A Light Unto the Nations: Stuyvesantians Living in Israel

by Michael Kaye, Fall 2002

“Our life in Jerusalem, you ask?” says George Roth, Stuyvesant class of ’41. “There's no good news tonight. Right now it has turned into a terrorist hell again. About an hour-and-a-half ago two suicide bombers blew themselves up on either end of a popular downtown pedestrian mall sending more than 130 wounded to the three major hospitals in more than fifty screaming ambulances. [Then] in a third attempt, with no injuries reported, a nearby car bomb exploded to deter rescue workers from arriving on the scene. On a personal note, my seventeen-year-old identical twin daughters finally arrived safely home within the last half hour. Elizabeth was finishing dinner with friends in a restaurant only two blocks from the second explosion. Her sister, Sarah, was at a party given in a classmate's home only two blocks from where the first bomb exploded.”

There are at least sixty, and as many as two hundred Stuyvesant graduates currently living in Israel. They range from Chassidic to secular, from settlers on the far right to peaceniks in Tel Aviv, and from the class of ’41 to the class of ’98. In this article you’ll catch up with five of them and hear their thoughts on life in the Middle East. You’ll find that each leads a very different life, but together they share three things: they are Jewish, they want an end to this war, and they approach life a little differently, a little more distinctly, a little more Stuyvesantly than everyone else.

George Roth ’41, One-time editor-in-chief of The Spectator

George lives in Jerusalem with his wife and twin daughters. He is Israeli modern orthodox and provides marketing consulting to publishing houses. In 1991, Roth and his family left a comfortable life in Beverly Hills to make aliyah (literally “to go up”), to immigrate to Israel.

“In Los Angeles,” he explains, “I heard Rabbi Hershel Shecter from Yeshiva University give a shiur [lecture] on the mitzvah [commandment] to make aliyah. I never even knew there was a mitzvah. So I figured if there was a mitzvah, maybe that’s where we should be.”

It’s interesting to find a graduate of the nation’s top science school turning religious, in a very serious way, later in life. In Roth’s case, he explains that Stuyvesant aided his embracing Torah.

“The exposure that I got to the scientific method at Stuyvesant was really the most valuable tool I took into life,” he says. “It meant keep experimenting. When you examine anything know that there is more to come, there is no finality.”

“But after ten years of exploring Torah,” he continues, “and still keeping my scientific mind open, I realized that there are two truths. Torah and science. But when you really come down to raw science, everything is in the Torah. There’s really nothing new. For example, according to current medical findings, the safest day for a child to have his bris [circumcision] is on the 8th day of life, the same day commanded in the Torah 3,300 years ago. Why? The coagulation mechanism depends on a group of proteins produced by the liver called coagulating fibrogen. The liver starts to work in the first 8 days. A sufficient level of coagulants is reached on the 8th day. But on the 8th day itself, the coagulants reach a once in a lifetime peak of 110%.”

Roth’s discovery of scientifically valid truths strengthened his bond to his heritage, but ultimately the ancient tradition itself demonstrated its profound value.

“In Israel we have a different outlook,” he says. “When my daughter had 12 fractures on her face, after two heavy steel doors fell on her, the first thing the community did was to start a prayer movement all over the country. Everybody prayed for my daughter. She never needed surgery and every day she got incrementally better. [We took opinions on surgery], but went the route of prayer. In America we would have prayed at the end of story instead of the beginning.”

Now Roth, and the rest of Israel, are living out a story in which Israel stands at the center of the world’s stage. Roth feels that of all the players in this saga, the U.S. needs to step up its role but with a different focus.
“My feeling is the U.S. is placing its emphasis on the wrong track,” he says. “Instead of sending a team to broker peace it should be paying more attention to Israeli intelligence and go after the dozens of terrorist cells operating out of the twenty-two countries surrounding tiny Israel.”

Nevertheless, like all Israelis, Roth desires a simpler, peaceful life, one in which joys exist without the complications of politics and war, a life like the one he remembers from his Stuyvesant days.

“How I yearn,” he says, “for one of those 14th street deli giant kosher hot dogs on a toasted roll, loaded with hot sauerkraut and hot spicy mustard, plus a giant mug of ice cold root beer and all this for an Indian head nickel! Good old days? You bet!”

Matthew Futterman ‘72

Sometimes Israel’s flag unfolds like an ancient prophecy coming true; other times, its blue and white appear in tatters, the strain of life in the middle east tearing it to pieces. Yet none of the Stuyvesantians interviewed spoke of giving up the dream.

“I decided I was going to make aliyah in high school,” Matthew Futterman ’72 says. “I felt that history had dictated there was only one place that a Jew could be a Jew without persecution.”

Futterman has served as the rabbi of the Conservative synagogue in the coastal city of Ashkelon, just south of Tel Aviv, since he made aliyah 16 years ago. After Stuyvesant he went to Columbia College and earned a bachelors degree in religion and psychology and masters degrees in counseling psychology and education, before eventually obtaining his rabbinic degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Futterman’s roots in Jewish leadership and education stretch back to Stuyvesant. He points to his teacher William Ince, under whom he studied journalism and existentialism, as a formative role model for his work as a rabbi and an early catalyst for his development of Jewish identity.

“He showed personal concern for the students and what we were thinking,” Futterman explains. “He was much more concerned with our values than high scores. I know he affected the way I deal with the people who study with me [today] because I’m more concerned with their values than their achievements.”

“His class also allowed for lots of existential angst and G-d wrestling,” he continues, “and he set the tone for me in so many ways for how to deal with that. He was not Jewish, but in the class he gave me room to express myself Jewishly.”

Futterman echoes the sentiments of many graduates who honor their time at Stuyvesant as one which developed their social and political identities as profoundly as their intellectual ones. In the early seventies, Stuyvesant’s social milieu forced Futterman to define his Jewishness more publicly, because although the left-leaning student societies with which he largely identified promoted cultural equality, their focus on racial unity did not address his Jewish identity. So he created his own club.

“The most important thing Stuyvesant gave me,” he explains, “was a place to be who and what I wanted to be at a time when Jewish issues were becoming important to me. We set up Stuy’s first Jewish club my sophomore year spring 1970, the time of the moratorium, the Kent State massacre, the height of ethnic factionalism—the Afro-American club, the Hispanic club, and the Hebrew club—but the latter was more of a culture club for Israel and we wanted a Jewish club. So we set up our own.”

“Our first advisor was Mr. Touhy the math teacher, whom we assumed was an Irish Catholic,” Futterman recalls. “Things kind of came to a head the week of the Kent State killings. The schools went on strike, about 1700 of 2200 students went on marches. The same week there were blacks killed in Jackson and the Afro-American society [was] dominated by a kind of Black Panther group. The tone of the demonstrations became anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israel. They would level charges at the ‘Zionist imperialist pig’ Abbie Hoffman as well as Judge Julius Hoffman who were antagonists in the Chicago 7 trial at the time by putting up clippings from the Panther newspaper on the wall.”

“We needed to feel solidarity,” he explains, “and so we formed a club .So those of us, I mean we were 15 boys and girls—mine was the first year [’69] that admitted girls to the school—the first big thing we did was invite Meir Kahane.”

Kahane, once a member of the Israeli parliament known for his controversial rightwing views, was killed by a Palestinian terrorist in 1990. But back in the early seventies, Kahane’s militancy meant escorting old Jews in Brooklyn who were getting mugged. The year after his first Stuyvesant appearance however, the school barred him from coming back because he had fired a rifle into the Soviet embassy.

“So we had a sit-in,” Futterman recounts, “and I was threatened with expulsion. We were not necessarily followers of him, but we wanted to draw attention.”

Futterman explains that the club’s most intense cultural confrontation however, occurred in an unscheduled meeting between blacks and Jews.

“The Afro-American society walked into this meeting that we were running,” he says, “showing a movie on the plight of Soviet Jewry. The teacher was so afraid, she said [to me], ‘Run and get help,’ instead of welcoming them in. By the time I came back, we were having a discussion and discovering that people on both sides had stereotypes about blacks and Jews. It was very special.”

After Stuyvesant, Futterman continued broadening himself at Columbia and later at J.T.S., and his politics and religious identity evolved. By the time he was living in Israel, married with three children, he had shed his rightwing background and actively supported the country’s peace process and leftwing. Now with a son in the army, he explains that sadly, in the last 18 months, his views are slowly changing again.

“In the last year and half it has become clearer and clearer to me,” he sighs, “that we have no peace partner. And there seem to be very few if any Palestinian leaders willing to risk working with us toward peace. So I [have] found myself moving to the center or right-of-center, which surprises me and upsets me. I’m convinced the peace process won’t be implemented any time soon.”

“But we can’t also allow the situation we’re in to continue to deteriorate,” he goes on. “Our first responsibility is to protect ourselves. I hope that changes soon. I would love to go back to a being a leftwing dove, but I don’t think the timing allows that for me.”

Marc Sherman ‘74

There are many ways to live in Israel and deal with the matzav or “the situation” as it’s usually referred to here. Some people focus on prayer, some on politics, some on scholarship. What they all have in common is hatikva—hope—for a better, safer, peaceful Israel.

“When I first came here,” Marc Sherman ‘74 says, “I was very involved with families who had soldiers missing in Lebanon. One of them was the best friend of my brother-in-law. Since I had a masters in library science and was a trained information specialist, I used all my research skills to help them search for their son, Zackery Baumel. He had been missing in Lebanon since 1982. I was able to use my professional skills to help them in their search, although he’s still missing.”
Sherman lives in Modi’in, east of Tel Aviv on the way to Jerusalem, with his wife Polly, a midwife, and their five-and-one-half year old son, Arieh. He is both the director of the Academic Research Information System (ARIS), a bibliographic database of research publications and projects of the faculty at Tel Aviv University, and the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Genocide (Santa Barbara, CA, ABC-Cleo, 1999). Published through the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, the Encyclopedia explores the burgeoning field of comparative genocide studies.
“It’s a new field, about 20 years old,” Sherman explains. “It attempts to understand the entire genocide process as it affects all of humanity—not only those involved but how it affects all of us, whether it’s Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Armenia, or the Holocaust. Scholars who study genocide strive to understand similarities in all genocides to develop ideas for early intervention and prevention. The goal is education toward prevention, so when racism and genocide surface they can be detected early and combated.”

“For example,” he says, “let’s assume a big aspect of genocide is when a certain group of people are dehumanized, such as being labeled ‘venom’ or ‘cancer’ or ‘cancer on our society.’ These are the seeds for destroying a people. So to be able to detect that in its early stages allows it to be defused.”

Sherman defines the term genocide as the “intent to kill a group, race or religion of people.” Given how much this term has appeared in certain media regarding the middle east and terrorism, Sherman’s work couldn’t be more relevant today.

“We have a term in the field called ‘genocidal massacre,’” he explains. “The numbers are very small, but the intent is to kill as many as possible. It’s similar to what happened in the World Trade Center. They try to kill as many people at a location as possible.”

In the Middle East, rhetoric is a strong weapon that lobs words like “military actions,” “suicide bomber,” “genocide,” “martyrs,” “terrorism,” and “truth.” Sherman’s field of study aims to create clearer distinctions in this discourse.

“When you go to war and you’re fighting army against army,” Sherman explains, “there’s no genocide involved. Genocide involves killing innocent civilians, and civilians getting murdered by one side as a means to an end.”

Sherman’s work is pressing and places him in a space that involves his country’s existence and history every day. He has always had a penchant for history, but he explains that Stuyvesant, one of the first American high schools to have a school-wide activity for Holocaust Memorial Day, catalyzed his direction toward social action.

“Stuyvesant taught you to be involved in your society,” he says. “While I was at Stuyvesant, I was president for a few years of the Jewish Heritage Club, the main Jewish organization at the school. In 1972, we arranged a screening of the Holocaust film Night and Fog for all the social studies classes at Stuyvesant. The early seventies were also the height of the Soviet Jewry movement. So we had demonstrations for Soviet and Syrian Jewry almost every week.”

“Stuyvesant was considered one of the leaders for the Jewish student movement in New York City,” he continues, “because of the people that we attracted in the school. We had students from the entire religious and political spectrum, from orthodox and reform and from left and right. We all came together in this one organization.”

Sherman’s activism involved marches and rallies and extended to participation in the Hebrew Culture Club, run by Miss Rose Merison. Sherman found a personal connection in the family atmosphere she created.

“Miss Merison never married,” he says. “So her students became her children. Every Purim and Chanukah she had a huge party open to the entire school in the school lunch room. I kept in touch with her until her death four years ago. She was like an adopted grandmother for me.”

The year before he went to Stuyvesant, Sherman went to Betar summer camp, where he connected to Zionism. Stuyvesant strengthened his bond to Jewish identity, and after, he continued to be active in Jewish social action in college and grad school.

In 1980-81 he attended the W.U.J.S. (World Union of Jewish Students) program in Israel for one year. He developed a bond with the land and made aliyah in 1985. All along the way, Sherman maintained strong relationships with his Stuyvesant peers.

“Many of my close friends are from my graduating year,” he says. “That common bond of Stuyvesant transcends everything. The respect we have for each other because of that experience brings us close. Six years ago we had two reunions here with about 30 people each. They were truly amazing experiences.”

“In fact, there’s a professor of chemistry here at Tel Aviv University,” he says. “He graduated Stuyvesant in 1945. We immediately became friends. He was the first Westinghouse talent winner in the United States. Professor Edward M. Kosower.”

While Stuyvesantians easily transcend their differences through shared memories, the work that Sherman does and even more so, the society in which he lives reminds him of how rare that is. Obviously his chosen field reflects a desire to unite and humanize the situation.

“But I’m torn,” he says. “Last year someone I was very close to was killed in a terrorist attack. He was only a 13-year-old boy. It’s difficult, because we’re dealing now with people who want to see the destruction of the state of Israel. Israel has made many attempts to give them a homeland, but they rejected these.”

“At the same time, I believe if we continue to retain the territories it will destroy Israel as a Jewish country,” he says. “We never wanted them. We were forced, in self-defense [in Jordan’s ’67 incursion], to take them. Whether we have the right to be there or not is not the issue. Being there prevents us from developing as a society that has the resources to deal with issues like water and mass transportation. The question is not should we leave the territories—Palestinians have made it clear that they also want Tel Aviv, Haifa, and even Arad too—but now that we’re there how do we get out?”

Sherman points, as do many frustrated Israelis, to Ehud Barak’s offer two years ago of 90% of the West Bank, which Yassir Arafat rejected. Such responses cause many in Israel to question Arafat’s ultimate interest. Those on the far left counter however that the territory offered would have been split into quarters—and not really have been a true state. Sherman disagrees.

“It would have retained Israel’s security,” Sherman responds, “while letting the Palestinians have their own country. I support their call for an independent nation, but I can’t allow that to destroy me.”

So as the effort toward peace continues, Sherman pursues his own vital work for a safer world, a passion he believes that began at Stuyvesant.

“Stuyvesant taught me above all a drive to succeed at what I individually choose to succeed at,” he says. “That’s the key.”

Myra Abolitz ‘81

Living in Israel, staying in Israel, and believing in Israel at this time in history seems radical to many Americans, even many American Jews. But Israelis love their country with almost a personal intimacy and fidelity; this enormously challenging and special place is home. Perhaps this distinctive outlook and sense of belonging is what Israelis as a whole have in common with Stuyvesantians: they see the world differently, and they celebrate their difference.

“What was Stuyvesant for me?” Myra Abolitz ’81 asks. “A way of thinking that was different. At Stuyvesant, difference was admired. Even the teachers were different. We had this chemistry teacher, Mr. Kramer. He didn’t write ‘great’ or ‘good’ on papers. Instead he stamped trees on the page. You could ask him anything.”

Abolitz, who studied plant science at Binghamton and Cornell before receiving her masters in the field from Hebrew University, practices Chinese medicine in Tel Aviv, where she makes her home. She studied Chinese medicine in Israel and recalls taking notes in Chinese, Hebrew, and English. She says Stuyvesant taught her to embrace such diversity.

“Stuyvesant influenced me more than college or graduate school because of the students’ and teachers’ openness,” she says. “It was the best school I ever went to.”

“Everybody was well accepted,” she continues. “There was the hippie group and this group and the other, and it was okay be anyone of those things. It was a time when I was discovering myself. That was the place to do it because there was so much to choose from—kids from all different walks of life. Even taking the train into the city was an experience. And it was an experience just to be out there on my own.”

Abolitz is a first-generation American. Her parents met in Israel after fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in Russia (father) and Adin (mother). The fact that Zionism saved them from programs and jailing instilled the clear need for a Jewish state in Abolitz’s mind. Before and after Stuyvesant and during and after college, she studied and volunteered in Israel. Her extended Israeli family strengthened her experience and her love for Israel grew. Eventually, she made aliyah.

Now she faces the hard reality of actually living in Israel. The struggle for normal life amid ongoing terrorism can be difficult. Abolitz explains however, that the rest of the world’s misconception of the situation is equally frustrating.

“It’s very upsetting,” she says. “Depressing, angering in a way. When I watch international news, it’s a distorted picture. Kofi Anan recently criticized Israel for going into the Westbank to destroy the terrorist infrastructure and protect our citizens. He said, ‘Well the whole world can’t be wrong.’ And I thought to myself ‘How many times in history has the whole world been wrong?’”

“Barak gave Arafat many opportunities [for peace], but he didn’t accept them,” she continues. “If Arafat really wanted land and peace, he would have found it. It doesn’t look like that’s what he really wants. Part of the problem is poor Palestinian leadership.”

Abolitz echoes the feelings of more and more Israelis who have grown weary of the mercurial Palestinian leader. Many on Israel’s right completely oppose a Palestinian state, arguing that—in light of the discovered ship that was smuggling arms from Iran to the P.L.O.—such a state would only foster the development of a fortified Palestinian army and create a potentially catastrophic situation. But Abolitz disagrees.

“How would I feel about a state with ammunition?” she asks. “At least then the rules would be more clear.”

Despite the tense environment, Abolitz believes that life in Israel remains a beautiful expression of the Jewish ideal.

“I just liked it and stayed,” she says about her decision to make aliyah. “Jews should be living here if they feel good here. I do believe that there is a need for a Jewish state, and I like being a part of that. I also like the lifestyle, the weather, the beach, and the openness of the people. There’s a certain family feeling.”

The sense of belonging—the sense that, trace it back far enough, and you are related to everyone on the bus, in the restaurant, and at the beach—is solidified by living out a shared dream. 2,000 years after Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews came back. In a certain light, there is something very Stuyvesantian about this visionary reality.

“There’s a certain spirit of Stuyvesant,” Abolitz says. “If you have an idea, if you really want it, go after it and do it. Don’t just leave it on the side. Get out there and don’t let somebody else say no to you.”

Josh Farber ‘98

“I love the country and I love the people and I’m a Zionist,” Josh Farber ’98 declares. “I’m in Israel now because I want to contribute to the country in its time of distress.”

At 22, Farber is the youngest Stuyvesant graduate interviewed for this article. He received his B.S. at Cornell in December, and in February, he arrived at the W.U.J.S Institute in Arad, a small development town near the Dead Sea, for a one-year course in Hebrew and Jewish studies (history, religion, politics, art and literature). W.U.J.S., which offers its course to individuals with a college degree, will take him around the country, put him to work, and ultimately, if he chooses, prepare him to make aliyah.

Interestingly, one of his teachers in Israel, Rabbi Arthur Fischer '73 and wife Cheryl Fischer née Fleischer ’74 also attended Stuyvesant. For Josh, high school—and its challenges—are still fresh in his mind.

“We took this test [to get in] and had a remarkable experience,” he says. “It was incredible. It changed my life.”

“Being surrounded by people,” he continues, “who were as smart as I was or smarter than I was, from all different countries and the amount of work that the teachers gave you—the level of expectation was higher. At Stuyvesant, I’d wake up at six and get home around seven thirty. I found it impossible to have a life and do well at school and sleep more than five hours a night. But to a certain extent there’s a sense of merit that you passed through this ordeal and a sense of pride that comes with that. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.”

“The main life skill that I got, probably at an earlier age than most people, is that I had to deal with pretty serious work expectations,” he says. “It also gave me a lot more insight into people who were either born in Asia or of Asian descent and recent eastern European immigrants. I had a lot of friends from former communist countries who’d fled persecution.”

Farber also found that Stuyvesant’s science and math emphasis prepared his humanities bent for an economics degree at Cornell.

“Stuy gave me tremendous respect for the scientific fields,” he says. “It made my thinking more rigorous and less speculative.”

Farber has kept in touch with a number of his friends from school, largely due to the East coast collegiate circles in which they circulated. But now that he’s in the Negev Desert, far from the ambitious streets of New York, he feels the distance.

“I’m like one of those asteroids that gets ejected from the belt that flies off into deep space,” he laughs. “‘What happened to Josh?’ ‘Oh he’s in Israel right now.’”

Farber’s community here consists of Israelis, American students, and the immigrants that live in his building: Ethiopians, Russians, and Argentineans. In his new home, his focus often shifts from history to Hebrew to the one thing no one forgets: the war.

With his friends, he sometimes talks about what he would do if he were the Prime minister of Israel.

“I would extend the draft,” he says. “I would erase the religious exemption, unless you’re going to rabbinical school. I think everyone should contribute to the safety of the country. I would also erase the gender restrictions in combat. I think that was part of the social capital of the country in the founding days, the equality, the ability for everyone to contribute. It created more sense of cohesion. People shared a common experience.”

Farber believes that even with domestic reforms, building a sense of unity and security will provide no rest until the leadership on the other side of the green line changes.

“I think that the situation is in large measure,” he places his words carefully, “the result of Arafat surfing the popular vote. His form of leadership is to go forward and change direction with the tide, basically whenever necessary in order to remain in control, within certain parameters that fit his overall vision of Palestinian liberation.”

“But what exactly that means,” he continues, “I think is very flexible for him. But what it doesn’t mean is using measures to impose order and structure on Palestinian society that would either put him in confrontation with the most extreme elements of Palestinian society or that would create enough political infrastructure that he might become replaceable.”

Farber and his peers are the next generation of influence and perhaps even leadership for Israel. The country just celebrated its 54th year of modern existence and still has to fight for its right to be. But Farber sees real light in the future and a time when Israelis and Palestinians will rest and heal.

“I don’t see an obvious way out,” he says. “But I’m not a fatalist, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I do think that some day we will all live in peace. The path is obscure, but I’m sure it’s there. It only requires patience and fortitude.”

In Loving Memory