The circumstances that eventually brought my Syrian grandfather to the U.S. in the 1920s go back to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. This great technological feat that tremendously expedited trade all over the world was the beginning of the end of Syria’s status as the trading crossroads of the world. Suddenly, commerce shifted to boats instead of passing through the famed Damascus and Aleppo trading centers. Economic opportunities for the Syrian Jews, who were famed for their business skills, suddenly plummeted. Businesses were failing, and my grandfather’s family, among many others, fell on hard times.
Adding to the Syrian Jews’ difficulties was World War I and the Ottoman Empire’s army recruitment decree, which conscripted youths as young as 12 and 13. The Aleppo and Damascus Jewish families would send their children abroad to dodge the brutal Turkish draft.
My Mother’s Family, the Nahmods
My grandfather, Ezra Nahmod, came to the United States with his mother when he was 12 years old. His brother was already living in Pittsburgh, which had only three Sephardic families at the time. The reason why many Syrians moved to outlying cities was because they were businessmen, and felt they had a better chance to succeed in little towns all over the country.
When my grandfather turned 24, his parents arranged for a second cousin to come from Damascus to marry him. They lived in the Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, and he worked in a store. They had three sons and three daughters in Pittsburgh, the middle one of which was my mother June. Their daughters went to public school and then attended an Ashkenazi Hebrew school in the afternoon. Growing up, my mother had one Sephardi friend, but like other children born to immigrant families, she quickly felt at home in America.
In the end, my grandparents moved to New York City because a Syrian friend, a traveling salesman named Joe Maslaton, who would visit them when he came to Pittsburgh on business, convinced them that their three daughters would never get married if they stayed in Pittsburgh.
They moved to New York and joined the Syrian community in Bensonhurst. My grandfather was very active in the Damascus Ahi Ezer shul.
My Father Shlomo Cohen
If my mother’s family had been thinking for years to leave Syria, the idea of leaving his birth country had never crossed my father’s mind. The family of my father, Shlomo David Cohen, was originally from Marrakesh, Morocco, but they had immigrated to Palestine, and my father was born there. They lived in the Old City on Hayehudim Street.
One day in July, 1946, my father was on his way to Yeshivat Porat Yosef when he saw an injured Jew lying on the street. He didn’t know that the Jew was a member of the illegal Lechi Irgun who had just taken part in the bombing of the King David Hotel. Because he was a kind person, my father took the man to the hospital to get medical care. When they arrived, he was arrested for aiding and abetting a terrorist and was thrown into jail.
My grandmother worked for the doctors’ offices in the Department of Health. She told one of the doctors about my father’s mistaken imprisonment, and he gave her a note to give to the British officer in charge of the prison explaining that my father was not in good health and should be kept under house arrest. They allowed him to go home on condition that every day my father would go to the jail, get fingerprinted, and sign a form.
My Father Goes to the U.S. to Escape the British
The Porat Yosef Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Ezra Attia, was perturbed about my father’s predicament, so he reached out to Rav Avraham Kalmanovitz, the Mirrer Rosh Yeshiva in the U.S., to try and get him released and admitted to the U.S., where he would be free from British injustice. Our family has letters that Rav Kalmanowitz sent to the Department of Immigration requesting approval for my father to immigrate to America.
In the meantime, my father worked for a travel agent so he could earn the funds to afford a ticket on a boat to the U.S. When he got the go ahead to leave the country in 1947, he booked in steerage, the cheapest ticket.
Before he left, my grandmother gave him some Dramamine to take along in case he would suffer from sea sickness.
An Arab on the boat was suffering from sea sickness, and my father gave him some of the Dramamine. A few days later he overheard several Arabs talking, saying that he probably had money and they should kill him to get it. They didn’t realize that he understood their Arabic. Luckily, the Arab he had helped told his friends that my father was a good person who had saved him when he was sick, and they should leave him alone.
The plan was that my father would stay a short time in the U.S. and then go back to Palestine. He had a return ticket, and he was constantly writing letters to his family that he wanted to come back. However, the situation in Palestine was deteriorating and war seemed imminent. They insisted that he stay where he was.
His family was told to leave the Old City because it was too dangerous. My grandmother left with the children, but my grandfather refused to leave, and my father’s youngest sister Aviva, who was 15 at the time, stayed behind in the Old City to take care of him. They were evacuated six months later in a UN armored vehicle while being shelled by the Jordanians.
My Parents Meet and Marry
In the meantime, my father was stuck. He was 23, living in the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and learning in the Mirrer yeshiva. He already had semicha from Porat Yosef and kabbalah in shechita and safrus. He was looking for a job and thinking of marriage.
He met my mother at a Palestine Aid Committee event, where my mother was very active, and they began to date. My mother’s father was at first wary that the young Palestinian Jew was looking for a way to get U.S. citizenship, but Rabbi Jacob Kassin, the chief rabbi of the Syrian community, knew my father’s family from Israel and highly recommended him. They were married in August 1949.
My Father’s Rabbinical Positions
My parents started out in Lynn, Massachusetts, where my father taught Jewish studies and Hebrew in the Maimonides school as well as serving as the rabbi of a small Sephardi shul. He spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and Ladino, and with the years, he picked up Yiddish and English.
Two years later, he was offered a position in Seattle or Rochester in upstate New York. Because Seattle was so far from my mother’s family, he decided to take the position in the Ohr Yisrael synagogue in Rochester. He ended up staying there for 43 years. Only once, in 1969, did he think of making aliyah, but the only job offered him was insufficient to support our family, and the community in Rochester also didn’t want him to leave.
His congregation was comprised of about 100 families from Turkey, Rhodes, Monastir (Balkans), and Yugoslavia. They were all laborers, workers, and tailors. He was their first rabbi. I was born in 1950, six weeks after my parents moved, their first child.
Besides the Sephardi community, there was a large strong frum Ashkenazi Jewish community living in Rochester that had rabbanim of stature leading it.
A Congregation Rabbi in Rochester
Rochester was a small community but it had the essential services needed for a Jewish community. We had kosher meat, kosher bakeries, and a small day school where my father taught the first few years. In the 1950s, that was pretty good. Most cities didn’t have day schools.
My father involved himself not only with his congregation but with every aspect of Jewish life – kashrus, shechita, gittin, and chinuch. He wouldn’t compromise on halacha and would frequently consult Rav Moshe Feinstein.
In addition to the above, my father gave the full range of services to the congregation: speeches in shul, bar mitzva lessons, weddings and funerals, teaching in Hebrew school, etc.
My mother was the shul rabbanit, which was a full time job in itself. Sephardim sew their own tachrichin before a levaya, so she ran the Chevra Kadisha. She formed the shul sisterhood, ran Bingo for Hillel Day School for years, which was a big income for the school, and chaired the ladies mikvah association. She was the PTA president a few times. My mother would also make the cocktail reception after the annual Israeli Bond concert.
The original Sephardic shul had a balcony, but when they built a new shul, many congregants didn’t want a mechitza. My father fought with them over this, and they had to give in to him. Despite my father’s best efforts, it was very difficult to stave off assimilation.
Many people came to Rochester every few years hoping to start a yeshiva. They would come to our home for dinner and question my father on how to go about it. My father would give them names of gvirim, and say, “I will do anything in my power to help you.” But none of them succeeded. When Rabbi Davidowitz and Rabbi Harris came to start Talmudical Institute (a branch of Chofetz Chaim), he helped them as he had helped others, and this time he added, “I hope you will be the last ones to come!” And they were.
The city was taking over old sections of the city to make way for urban housing. Our new shul had been rebuilt by then in a better neighborhood. The city gave each of the synagogue rabbis a nice amount of compensation. My father gave it to the Talmudical Institute and refused to take a penny.
My father was also involved in the construction of the new mikvah.
Kashrus Supervision
My father would check all the bakeries in the city to make sure they were using only kosher ingredients. In the beginning he didn’t have an official kashrus organization; this was just something he wanted to do to make sure people would not eat treif. The owners were not shomer Shabbos, but they were closed on Shabbos. One time, on the last day of Pesach, someone came and told my father that one of the bakeries was baking that day. Even though it involved a long walk through dangerous neighborhoods, he went there to find out if it was true. The bakers got a fierce reprimand. Eventually my father made his own personal kashrus agency and supervised various plants in the area.
Kodak had a distillation industry in the area, where they made monoglycerides, the only monoglycerides production in the whole world. My father did all the preliminary work to make it kosher, and it remained completely under his hashgacha. Many representatives of other kashrus agencies would come to check out his supervision because this product is used all over the world. They all confirmed his hashgscha. He also did hashgacha work for the Orthodox Union.
My father would also check the local shechita plants. There was a very big plant in Rochester which he supervised.
In 1977, the Coalition for Advancement in Jewish Education decided to hold their second annual conference at the Rochester Institute of Technology. My father single-handedly took care of all the kashering and preparations for this event, which catered to 1,000 participants including Orthodox Jews.
Bris Milah in Upstate New York
One of my father’s most important roles was doing bris milahs. He often traveled out of Rochester to do brisim in the cities of Buffalo, Binghamton, Syracuse, Utica, Elmira, Ithaca, and Niagara Falls. Once he flew to Saratoga Springs in a small plane to do a bris.
In Rochester, my father often had to walk five or six miles on Shabbos to do a bris, and when it was winter, he sometimes could only return after Shabbos.
Every week he would visit the various local hospitals to see if any Jewish mother had given birth to a baby boy. He would try to​ convince them to let him do the bris. Many of these Jewish boys would have had a doctor do the circumcision and wouldn’t have had a kosher bris.
Once he went to Newark to do a model seder for Jewish residents of a home for mentally retarded one week before Pesach. A state trooper pulled him over for speeding and asked to see his license. The trooper asked him, “Where are you running to?”
My father told him, “I have to go make a Seder at the Newark State School.”
The Jewish trooper told him, “But Passover is next week!”
“Next week I have to celebrate Passover myself so I have to do it at the home now.” He asked the trooper what his name was and discovered he had done the man’s bris in Rochester. When informed of that fact, the trooper laughed and let him off.
There was a conservative rabbi in Rochester who had done something terrible to undermine the kashrus in the city (my father wouldn’t tell me what it was). My father was very upset with him, but he never confronted him as there was nothing that could be done, and this rabbi eventually moved away.
Some years later, my father got a call to do a bris in a small town outside of Rochester. Since it was a snowy day and driving was difficult, he didn’t make a prior visit to check the baby and just went to perform the bris.
When he knocked on the door, that Conservative rabbi answered it. My father was stunned and was about to leave but then thought how could he do this to the parents? It was obvious to him that this was a very secular family. He looked around the room and noticed a picture of the Ben Ish Chai on the wall. He asked them, “What is your connection to this great Rabbi?” The father of the baby, who looked Israeli, said “Oh, that is my grandfather.” My father told us, “I almost missed out on doing the bris of a great-grandson of the Ben Ish Chai!”
He did brisim for Russian children and Russian adults for free. This was usually arranged with Chabad. The mitzva of milah was so precious to him that he saved all the orlot that he had cut and had them buried with him on Har Hazeisim.
Gittin and Chaplaincy
My father also took care of all the gittin (Jewish divorces) in the upstate New York area. Many times people didn’t want to obey halacha, but my father would stand his ground and insist that it be done the correct way.
He served as a chaplain in the women’s prison in Albion, NY, and in the Newark state home for the mentally retarded. He would go to visit every week or two.
When it was Sukkos time, he would stop on his way back from Albion and Newark at an evergreen farm and ask if he could have some branches for our sukkah schach. The farms were glad to give it to him.
Growing Up in Rochester
Because my father was very dedicated to his shul, we rarely left Rochester and only went to New York City once a year in the summer for a week to my grandparents. My grandmother would show me how to cook all the Sephardi delicacies, and we would go to their shul and hear the Sephardi davening, which was different than in my father’s shul.
I didn’t feel a clash with my Sephardi identity, because I was already “Ashkenazied.” Even though I knew how to daven with a Sephardi accent, I had learned Ashkenazi reading, and we were very integrated in the Ashkenazi frum community. The Sephardim in our shul were less observant than us, and our frum friends were all Ashkenazi.
Shabbos was one of our hardest days. We lived on the opposite side of the city from all the frum kids, because we had to be near my father’s shul. Because we had no frum friends our age nearby, my mother would play games with us to occupy us.
Despite the danger, in the summer time my parents would let two of us kids walk through the bad neighborhoods to visit our friends in the frum neighborhoods because we were so desperate for friends.
Day School and Public School
My father had insisted that the principal of the day school always had to be a religious person. When I was growing up, Rabbi Mordechai Kobre was the amazing principal of our elementary school. One of the things he started was a model seder for the kids in school. He would have the oldest class, the seventh grade, take the role of the father and mother at the table, and the rest of the students were the “children.” Each grade had a certain part to fulfill. One grade said Mah Nishtana, etc. It was a good educational experience for the kids, especially the non-religious ones. Forty percent of the 100 students in the school were not from religious homes, so this taught them what a seder was about.
But day school only went up to seventh grade. My father tried to open an eighth grade, but it didn’t succeed. I was in public school for eighth and ninth grades. I hated it and was desperate to get out of the public school system. I was the only frum girl there. Every time I missed days for Yom Tov, I would get complaints: “Why are you missing school when all the other Jewish kids come?” There were lots of Jewish kids in our high school. I replied that I was Orthodox, but the school administration didn’t know what that meant.
My father started an afternoon Hebrew school for the kids who were studying in public high school. So on Sunday from 9:00 to 1:00 and Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 4:00 to 7:00, nine of us would return to the day school after public school to learn Navi, Chumash, Ivris, and halacha from the day school teachers. I would take two buses from my public school on the other side of city to come to the day school, come home at 7:30, eat supper, and do homework. It was grueling but worthwhile. My Jewish education was so good that when I went to Bais Yaakov in tenth grade, I was up to par.
When I was in ninth grade, NCSY came to Rochester and that helped a lot. I would get together with my frum friends, boys and girls together, at a Shabbaton. Having an organization that catered to frum kids made life a little easier. And when we went to Shabbatons, we got to meet frum kids from other places.
How did we stay frum when the environment was not very supportive? There was no option for us six Cohen kids not to be frum. When I was in public high school, the rage was fishnet stockings, and I badly wanted to wear them. My mother utterly refused and told me that they were not for a bas Yisrael. Because my father was the rabbi of the shul, we were always invited to fancy bar mitzvas with bands, and I wanted to dance with the boys. My mother said no to that, too. My parents were strict. We knew we were different, and we knew our parents were doing the right thing; that’s why we stayed the course.
I Go to Bais Yaakov
A friend from Rochester who was in twelfth grade had switched to Bais Yaakov Baltimore. I was dying to go too. My brother had gone to the Talmudical Academy in Baltimore the year before, but I knew my parents couldn’t afford to pay tuition and board for me as well.
My parents didn’t want me to go to New York because they felt I would get lost there, and they didn’t want to burden my grandparents. They looked into sending me to Baltimore. We went down, met Rabbi Steinberg and Rabbi Diskind, were very impressed, and I started studying in Bais Yaakov in September 1965. The school made it affordable by giving me a scholarship.
In the beginning, I would take a bus at 7:00 p.m. from Rochester and get to Baltimore at 7:00 a.m. The bus made a stop in every little town on the way. By the time I was in the eleventh and twelfth grades, student fares had become cheap enough to travel by plane. When people didn’t show up, you could travel stand-by, and it was cheaper and faster than the bus - but you could even be on the plane, and they would yank you off because three people with reservations arrived at the last moment. I only came home Sukkos, Chanukah, and Pesach. One Chanukah my parents couldn’t afford to pay for my return flight, so I went to my grandparents in New York.
Those three years were amazing, the best thing that happened to me. There were other out-of-towners there, from Cincinnati, Harrisburg, New York, and Washington DC. The whole school only had 100 girls at the time (now there are more than 1,500). Everyone was friendly with each other, and I had only 22 girls in my class. We felt like one big family. Our teachers were amazing too.
I Become a Teacher
When I finished high school in 1968, an uncle told my father to send me to Machon Gold in Israel. My father didn’t know about BJJ in Yerushalayim, and thought this was the only place. I went the last year that it was co-ed. The boys in the Machon were older, from Morocco and Paris, and were going back to be teachers. The girls who learned there at my time today wear sheitels and are very frum. But that is all they had then and all we knew about.
After my year in Israel, I came back to be a teacher in the Rochester day school. I was also an NCSY advisor that year and taught in the afternoon Hebrew school.
My friends told me I was crazy to go back to Rochester. “How will you get married?” They stated the obvious problem. But I had signed a contract with the Jewish Agency that I would be a teacher for two years so that my parents would only have to pay half tuition, and the Board of Jewish Education in Rochester had paid the other half. So I had to teach, and the easiest place was my home town. It was good coming home. I knew the families and teachers, and it was a good experience.
I visited a friend in Baltimore a few times that year, and she tried to suggest boys for me. But my zivug came in a completely different way.
Marriage
My brother had switched from TA to the Scranton yeshiva in the tenth grade. They matched beis midrash boys with younger boys, and my brother had a chavrusa called Chaim Gartenhaus whom he liked a lot. He thought the shidduch might go because both his sister and chavrusa “liked to talk and were good people.”
The Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yaakov Schnaidman called my father and asked if he was makpid to have only a Sephardi boy for his daughter. My father said, “The important thing is that he is a ben Torah.” The Rosh Yeshiva asked if my father had any questions about the boy. My father said yes: Does he come from a good family? Is he a ben Torah? And is he responsible? Three questions, nothing else! Today, I make shidduchim, and you won’t believe the questions I hear – like does he take medications? Is there cancer in the family? There was no issue concerning our Sephardi-Ashkenazi backgrounds. My husband loved my mother’s Sephardi food.
Out-of-Town Klei Kodesh
We got married on September 1, 1970. Inspired by our education and my parents’ example, we spent many years in various out-of-town communities working as klei kodesh: teaching in schools and heading Pirchei and NCSY groups. My husband and I taught in various day schools and girls school in Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Toronto, and Windsor until we returned to Rochester. My husband was a popular mechanech who funneled many kids to yeshiva from day school.
In Rochester, my husband became a chazan and youth director and revived NCSY. When he reopened it, only two kids signed up for the senior group and no kids in the junior group. When we left eight years later, there were 100 kids in senior and 75 in junior, many from families who belonged to Reform and Conservative temples. On a Shabbaton, I would cook for 300 kids with other ladies. Many kids wanted to come for a Seder. B”H, many kids became frum.
In 1986, my son was ready for yeshiva, my daughter was going into seventh grade, and we felt we needed a place with better chinuch. We looked at the map and considered Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore. We decided on Baltimore because I loved Bais Yaakov and wanted the same opportunity for our kids. It was also closer to New York so we could be closer to our family, and it had good parnassa possibilities.
My husband did hashgacha work for chalav Yisrael for a number of months and then trained to be a flooring estimator. After we married off our kids, he went back to chinuch. Today my husband is working as a tutor for third through sixth grades, which he really loves. I taught in Beth Tfiloh Day and Hebrew schools for​ 12 years. I was principal of another Hebrew school, was an assistant coordinator in NCSY, and have been teaching in Bais Yaakov for the past 28 years.
My Father’s Last Days
My parents finally decided to make aliyah. In 1994, they moved to New York to be close to my siblings before leaving a few months later. Part of the prerequisites to make aliyah was that my father had to get a physical. He went back to Rochester and was found to have stomach cancer. They operated on him in Rochester, he came back to New York, and was accepted to a clinical trial in Montefiore Hospital despite an unfavorable prognosis. He survived for six years and was written up in the Albert Einstein Journal as the longest surviving person with stomach cancer.
He passed away in November 1999, and my grandson, born the next month, was named after him. My mother is living in New York with my other siblings until today.
Once my father was traveling in a plane and started talking with his neighbor.
“Where are you from?” the man asked.
“From Rochester.”
“Rochester? I never met him but I heard there is a great rabbi there. His name is Rabbi Cohen. Do you know him?”
My father smiled. “You’re sitting next to him.”
My father had been forced to leave Israel, but he always saw it as Hashem’s divine plan so he could help many people stay connected to Judaism. He did brisim in the hundreds, he helped many become frum, and, b”H, he left behind a wonderful reputation.
This article first appeared in Yated Neeman. It is reprinted with permission.
