I drove down Clarksville Road yesterday on my way to a baseball game at West Windsor-Plainsboro South and can report that construction on the new JCC is advancing at an impressive clip.   The first phase of the Jewish Community Campus is set to open by the end of this year.  Check out the article in the New Jersey Jewish News about the "Topping Off" celebration at the end of March.

One of the contributing factors to the existence of this blog is that in 1999, I scanned all of the pictures that were yellowing and tattered and on display on the walls at the old JCC .  It led to me doing some research about some of the faces that I had seen in the old photos.   It’s exciting that in just a few months there will be a new Jewish Community Center serving this area.  One thing that the group that is working to open the Center realize is that the old YMHA in Trenton and the old Trenton Jewish Community are direct forebears of what they are doing now.

In that light, I invite all of you with memories of the old YMHA on Stockton Street to send me your memories of the Y and what it meant to you as you were growing up.   If you have pictures, scan them and send them to me (no originals, please).  If you have a video camera, camera on your phone or iPad, record your memories and contact me about uploading them to our blog.  From what I’ve learned, it was a special place and a hub of activity.

Zalman King

Passover has come and gone and once again we hosted Sylvia Schultz for the second Seder.   Four years ago, Sylvia was a guest and during the meal talk turned to my signature brisket and it brought back memories for Sylvia of the smells, sights and sounds of Old Time Trenton.  The excitement with which she spoke of her hometown was really the inspiration for everything that you read on these pages.  Sylvia invited me to the library and showed me the treasure trove of pictures and documents that exist in Trentonia now.  

This year, Sylvia talked to me at length about her friend, Zalman King Lefkowitz, who passed away in February.  Sylvia was best friends with King’s sister and called King her adopted brother.   In this video, she talks about the “House of Tomorrow” that King’s family lived in on Bellevue Avenue, across from Cadwalader Park and how King left for Florida, to work on an excursion boat. That led to acting jobs in commercial, then he landed a role in The Young Lawyers, Gunsmoke, and even The Munsters, before going on to direct a number of films, including 9 1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid and the Red Shoe Diaries, among others.  

The last time Sylvia saw King was at his mother’s funeral and when Schultz asked him whether he could be in one of his films, his response was, “Sure, if you take your clothes off.”  Sylvia’s comeback line was, that “if she took her clothes off, nobody would come to see the movie”, so the deal was off.

More than once in the interview, Sylvia recalled that despite his fame, King was so humble and such a gentleman and that when he started directing the racier movies, no one cold believe it, because that wasn’t him.   Sylvia mentions Charlie Sheen’s message on his Facebook page the day that King passed.

Here is an obit from a site called the avclub, which includes some clips from King’s acting and directing career.

Arnold Ropeik      

Arnold Ropeik passed away in April at the age of 90.   Although he did not grow up in Trenton, Arnie did marry a Trenton girl, Bertha Levine, and spent almost 70 years in and around Trenton.  Unfortunately, I never met Arnold Ropeik when he was alive.   I saw him a few times at Adath Israel, but never got a chance to speak with him.   Thanks to Sherry Spiezle, I did get a chance to interview Bertha and she told me many stories about him.   By the time we did the interview, Arnie was at Greenwood House and he would have good days and bad days.  Bertha told me that he was better in the late afternoons, but I was never able to sync schedules.   Here are a couple of stories that Bertha told about Arnie .  The first is about Arnie’s first job in Trenton, after graduating from Rider in 1947.  His first job was with The Trentonian, which had started after a strike at the Trenton Times in 1946.  

Here, Bertha talks about how Arnie first met Bertha.

You’ve heard about newspaper wars?   Well,  in 1946 Trenton there was literally a newspaper war between the Times and the upstart Trentonian.   Bertha Ropeik remembers that the old YMHA on Stockton Street was sometimes in the demilitarized zone between the two papers.

For more background information on the beginnings of the Trentonian, here’s an online article.

And finally, Bertha explains how she came to be known as Beloved Spouse in Arnie’s columns.  But there were to be no abbreviations.

I also include a great story that Herb Speigel told that Arnie used to tell about Bertha’s father, Albert Levine.

 And finally, a shameless plug for a college buddy of mine.   Dan Cohen was a year ahead of me at Ithaca College.  He worked for years in local news in Orlando and Washington, D.C..  He developed a love for the space program and has produced a documentary that has been shown at film festivals across the country and around the world.     The film is called "An Article of Hope" and follows the story of a tiny Holocaust Torah that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon took with him on the the ill-fated Columbia Space Shuttle which disintegrated on re-entry in 2003.   Dan is in the final days of trying to raise $50,000 to have the film broadcast on PBS and has a website on a service called Kickstarter, which  helps get word out about worthy projects. 

As I write this, there are 7 days left on Dan’s drive and $46,000 has been pledged so far.  Please take a look at the trailer and if you see fit, give as little as $1.  If he doesn’t reach his goal, your credit card will not be charged.  See website for more details.

I know I’ve put a lot of material in here, so thanks for reading and please send me your remembrances of the YMHA.

Ed

A Memory of Ben Olinsky

Ten years ago, I had no idea what a blog was.  If I had, I'm sure I would have published this at the time.   This Monday morning, October 31, 2011, I was cleaning up in my office and came upon a CD on which I had archived old documents from a computer that had long ago been recycled.  I had been on the lookout for years for a copy of a story that I had written in November of 2001.  It was on this disc.   If there was a point when the groundwork had been laid for putting together the Trenton Jewish Project, this was probably the it.  I've done just a little editing, changing some present tense sentences to past tense and updating the information about my kids.  But 99% of what you about to read was written a decade ago.

It was a sad time, for 9/11 had happened just two months earlier and there was much uncertainty.   The weather was changing.  Another winter was approaching and with it, an inevitable case of Seasonal Affect Disorder.  I had also just gotten some very bad news.  Someone who I had met only once, but made a lasting impression on me had just passed away.

A MEMORY OF BEN OLINSKY

                                                             By Ed Alpern

     If life is a game, then the measure of your accomplishments should be able to be totaled up shortly after your death.  The final buzzer sounds and the score is up there on the big board for all to see.  The tally includes all the people who you touch along the way and the impact that you have on them and your community.  This is the story of a man who won big.  He gave and touched and he deserves to be remembered.

     I didn’t meet Ben Olinsky until he was 82 years old.  By then, he was having trouble walking.  I only met him once.  We spoke for a little over an hour.  Almost a year to the day later, I attended his funeral.

     I first became aware of Benjamin C. Olinsky while doing a community service project at the Jewish Community Center of the Delaware Valley.  Both of my sons had attended Ring Nursery School at the Center and my oldest, age 8 at the time, was intensely proud of the 12 trophies he earned through the sports programs that were run year round.  After years of walking past yellowing and faded photos stapled to a bulletin board, I decided that these pictures needed to be preserved.  There were 226 of them.  They spanned the decades, beginning in the 19-teens with activities from the Trenton YMHA (Young Man’s Hebrew Association) and ending in the 80’s.  Most were black and white, many were ripped, almost all had neatly typed captions with names of people who had played basketball, wrestled, swam, played baseball, organized dances, supported soldiers, taught children how to play sports and be good sports.  It was a collection that demanded attention.

     As I removed the staples and faithfully made piles for the different decades to which the photographs belonged, I couldn’t help but wonder who these people were.  One face kept staring back at me.  I first noticed it in a 1933 picture of a basketball team.  There, in the center of the back row, was a handsome, skinny man, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a very faint smile.  “Wait a minute,” I said to myself.  “I’ve seen that face before.”  

I rifled back through the 1930’s pile, then the 40’s pile.  The skinny kid had put on some muscle and before I got to the end of the 1940’s, it was clear that Ben Olinsky was some kind of a gym rat. He must have lived at the Y. 

     At the top of the 1950’s pile I started seeing pictures of Ben Olinsky, not as a player, but as a coach.

And then I came upon a photo from 1955, there was a picture of five women who were members of the Dance Committee.  On the far right, the caption identified a Muriel Olinsky.  She didn’t look like a sister, but maybe a wife.  

Muriel Olinsky on the far left.

 It turns out that in the late 1940’s a woman named Muriel came to Rider College.  She played basketball and found her way down to the Y.  The athletic director of the Y at the time, a Scotty Mosovich, worked with Muriel on her free throws and happened to introduce Muriel to the gym rat.  An 82-year old Ben Olinsky described it as “the worst decision that Scotty ever made.”  The mating ritual was far from typical, but what else could you expect.  Ben challenged Muriel to a free throw shooting contest.  She won.  “I beat him at his game and he had to marry me,” remembers Muriel.  The match lasted 54 years.

     The 1950’s pile also provided me a more personal link to this mystery man, Mr. Olinsky.  From 1954, there was a picture of a an adult handing a basketball to a couple of boys who looked to be 7 or 8 years old.  The caption said one of the two kids was named Tal Brody.  

 It was a name that I knew from my teenage years.  I went to Israel in 1973 for six weeks with the summer camp I attended.  We went to the opening ceremonies of the Maccabiah games (The Jewish Olympics).  At my aunt’s apartment in Jerusalem, four of my friends and I watched as this same Tal Brody led the Israeli team to a spirited win over the United States team in the gold medal game.  Now, I held in my hand another picture.  One that made this public service project even more compelling.  Tal Brody, who grew up in Trenton, became a star at Trenton High, was an All-American at the University of Illinois, played on the U.S., then Israeli national teams, was a member of the ill-fated 1972 Israeli Olympic games and later became a national hero in Israel, and Ben Olinsky had crossed paths.    The photo brought a flood of my own memories of that summer of 1973.  We played many a basketball game that ended with one of us hitting a jumper from beyond the three point line (ABA rules, back then) as time ran out and another of us screaming…”Tal Brody at the buzzer…it’s good!!!”

By the bottom of the 1950’s pile, my man Ben was the guy giving out the trophies to the kids.

  He had started a program called the Biddy League, and he was now its president.  The Biddy League was the place where hundreds of kids, starting at the ripe age of 7, got their first chance to learn about and play the game of basketball.  One of the rules of the Biddy League was that everyone played at least a half.  When I finally met Ben in November of 2000, that rule was one of the facts he made sure to tell me. “Everybody got to play at least a half.  Whether they were good or bad.”  Tears actually started to well up in the eyes of this strong man who could swear like a sailor (he was one—Navy 1940’s) when he told me, “That was what I was the proudest of, I felt noches (yiddish for pride) when I saw the kids learning how to play.”  Tal Brody was one of those kids.  By the time I met Ben, Brody was a middle-aged insurance executive.  The man who is still considered Israel’s Mr. Basketball has lived a charmed life because of basketball.  I found Tal Brody's telephone number and interviewed him in 2000.   Brody told me, “I started playing basketball at the Y in the Biddy League, that was really where I got my start.” 

     Brody isn’t the only one with fond memories of the man and the program.  To this day, many of them still keep in touch with each other, sharing a link they forged as kids on the basketball court.  One was a weatherman in Israel and another a stock analyst for Robertson Stephens in San Francisco.  There’s a lawyer in Lawrenceville and a Rabbi in Jerusalem.   In fact, there are hundreds of people whose lives were touched by Ben Olinksy.  And I guess that’s the point.  Even though you won’t read about someone like Ben Olinsky in the pages of People Magazine or see his story on a TV magazine show, he was a man who gave of his time and volunteered so that future generations would have a positive experience and a love of sports.  So, I really wasn’t surprised on that bright and sunny day in November 2001 when the chapel at the funeral home was packed and more than 100 people came to say goodbye to Ben.

     I didn’t meet Ben Olinsky until he was 82 years old.  In November 2000, we sat and talked with a video camera rolling for a little more than an hour.  In the middle of the interview, a client called and I had to rush off to a meeting. We didn’t get a chance to talk again.  Almost a year to the day later, I ran into his wife at the local supermarket.  I asked how Ben was doing. “He was hanging in,” Muriel said, but knee problems were hobbling him physically and Alzheimer's was robbing him of his mental agility.  I promised to get her a copy of the interview.   It would be ready on the following Monday when Muriel would be at the Golden Age meeting at the JCC.  My wife dropped in to give her the tape as promised.  Muriel wasn’t there.  One of her best friends informed my wife that Ben had passed away on Sunday, four days after I ran into Muriel. 

     Ben Olinsky was 83 at the end of regulation.  I met him almost a year to the day before he died.  The seats were full at his funeral.  There might as well have been a big scoreboard at the end of the chapel where the rabbi spoke.  His friends and at least one acquaintance had come to celebrate a life that was a lopsided victory.


A side note---Last week, I included a color picture of the Saperstein brothers sitting on a bench.  One of our readers, Mary Lou Byer recognized the setting instantly as Ahavath Israel.  Not only that, but Mary Lou knew that the bench had made the trek from Ewing to Lawrenceville when Ahavath and Adath merged earlier this year.  Well, a little bit of detective work uncovered the wherabouts of that bench and a matching one.  In the synagogue offices at Adath, the benches have a home.   The benches are inscribed with a plaque commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Albert & Anne Hirsch.   Case solved.

Tal Brody, Trenton's gift to Israeli basketball

Tal Brody Interview, circa 2000 from Ed Alpern on Vimeo.




In 2000, I took down all of the pictures that were displayed in the hallway at the JCC in Ewing and scanned them. They spanned decades of activities that were held at the JCC and the YMHA on Stockton Street before that.   Thousands of kids played basketball at the JCC from the 1910's-2000.  None of them were better than Tal Brody, who got his start at the JCC and went on to star at Trenton High School, then at the University of Illinois, the US Maccabiah team, Maccabi Tel Aviv and to this day is still revered in Israel as "Mr. Basketball".  I did this interview over the phone with Tal Brody after seeing his name on a captioned photo.

On a personal note, when I was in Israel in the summer of 1973, Tal Brody led the Israeli Maccabi team against the US team.   Four of my fellow Ramah campers came to my Aunt's apartment in Jerusalem to watch the game.   My memories of that game are that we were bowing in front of the TV, chanting "We're not worthy!" after watching him play.  

What a feeling when I found the photos at the JCC!   

P.S.  Most of the photos at the JCC were donated by Ben Olinsky, who ran the biddy basketball program from the 1940's-the 1970's.