My (Own) Jewish Journey

Yom Kippur Morning

October 5, 2022

I have never shared with you my personal Jewish journey.

I have spoken with you about YOUR personal Jewish journeys. I have shared morals,
lessons, philosophies, ethics and values that represent the ideals of Judaism, and I have
shared with you programs that inspire the emotions of our souls. In all of these I have
attempted to share with you many different sources of our tradition and approaches
towards Judaism to help you find your own Jewish journeys.

But I have never shared with you MY Jewish journey. How did I get to be here, with
you, today? So, today I am going to talk about a significant part of my personal journey. I
am going to talk about how my father, Max Lendner, affected the path of my life.

I am a descendant of early 20th century Russian Jewish immigrants on one side and
Holocaust escapees on the other.

I grew up in Buffalo. My father, Max, was an entry level social worker in the county
welfare department. His job was mostly bureaucracy – spending some of the time
meeting clients, but spending most of the time filling out paperwork so that the county
would send out funds to people in need.

My mother, Tinka, cared for us full time until we went to school and then she became an
education aid in our public schools. I also have a sister, Rachel, 3 ½ years younger than
me. We had a Jewish upbringing probably fairly typical of most of you who were born
Jewish. We lit Shabbat candles once in a while. And we attended services on the high
holidays.

When I reached school age we joined a Temple, attended a few more services during the
year and talked about Hanukkah to our friends in public school. Besides that we lived a
typical American lifestyle, actively Jewish a few times a year, most of the time blending
in with our predominantly Italian neighbors. Christmas eve was a big party time at our
neighbors’ houses and we visited our friends on Christmas morning as they opened their
presents.

We never had a Christmas tree in my house although there were a couple of years when
we experimented with Christmas, hung stockings and had big blowout present giving in
the morning. My favorite meal was spare ribs and spinach soufflé. And the ribs were not
beef.

There was, perhaps, a clue to my Jewish future when at about 5 years old we went to the
mall and visited Santa. We actually went with one of the very few other Jewish families
who also lived in our neighborhood. Santa asked my friend, also my age, what he
wanted. He said he wanted an electric train and a GI Joe.

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When it was my turn Santa asked me, “and what would YOU like?” “Nothing,” I
grunted. “Why not?” he asked, “because I’m Jewish.” I grunted. “Oh, Jeffrey!” my
mother exclaimed and took me off his lap.

I don’t remember the rest.

I do remember my father talking about the Nazis all the time. My father was born in 1929
in Austria. He and his mother were Austrian citizens and received visas to come to
America in 1939. His father was a Polish citizen and couldn’t get an exit visa.
If they had waited two more weeks to apply for a visa none of them would have escaped.
If they had applied two weeks earlier my grandfather would also have joined them.
Instead, my grandfather died in Buchenwald.

I’m going to come back to this.

My personal path towards Judaism intensified at my Bar Mitzvah. I LOVED preparing

for my Bar Mitzvah, loved reading Torah, loved learning the service. My Cantor, Gerald
DeBruin, alav hashalom, kept adding more and more assignments to my Bar Mitzvah
preparation because of how much I loved preparing.

By the time of my Bar Mitzvah there was just one section of the service I just didn’t have
time to learn. I said I’d do it and at the final rehearsal I struggled with it and my cantor
said, “you know, that’s enough. You’re doing plenty. I think we should stop where you
are.”

On the day of my Bar Mitzvah, as soon as the service was over, my Cantor came up to
me and said, “Jeff, I have a proposition for you. When I go on vacation over the summer,
how would you like to lead the service with the Rabbi?” I eagerly said yes.
By the time of that service two months later I learned the remaining section I wasn’t able
to learn in time for my Bar Mitzvah.

By this time, I loved being Jewish, embraced the rituals. My mother, sister and I were
attending services almost every week, mostly at my instigation because I really took to
my Cantor, my rabbi, and the attention of the mostly old men at services who loved to see
such interest from a young person.

But, as I said, my mother, my sister and I attended almost every week. My father almost
never joined us.

My father was the most, let’s say, ethnocentrically Jewish. Any time a name came up on
TV he’d say, “oh, he’s a yid.” A name might be mentioned in the newspaper, and he’d
say, “yiddle.” Or I’d talk about a TV show I liked and he’d say, “the actors are Jews.”

He talked about all of the great things the Jews did in the world, but when he’d complain
about the things wrong in the world or even in our own neighborhood, he’d use a word
that I no longer ever use. He’d use a word that today I find as offensive as any other

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derogatory slang word that one never uses in polite company, and really a word as
derogatory that I hope people never use even in private. When talking about the
problems in the world or the problems in our community, he’d blame it on, “those
goyim.” Sometimes he’d use an adjective before the word, “goyim.” Actually, there are
several different adjectives he might have used.

Ironically, most of his friends were not Jewish and he didn’t have a lot of Jewish friends.
But the impact of the Holocaust haunted him his entire life.

The definition of a Holocaust survivor is someone who lived in a camp and survived. My
father was never in a camp, but he also NEVER RECOVERED from the trauma of the
Holocaust, of losing his father, of growing up raised by a single-mom widow in Forest
Hills. My father was not a survivor in the conventional definition of the word, but he
lived his life with the trauma of a survivor, a trauma which he never did overcome.

Onto the next stage of my life.

I lived within the city limits at a time when inner city public schools began deteriorating.
By the time I began high school the schools were so bad that my parents were worried for
my safety in sending me to a public high school, but we couldn’t afford the private school
where most Jewish families in the city sent their children.

So we chose one of the best private schools in the city that was close by – a school run by
Jesuits. My rabbi did some checking and thought that with my background and the
philosophy of the school that I would do fine and my Jewish identity would not be
threatened. My father did not really like our rabbi. Now, my father rarely went to
services, but let’s just say he thought my rabbi was too – liberal in his approach to
services. This attitude seemed kind of odd for a man who was a staunch Democrat, who
never attended services and who believed, despite his experiences with the Holocaust,
that the only solution to the Arab Israeli conflict was that the Palestinians should have
their own state. In fact, in describing the Arab-Israeli conflict – my father would say,
probably surprisingly to you based on what I’ve said so far – my father would say, “the
problem is not that you have one side that’s right and one side that’s wrong. The problem
is that both sides are right.”

Nevertheless, my father thought that my rabbi was too liberal in his approach to the
Temple. So he didn’t quite trust my rabbi in his assessment of my going to a Catholic
school.

So he asked the community’s director of Jewish education, another rabbi in town, much
more traditional in orientation, who knew me from my participation in the community
religious school. My father asked him to look into it and one day my father came home
and said to me, after speaking with this rabbi, my father said, “Mintz thinks it’s OK.”
That was my father’s blessing for me to attend St. Joe’s.

So I applied to the Catholic school and as the only Jew in the school at that time I was

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accepted and granted an academic scholarship.

As I went to this Catholic school my Jewish identity intensified. I experienced a little

anti-semitism – the typical stuff Jewish teenagers face among other teenagers. Nothing
outrageous, but you know how teenagers can be – now, forgive me teenagers out there –
this isn’t referring to you. You’re the good ones. But some can be tactless, using
anything they have as a weapon – racism, insults, anti-Semitism, testing the limits of
authority and societal acceptance.

I remember one person who I thought had been nice to me – when the school fund raising
competition ended he was excited that he “beat the Jew.” I usually ignored the anti-
Semitism and most of my friends stuck up for me more than I did for myself.

I attended religion classes and the teachers always asked me to look into Judaism to find
answers to share with the class. No teacher, priest or brother ever made even a mild
suggestion that I consider Catholicism. Ever. When in Spanish class my freshman year
the teacher saw that everyone was praying the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish except me he
asked me to come speak to him after class. He asked me, “Señor Lendner, what religion
are you?” “Jewish,” I said.

He stuck out his hand to shake my own and said, “welcome!” He then gave me an
assignment.

He asked me to give him a Jewish prayer in English that he would translate for me so that
I could learn my prayers in Spanish. Every so often during the opening class prayer he
would say out loud, “Señor Lendner?” and I would say, “Oiga o Israel, el Señor es el
nuestro dio, el Señor es el uno.”
Those of you who know Spanish know that I just said the Shema.

As I continued in high school I intensified my Jewish study at religious school, actually

beginning to take religious school seriously for the first time and became very involved in
my Temple youth group, achieving local and regional leadership positions.

It was at that time that I decided to become a rabbi, during high school, exploring my
Jewish identity in part prompted by the religious identity searches encouraged by my
school as well as the enjoyment I received from leading services at my Temple and
taking leadership responsibilities in my Temple youth group.

The rest of my journey was a continued exploration of that path, through college and
beyond, pursuing philosophy, theology and Jewish texts on a continued level. By the
time I became a high school Sophomore I was already on that journey and since that time
the variations in my ideas have been branches of that path.

My own rabbinic philosophy of engaging Jews where they are – instead of where I think
they SHOULD be – did not develop until after I was ordained, accepted my first rabbinic
position at the Hillel at Tulane University. I was influenced by the direction of Hillels

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nationally in enhancing Jewish student participation through a model of creative
engagement, creating programming opportunities for all Jews from all backgrounds.

But that’s a tactic, a tactic to share all that I love about Judaism, a tactic to get people in
the door so that I can share with other Jews my passion and love for Judaism and what it
has meant to me. I love my people, I love my culture, I love my heritage and all of the
joy it has brought to me and I want to share it with other Jews.

Yet I am haunted. My faith is firm because of all that it has meant to me, but my doubt
has never been resolved because of the lack of faith of my father. My father never
believed in God. If there were a God there would have been no Holocaust, he asserted.
If there were a God his father would not have been murdered. God abandoned my father
and my father returned the feeling.

Some survivors, some Holocaust escapees, found strength in the future, comfort in the
rebirth of Israel, faith in the future generation. Sure my father loved Israel, loved Jews
and loved his family. But he never found peace. Hitler defined my father’s Judaism for
him until his very last day on earth.

My father never overcame his trauma and torment and in the end, after suffering years of
delusional depression, died a tormented soul, a man broken when his father was torn from
him and never healed. My father was unhealthy and never took care of himself
physically but I believe in my heart that my father died of depression.

But I learned from my father lessons from his actions – lessons from what he said and did
and lessons from the things I rejected. I learned from him a passion for Jewry; but his
empathy towards the Palestinians from a man whose heart was traumatized by anti-
Semitism resonates with me to this day. I learned from a man who asserted out loud how
great the Jews are and how bad the goyim are; yet, when he acted, most of his friends
were not Jewish and he never had a bad word to say about another individual.

He might blame – the goyim – with his words, but in his actions he never said a bad word
about another human being. He affirmed his Jewish culture but rejected his Jewish
religion.

My own faith in our heritage, and culture, and religion has brought me a sense of peace
that my father never achieved. His struggles have left me with the doubts to know that I
don’t have all of the answers to life’s questions. His doubts led me on a rabbinic path
defined by a love of my heritage and faith but a doubt in absolute truth. Sometimes you
might ask me, “why?” and I will answer, “I just don’t know.” I can’t look in the Torah or
Talmud or Jewish tradition and find an answer for every one of life’s mysteries.

I can’t find an answer to the question of why the Holocaust happened.

I have no answer as to why the Nazis killed my grandfather.

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I have no answer as to why my father was never able to recover from that trauma.

And that is why in my rabbinate I continue to have doubts. That is why in my rabbinate I
can’t tell you what THE correct path to Judaism is, because the doubts I have in the
absolute good of this world are accentuated by the trauma I have seen in the lives of
others around me, the trauma that pervaded my father’s entire life and the definition of
who he was.

But at the same time the Jewish identity my father imparted within me coupled with the
positive experiences I gained from Judaism, my Temple and my Jewish community have
demonstrated for me that there is ultimate meaning, comfort and spirituality from within
Jewish tradition for those who seek it. I know, because I found it, and I want to help
others find their own paths.

While my father’s Jewish identity was defined by the Nazis, my triumph over that horror
is that I embrace our tradition and define my Judaism regardless of the Nazis.

The tragedy of my father’s life was that he never recovered from the trauma the Nazis
visited upon him.

The triumph of his life, however, is the legacy my father left behind, that the son of a
Holocaust victim has embraced a Jewish identity in a free country. That I’ve made the
expansion of Judaism my primary mission in life, that I help each of you find your own
paths, and, more than anything else,

My father’s GREATEST legacy is the love of Judaism that has been imparted on his
grandchildren – my children – for whom a Jewish experience has only been positive,
rewarding and life affirming.

For all you did, for all you were to me and still are to me, thank you, THANK YOU,
MAX LENDNER. Thank you, Dad.

Copyright © 2022 Rabbi Jeffrey Kurtz-Lendner