mandelbaum. (Parenthetically, I should add that today, Rabbi Dr. Mandelbaum’s great granddaughter Esther Schubert is very close friends with my daughter Vivi.)
* * *
Later in life, my father fell under the influence of Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, who became his brother-in-law in 1953. For decades, my father (and I) read Rabbi Lamm’s amazing sermons that he delivered every two weeks at the West Side Jewish Center in Manhattan. The new mantra was now Torah U’Mada, but the passion for Torah learning and secular knowledge continued unabated.
My father and his siblings did achieve their father’s dream of receiving a good education as they all earned advanced academic degrees. My father excelled academically in high school, especially in Latin. He credited his Latin scholarship with easing his mastery of anatomical words in medical school. His story of getting into medical school based solely on his outstanding high school grades reflected the changed circumstances of World War II.
In 1942. my father graduated high school at the top of his class. In his own words, “I never intended to become a doctor because it was out of my financial range. Additionally, at the time it was very difficult for Jews to get into medical school because of quotas limiting the number of Jews accepted per year. But because of World War II, they wanted to train more doctors. In the fall of 1942, I saw an opportunity to get into medical school. The government was paying for doctors’ schooling, so I applied. Applications were based on high school grades. They were accepting people with no college training at all because they wanted to get as many students as they could.
“I was interviewed by two or three people and received a recommendation from my rabbi. Initially, I was rejected. I enlisted in the army and did well on an aptitude test. The Army sent me to a military school for eight months to study engineering. I was accepted into the ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program, instituted by the U.S. Army to supply desperately-needed engineers and technicians for the war effort. I found out that my cousin had been rejected after applying to dental school but had reapplied and got in. So I reapplied to medical school and wrote them a letter saying that I was in the ASTP and could they reconsider my application. I received the news of my acceptance to medical school right after Rosh Hashanah.” (Other family members remember hearing that, in fact, his mother reapplied for him without his knowledge! When asked about this, he acknowledged that it could be.)
Remarkably, two weeks after he received the news of his acceptance, the entire ASTP program was scrapped by General Marshall, who stated that the Army had no time to wait for these college students to get training as the Army needed them immediately to fight in Europe. From a wartime high of 145,000 students, the ASTP was immediately reduced to approximately 35,000 members. Fortunately, exceptions were given to medical students, and my father did not have to fight in Europe.
* * *
At that time, you needed two years of basic science courses in college before entering medical school. The Army sent him to Yale University, where he crammed those courses into six months. During that period, he was under significant pressure to succeed and not fail. His faith in Hashem kept him going. Keeping Shabbos was a challenge as classes took place on Saturdays. He did what he could to keep Shabbos by walking to class when possible or taking a bus without paying, by flashing his military pass that allowed him a free ride.
During medical school he attended classes in military uniform as did most of his classmates. He lived at home, not in barracks, and was paid military pay with his mother being designated as his “first sergeant”!
He graduated medical school in 1946 and took a residency in internal medicine at Receiving Hospital in Detroit. In the fall of 1952, he was drafted into the Korean War. Before he left, he met his future wife, Jean, at a Young Israel dinner dance. They became engaged one month before he left for Korea.
Again, in his own words, “In Korea I was stationed at an Airforce base that was designated for maintenance. They kept parts for airplanes there, but it was a waste of time because they changed from using propellers to jet planes. There were 2,000 soldiers on the base, and everyone was going crazy from boredom. Most of the time I studied Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. Every day, I would write a letter to my fiancé Jean. I still have those letters that chronicle my time in Korea.
“There was severe anti-Semitism among the Americans. There was a Nazi from Philadelphia who put Nazi symbols on my things; he got drunk and fought physically with me. They were all drunk and crazy. One of them was very friendly to me, and after the war he came to visit us in New York. Pesach time I sold my chametz to him. His father was a minister.
“When I was an officer in Korea, they had a chapel which served all three religions. I was the acting Jewish chaplain on the base, and I went there and davened every day. I also conducted Friday night services; only four or five Jews came to the services.”
* * *
After my father returned from Korea, my parents married in 1953 and eventually moved to Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York, in 1962 with four young children in tow. They joined the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills where my father became a close friend of Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld. He attended his weekly Talmud classes and became an outspoken participant, always ready with some penetrating question. Still, he really didn’t have the time to devote to learning Talmud, as he labored to stay up-to-date in internal medicine, arising at 5 a.m. every morning to study his books and journals before davening.
In fact, the reason I went into ophthalmology was due to my father’s resignation about not being able to keep up with the explosion of medical information. One day when I was 12 years old, he asked me to pick up his ophthalmoscope and find his macula. “You are going to be an ophthalmologist,” he declared. “At least you will be able to keep up, after all, it is only the eye you need to study, not the whole body!” He didn’t realize at the time that ophthalmology had eight subspecialties and that my chosen field of neuro-ophthalmology deals with the entire nervous system. So, over the years, I too became resigned to the reality that even my narrow field of neuro-ophthalmology was too vast to master.
* * *
My father continued to attend the Shabbos Talmud classes over a period of 30 years, but then something momentous happened: The Daf Yomi movement was beginning to gain traction, and a major siyum had just taken place on April 26, 1990 in Madison Square Garden with over 20,000 attendees. There was an excitement in the air that it was possible for even a regular “balabos” to finish Shas. This astounding achievement, which previously was only a dream that few could hope to accomplish, was now an attainable reality. My father enthusiastically joined other members of his shul and committed to learning every day at 5:30 a.m. under their dedicated magid shiur, Rabbi Dr. Mordecai Koenigsberg. They started with the new cycle in 1990, and my father, who was 66 at the time, merited to finish three cycles of Shas with his shiur. In the last few years, unable to attend the shiur, he followed the Daf with Rabbi Elefant on the OU website. I was already on my second cycle of the Daf when my father started his first cycle, and from then on, whenever I or my brother would speak with our father, the Daf was always a point of discussion.
As the Orthodox world holds its 13th Siyum Hashas this week, the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills is planning its own fourth Siyum Hashas. The shul will be honoring the memories of four deceased members who were active participants in the shiur, my father among them.
It is interesting to reflect on how my father, who started with a very rudimentary Jewish education but with immense drive, could maintain his dream through the course of almost a century to one day become a true Talmud scholar. In reality, he had achieved this goal many years earlier, but in his later years, he was proud of his credentials, having finished Shas over three times. From the time he retired from active medical practice at age 70, he spent much of his day preparing or reviewing the Daf Yomi. In his later years, he found the challenge too great, and devoted himself to prayer, spending the whole morning in his tallis and tefillin.
May his memory be a zechus for his family and friends.
