Reflections On and From My Centenarian Friend
My friend Dina Rosten died in May. She would have turned 101 in July. It’s rare to be in regular email communication with a centenarian, and so I am very grateful for my relationship with Dina. We met a few months after my parents moved to an assisted living facility on Long Island. My mother had told me about this lovely couple with whom she had a Hebrew Club. At the time, Dina was 93 and her husband Bernard was 95; they both were extremely interested in hearing about contemporary Israeli society and peppered me with questions. [Out of respect for the Rostens’ privacy, pseudonyms have been used, and some identifying information has been changed.]
Dina and Bernard raised their three children in Kew Gardens, Queens in the 1950s and 1960s. Both Dina and Bernard were immigrants, though Bernard had no recollection of his life before America since his family emigrated from Kiev when he was three. Dina’s story on the other hand was one of being from a well-off family in Brussels whose life was interrupted by the Nazis, and having to suddenly flee as a teenager with her family, eventually arriving by a very circuitous route to the Bronx. Dina spoke with a lovely European accent that in itself is also mainly a thing of the past—already even American Jewish nonagenarians speak unaccented English.
Dina and Bernard were committed Jews and Zionists, and they translated their ideals into deeds. They provided their children with a Jewish education, but like other non-Orthodox American Jews, they had a difficult time passing on their commitments. Dina and I were friendly enough so that I could ask her about this. I asked specifically about her son, whom I knew was married to a non-Jewish black woman (indeed, one of the first things I knew about Dina was this fact, told to me by a fellow assisted-living resident for whom, like many American Jews, a marriage to a black gentile was more transgressive than to a white gentile). Dina wrote back: “In answer to your question about my son who married a black woman, they married a few years ago, and as they married later in life, obviously there are no children. However, my son has a daughter from a previous marriage. And I have six other grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Since I grew up in a Zionist socialist family and Bernard in a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking household, our Jewish values were strong. And I am happy to say that all my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren have moral values and politically lean in the right direction, from my point of view.” Dina loved and was proud of her family, but it’s no coincidence that when she speaks of her family’s next generations, “Jewish” gets replaced by “moral” as the adjective describing “values.”
Dina was not untroubled by the difficulty of passing on Judaism and Jewishness to the next generations. In response to my 2019 Yom Kippur column in which I spoke about a young Israeli woman who said that she does not feel a need to fast on Yom Kippur because the whole country observes the holiday for her, Dina wrote: “Most interesting! I never thought one could feel more Israeli than Jewish. I feel more Jewish than American. But that is her point; that is the difference between living in Israel and in the galut [diaspora]. I only partially agree with her. If many young Israelis follow her thinking what kind of Jews will Israelis be in the future? Ethical, spiritual—but Jewish?”
For many non-religious Israeli Jews, the answer to Dina’s question may precisely have been provided by my 2019 interviewee: These Israelis are Jewish in that they live in a democratic Jewish state, whose holidays are Jewish holidays, whose institutions serve kosher food, and whose public schools teach Jewish stories and traditions. The really big question concerns those non-religious Jews living outside of Israel. As Dina’s substituting “moral” for “Jewish” values concerning her own loved ones indicates, the challenge is great.
Shana Tova and Gmar Hatima Tova: May you be inscribed in the Book of Life.
Teddy Weinberger is a contributing writer to Jlife magazine. He made aliyah with his family in 1997 from Miami, where he was an assistant professor of religious studies. Teddy and his wife, Sarah Jane Ross, have five children.
