Coming Home

February 10, 2010

At the synagogue’s Sisterhood board meetings, she would sit at the head of the table, impeccably and elegantly turned out in a perfectly coordinated, bright-colored suit and bold red or pink lipstick. For forty years she was the Sisterhood treasurer but, as was said at her eulogy this week, she was really the Sisterhood’s Queen.

Only if you served on the Sisterhood board with her as I did for seven years can you fathom the amount of passion and energy Rochelle put into the organization. We met monthly at the synagogue to plan social and cultural events that the Sisterhood sponsored – cake decorating classes, lectures, Broadway evenings, and more. The money raised (which was guarded very closely by Rochelle) went toward beautifying or enhancing the synagogue, our spiritual home. For seven years, I sat through Sisterhood meetings which, to my great surprise, would often become quite heated. Somehow, a discussion of purchasing Torah covers became weighted with the entire history of the synagogue, and there was Rochelle in the fray, nodding her head, bringing up something that had happened twenty, forty, sixty years before during another rabbi’s tenure. Rochelle’s eyes would narrow at the mere thought that anyone in the synagogue would dare interfere with anything that Sisterhood wanted to do. And, no sooner was our annual spring brunch over than Rochelle was busy thinking about next year’s. “We need to find a home,” Rochelle would say in her precise, Eastern European accent. “I have someone in mind.”

“Do you think they’ll give their home?” I once innocently asked, and Rochelle looked at me, gave a little satisfied smile and said, “Nobody has ever turned me down. If I ask, they don’t turn me down.” Two years ago, the familiar refrain of, “We have to find a home,” was raised by Rochelle for the dessert reception following South Pacific. On the word “home”, Rochelle turned her gaze to me, seated as I always was next to her on her right. She didn’t even have to ask. Without a protest, with just a glance from her, I meekly said, “I’m happy to host it.”

“Good.” She smiled her self-satisfied smile.

I privately often wondered why Rochelle took Sisterhood so seriously. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have many, many other things in her life: she still worked full time in the spice business that she and her husband had created when they arrived here after surviving the Holocaust; she had two daughters, four granddaughters and a myriad of interests and organizations she was actively involved with.

I knew Rochelle toward the end of her life, and so knew her in bits and pieces: she was tenacious and fierce and her eyes, windows to her soul, let you know immediately if she perceived a slight or a lack of manners of any kind; she was fond of saying, “If I tell you I do something, I do it, yes, that’s the way it is.”; she had an old-world, European elegance and discipline even though she very much lived in this world; she was a homebody who had never lived anywhere other than West 86th Street since she’d arrived in America, yet she spoke 9 ½ languages (a little Romanian) and she traveled extensively; she unfailingly gave me spices from her company every year before Passover; when one of the single men in the synagogue became engaged, especially one who was over 30, she would look up at heaven and say, “Thank God!”, as if she had personally been praying for this and her prayers had been answered; several times, when these young men from the synagogue walked past the room where we conducted our Sisterhood meetings, they would stop off and kiss Rochelle, who would smile and give them a red-lipsticked kiss in return; without fail Rochelle asked about my family, taking my hand in both of hers, looking me directly in the face, listening without interruption to me talk about what the kids were doing; on the holidays, she would ask me if we had a place for Passover or for Rosh Hashanah and if not, we should come to her; she seemed to know absolutely everyone in our large synagogue, and was privy to information that I can only imagine. No matter whose name was casually mentioned, Rochelle would nod and shrug and say, rather mysteriously, “Oh, I know him, yes I know him very well. Believe me, I know.”

Last year, after attending West Side Story with the Sisterhood, I was at the dessert reception that her daughter hosted and Rochelle said, “You’ve never seen my home! Come!” and she took my hand and brought me to her apartment in that same building. Her home was lovely and gracious, very much like Rochelle, and I looked out the window onto West 86th Street. “Yes, you see, you see,” she said with her smile, “I was in your home last year, now you’re in my home.”

At the packed funeral service this week, some of the other pieces of her life came together. Born in Poland, which is now the Ukraine, she and her sister, barely out of their adolescence, had jumped the train heading for a death camp. They’d lived in the forest, and then were hidden by a Polish family for the duration of the war. After the war, they walked across Europe rather than go to a displacement camp. She lived in Italy and in Argentina, and finally settled here on West 86th Street, a few doors down from the synagogue, with her husband and two daughters, and they built their spice business from scratch. That’s the overview.

But her life was truly in the details: I didn’t know, and probably many at the service didn’t know, that Rochelle continued to support the families and their children who hid her in Poland those many years ago. That she regularly called our rabbi to ask who didn’t have a place for Shabbat and to invite them to have Shabbat dinner with her family; or that she anonymously gave money to people who were needy, who would never know who it came from. After the service, when I saw Cindy, the owner of the Korean nail salon on Amsterdam Avenue, and her husband, I discovered that Cindy’s husband had called Rochelle “Mom.” “She was like my mother,” he said. While she would get her manicure and pedicure with Cindy, Cindy’s husband would sit and talk to Rochelle. It made sense to me that this woman who’d lost so much family in Europe would emotionally adopt another immigrant who’d re-invented his own home just blocks away from hers.

Two weeks ago, Rochelle sat next to me at the Sisterhood meeting, looking faded, not her vibrant self. She was quiet for the most part, but when the discussion turned to our upcoming brunch, she perked up and looked down the table at a woman who was a newcomer to Sisterhood and said, “What about your home?” For Rochelle, “home” was probably the most powerful four letter word in the English language. She kicked the non-Jews out of her home in Poland when she returned after the war, kept her family close to home, brought strangers into her home as if they were family, and lost her home and then recreated it.

When our Sisterhood meeting concluded, we set a date for our next meeting and as always, kissed Rochelle goodbye like the Queen that she was. We still don’t have our home.

Coming Home

Angela Himsel

Life and Action