Chameides, Leon_2003/10, Oral History

Tape #649 Interviewee: Leon Chameides Interviewer: David Klau Date 10/03 Subject: Oral History

Chameides_Leon _Interview 10/03

Interviewee: Leon Chameides Interviewer: David Klau Interview Location: Unknown Interview Date: 2003/10 Interview Audio Location: (Box _Number 649) Transcription by: Janet Poitras

LC = Leon Chameides DK = David Klau

DK: So, you were President. What years were you President?

LC: I think ‘95 – for a two year term, I think. Yes ’95-‘97

DK: And what got you involved originally?

LC: Well, that’s a good question. I think what probably got me involved was Jerry Wagner. I followed Jerry Wagner as Chairman of C.J.E. and so it seemed natural (laughing) to follow to the Historical Society. No, I admire Jerry very much for his interest and I’ve always been interested in history of any kind and I’ve always been interested in communities and the history of communities and how they develop and so I began attending Jewish Historical Society meetings and being on the board because of that. So it seemed my turn to do the job.

DK: Without a lot of training.

LC: Without a lot of training and with not all that much thought really but it had to be done. (Tape stopped then resumed) Ok, so we were talking about getting involved and I think I answered that question in terms of how I got involved in it.

DK: What did you think of the space because we didn’t get Lynn in until the following year for archives.

LC: That’s correct.

DK: Was it piled as high as it is now?

LC: Well, it was but you know I’m still fortunate to have remembered the last days of the space.

DK: Upstairs.

LC: Upstairs.

DK: So you were in that transition.

LC: In that transition. Well, not while I was President but I remember it before I was President. So whenever, you know, I think things are piling up, my mental image goes back to that and it’s perfectly fine. You know, it’s like the story of the rabbi and the guy comes and he says bring in your goat, bring in your chicken, and finally invariably he says take them out, now it’s wonderful. The space we have is really wonderful and we shouldn’t complain.

DK: What made me ask was that I just before I came here I was over there doing some work and Marsha was trying to get the piles off, and they were on every chair. We had a long discussion on the need for an archive, getting on the archival committee.

LC: Right, right. Well, you know, I got exposed to, the first time I ever got exposed to the Jewish Historical Society was when Agudas Achim was celebrating its hundredth anniversary.

DK: Oh, really.

LC: Which I believe was in ’89, I think, ’89 or ’90. And I was President at the time of Agudas Achim and we had a journal and I decided I would write a history of Agudas Achim, and so I a). found a lot of material in the Agudas Achim and stuff that Mrs. Zabrutik (sp?) had, found old records and minutes in Yiddish, records and so on. I was shocked that they were all getting moldy and I thought they ought to be better preserved.

Then from that I decided that we should have an exhibit at the dinner.

DK: Sure.

LC: Which would be an exhibit of the hundredth anniversary. I contacted Marsha and applied for a grant with her help, and to my great surprise and pleasure we received the grant. So Marsha and I worked together to work up this project which came to be a very beautiful, very lovely exhibit of the hundredth anniversary. And I made sure that all of the records at Agudas Achim, old records, were given to the Historical Society. That was my first encounter with the Jewish Historical Society here. And so I became involved after that.

DK: So that was a lot of years, seven or eight years before

LC: Before that, yes.

DK: Before you became President.

LC: Yeah, I believe it was ‘89mor ’90.

DK: So unlike me who got caught walking down the hall (laughing).

LC: The problem with the Historical Society is innate in the animal, so to speak, is that, you know, as you go through life we are going like crazy for the future. And you have to pass a certain point in your life, and some people pass it at an earlier age and some at a later age.

DK: Only Joe Hurwitz (laughing)

LC: (Laughing) Right.

DK: And maybe Jerry.

LC: But you have to pass at a certain stage before you begin to look back rather than forward.

DK: It takes a little bit of leisure.

LC: It takes a little leisure, and therefore our organization tends to attract people who no longer have the energy and vision that perhaps all of us had when we were much younger and I think that’s one of the problems that we have but I think that’s the nature of the animal.

DK: Now you get a 60 year old, you’re young.

LC: That’s right.

DK: We’re very fortunate with Lea (laughing)

LC: That’s right. So, as I said, different people achieve that level at different ages. But I achieved it at a relatively young age. That’s one of the problems with the Historical Society because by rights we should be a huge society when you consider the number of people who are active in the Hartford Region who grew up here, and whose parents grew up here, and grandparents very often. They should have tremendous interest in preserving the history of this community.

DK: But Marsha was just telling me that down in Jersey, where we visited a site, which has a Jewish population four times our size, they have 550 members roughly and we have 430.

LC: Well, I think that

DK: Percentage-wise.

LC: And she speaks for the strength of the commitment to the Federation but most importantly it speaks to Marsha’s involvement and dedication. That’s really what holds it.

DK: So, again we’re drawing that blank about specifics during our term.

LC: Well, the one specific about the term I think that out in more time than anything else was the Holocaust Room.

DK: That was a difficult project to bring to fruition. It took a long, long time.

LC: It was extremely difficult because basically we were given a closet.

DK: Yeah.

LC: And as I understand it the Jewish Community Center, and I think rightfully so, was chastised by survivors interested in preserving the memory of the Holocaust and interested in teaching its details that the Jewish Community Center didn’t have. Some type of memorial to it. So they had set aside this oversized closet if you will and problem was, what do you do with it? What do you do with a tiny space like that? And how, and what are you trying to achieve, and how do you achieve it. I was given the task to try to, with a committee to come up with something for that and we decided what we should do is highlight the history and have one wall dedicated, or the photographs, dedicated to life before the Holocaust.

As you know I have for many years been a very strong advocate of the fact that where we need to memorialize the death of so many people it is equally as important, or perhaps more important, to memorialize the life. And I’ve always been concerned about the fact that we spend a tremendous amount of effort and time in memorializing death. And you know, m museums or statutes which commemorate an event, really are a reflection more of the need of the people who put them up than is really a memorial to whom they are put up. So we felt that one wall should be as life was before, and then a second wall during, and then a third wall after. And that sort of fit in nicely.

I was extremely fortunate because, as you know, I had been Chairman of Pediatrics at Hartford Hospital for ten years and Chairman of Pediatric Cardiology at Hartford Hospital for thirty years, and in 1996 was part of a group of leaders who helped develop the new Children’s Hospital, and leading up to 1996, and in 1996, we moved from Hartford Hospital and Newington and UConn, the Pediatrics Departments into this new Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. I was obviously anticipating that a great deal but at the same time having worked with Hartford Hospital for thirty years I was concerned that the history of Pediatrics at Hartford Hospital might disappear so I decided that I would write up that history, and so I went into the archives of Hartford Hospital and went all the way back to its founding in 1854, and went through the records of hospitalized patients in those days, and went through the annual reports of the department, and so on, and put together a very interesting history of the department from 1854 to 1996, and then decided that what we should do is put together an exhibit which would feature that and that exhibit would be before our move during our move and sometime afterwards to show the hospital family at least that there was a long history of that department. And in doing this I came, got together with Whitey Jenkins

DK: Oh, that’s how Whitey made the connection.

LC: Who I found just a delight to work with, innovative and thoughtful individual. So when I was given the task of doing the Holocaust museum thing I said we’ve got to get Whitey involved. So Whitey came in and very kindly worked very hard with us and helped us put that together. I wrote the history panels that are on there, did the research for them and wrote them. I wanted a nice elai escarat (sp?). These I remember as the feature as you walk in and one of the artists I admire very greatly, always have admired very greatly, was Moshe Zwein. And I asked Moshe whether he would do that and he kindly consented and contributed his abilities as an artist, and so he did that beautiful elai escarat (sp?) with barbed wire over it.

DK: Ah.

LC: As an Israeli stamp collector I remembered the beautiful stamp that Israel put out of the Sh’ma Israel in a flame and I thought that would make a very nice centerpiece so Whitey got an artist to do this in metal for us from that stamp. We enlarged the stamp. In fact we wrote to the Israel Post and tried to get permission for that and finally got permission from them and then Whitey had an artist make it out of metal, out of shiny metal so that’s that piece that’s in front.

It hasn’t been totally finished. We had hoped that we would have a rotating exhibit of

DK: Yeah. That’s a funds problem.

LC: And that’s a funds problem partially, yeah, and then we had hoped to have a brochure so that kids who come in

DK… had helped Marsha … from one of these high schools came in, I can’t remember where, 81 kids and Fred gave a talk. So it’s doing its work. And she had two groups in.

LC: Once in a while I get some feedback.

DK: They was very impressed, took them in maybe ten at a time. It was a whole, Fred gave a couple talks, and so you had this split thing.

LC: Recently Rabbi, I think his name is Steinberg, Steinberg, whose the head of the Holocaust Center in Springfield, which is a very large Holocaust center, well-funded Holocaust center, called me and he wanted to come down and look at that because they were thinking of putting an exhibit together. So he came down and he was most complimentary, considering the small space. So I think that worked out well.

DK: Yes, it did.

LC: It would be nice if there were some funds so that more could be done for it but I think it works out well.

DK: That wasn’t just the Historical Society, though, that was a combined, I think Bobby was on that committee too at some point.

LC: It was a , I don’t remember exactly, but I think that part of the members came from the Holocaust Memorial Committee of the Center, because it’s really in the Center, not part of the Jewish Historical Society. We were just given the task of developing what should be in it. But it was a combined effort, absolutely.

We had a little opening ceremony which was very nice. Fortunately we were able to get the gallery across the hall. I was a little disappointed at the number of people who showed up for it. I thought there’d be more but it was nice. That I think was a very large project that took an enormous amount of time to do. It was very time consuming to put those panels together because, as I recall, there were twenty panels. I could be mistaken but that number seems to ring a bell. And I decided that what I wanted to do was to start, always the question is when do you start something, because time is a continuum, and I thought about starting in 1939 but that’s wrong because, for the German Jews, the Holocaust really started in ’33. So I could start in ’33 but that didn’t seem right. So I started when Hitler

DK: Twenty-nine.

LC: A little earlier than that even. So I basically started with Hitler’s rise to power and then went all the way to ’45, and a little beyond. So that was very difficult because I started out with of course way too much material, I at first had to do the research on it, and then

DK: Was there a lot of conflict with the survivors, and the committee, to make these choices? Or were you pretty much on your own?

LC: I’ve chaired a lot of committees in my time, I continue to chair a lot of committees, and I like to achieve consensus. But I don’t like to have committees on every tiny issue. I don’t remember that I ever submitted things like that to the committee.

DK: (Laughing)

LC: I mean once we decided that yes, we were going to have a historical table, I didn’t feel that I should be submitting. Otherwise we’d still be here, as everyone argued their point. No, I think the only objection that I ever received from any one of the survivors in terms of that room, was one gentleman who came up to me and was very upset that a copy of Mein Kampf was included.

DK: Was included?

LC: I think it’s still there. That was, he was very upset by it. I tried to talk to him about it, and I told him I thought it was very important for it to be there because anyone really wants to understand the Holocaust and what happened and the nature of Hitler you really have to read that book because that can tell you better than anyone else’s words what the man was about.

DK: And what he had planned to do.

LC: Yeah. And these are chilling things that he says in there. I thought it was very important to have that. But as I said that came from only one person. Otherwise I had no criticism at all. The other thing we had planned there was a video tape that would continually play, and that would feature perhaps, local people discussing their reminiscences but I think we ran out of both steam and money. (Chuckling)

DK: (Chuckling) Because it was a long time. I know that.

LC: It was a long project.

DK: How about just working with the people within the Society?

LC: Of course, for all of us who have been presidents of that society we feel like sort of a cork on the waves, carried along by Marsha, because, and I was no exception to that, because it’s very difficult in a two-year period, and part time going in and out, when you’ve got another full time job that you’re doing, it’s very difficult to understand the intricacies of what this is all about.

DK: And she was always coming up with a new program.

LC: And she was always coming up with a new program, or a new grant. We did write, now that you mention it, we worked very hard, and I worked very hard, on a grant proposal from the Hartford Foundation for Giving. We, in fact, to get an Archivist.

DK: So the grant was written

LC: The grant was written.

DK: And then she came

LC: That’s correct. The grant was written and then we. I worked very hard with Marsha on that. And then the other grant I remember working on very hard was a grant from an organization ion Washington which looks at museums.

DK: Oh, yeah! That study was done, I had mentioned that with Seymour.

LC: That again was done later but the grant, the application for the grant, and the idea. Of course the idea generated from Marsha but then the

DK: Museum Assessment.

LC: Museum Assessment. Yeah. I think one always has to look at, there’s a continuum there, something has to start and there’s a lot of spade work to be done to get the money, to get the ideas together and put it together. By the time you get it your term is finished. The next one comes but then the money is there so it can be done and that’s what it’s about. And those grants also were part of the

DK: And you were pretty much with her.

LC: Yes, yes. Yes, we worked together and we, I remember writing a number of the things together with Marsha.

DK: Because they were writing the big grant for the Russians.

LC: That came afterwards.

DK: And I wasn’t involved. They had Mickey Yorkin from the Federation

LC: Right.

DK: And Betty. I lost Marsha for two months.

LC: While that was going on. Yeah, it’s a big job writing for a grant, it’s a big undertaking. One, particularly the one for the Hartford Foundation, because there was going out for something really big, outside of our community. It was our concern, even if we didn’t get the grant, that we make a good impression. (Laughing)

DK: (Laughing)

LC: So, those were the activities that we had, and then of course the program with Hillel.

DK: Yeah.

LC: Silverman.

DK: How was that? I mean how’d you get him and how did it go?

LC: We had one of those brainstorming sessions. You may have been added but I don’t remember, in which we were talking about “What shall we do” for I think the annual meeting, right?

DK: Yeah.

LC: And then someone came up with the idea, I don’t remember who, of having Hillel Silverman. And I don’t remember who actually called and got him, but he drew a very large crowd, was extremely popular, and turned out to be a very wonderful speaker.

The part that I remember, the major that I remember, that he talked about, was he described about when they lived here, and he gave the address, which I don’t remember.

DK: Up on Ridgefield Street.

LC: Right.

DK: Oh yeah, we used to walk right by.

LC: See, you know it, I don’t know it, but he said when he was a youngster he remembers how these massively huge rooms with ceilings that seemed to go on forever, and in the back they had this huge that was almost as big as a football field, and they used to play football all the time.

DK: I don’t think it was that big.

LC: Then he said they moved away and so on, and recently when he came back, as a matter of fact it may have been on that visit, he decided to go down there, and he rang the doorbell, and the lady answered and explained that he grew up there, and could he possibly come in, and he went through and he said “I don’t know what they did to this house. It shrunk!” It’s a little yard, ceilings are low. (Laughing)

DK: (Laughing) We lived up in the North End, on Cornwall Street, and we’re famous, night football games and baseball in the back. I was always replacing windows. My mother was an angel. She knew I’d take care of it, the glass would break, and it turned out to be a 65 foot yard. They’d come from all over to play football.

LC: It’s wonderful how memory seems to enlarge things. I guess that’s why eyewitnesses are so unreliable. (Laughing)

DK: (Laughing)

LC: So he was a very fun speaker. I don’t remember the other programs we had.

DK: I don’t have any real notes to trigger you from that time. It’s interesting that the grants were at your time. The only thing I mentioned was in Winter of ’95, Emma turned 90 and whether there was some ceremony that was done at the, uh, or it may just have been in the newsletter. Do you have any reminiscences of writing those newsletters? I read your letters.

LC: Well, I remember, no, I don’t remember any content. I do remember writing some of them.

DK: What was your thrust? I mean mine was get some money in (laughing).

LC: I don’t remember that I had a thrust. I don’t know. I’d have to reread them. I don’t know what on earth I wrote. You have a better idea. You’ve read them more recently.

DK: I think it was the usual: membership, you need membership, you need money, pay your dues. I have absolutely no idea what we’re going to do with all this, but I’m gonna just pull it together.