Louis Zork ran a dry goods store on Commerce St in San Antonio in 1847.

The lower floor served as the storefront, while the upper floor as the residence for his family.

The Zorks are considered the first Jewish settlers in San Antonio immigrating from Posen, Germany.

And while the exact year of their arrival is uncertain.

We know they came here as so many of other founding Jewish families in the vast waves of Europeans seeking a better life At the time, San Antonio was the largest town in Texas and a critical trading outpost.

Business flourished.

Zork was soon followed by other Jewish families the Halff█s, Oppenheimer's, Deutsch, to name a few, who would over the ensuing years, help set the cornerstones for many of the city's businesses landmarks, as well as its cultural and civic direction.

The first wave of Jewish arrivals were from Germany.

Like many Germans, they faced religious and political persecution, restrictive laws and devastating economic prospects and arrived hungry for a better future.

The timing seemed right.

Restrictions on immigration had eased.

Steamships had replaced sailing ships, and the transatlantic journey became more accessible and more tolerable.

As a result, more than 5 million people left Germany for the U.S. during the 19th century.

250,000 of them Jewish.

The second wave brought the Eastern European Jews, whose escape from oppression was even more dire.

They came from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and other areas within the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.

They were fleeing for their lives from forced conscription into the Russian army, where young boys said good- bye to their families forever.

Some as young as 13 years old, forced into a life of military work until the day they died.

Others were fleeing the pogroms of Russia's Czar Alexander the Third.

Mass killings that would eventually claimed the lives of thousands of Russian Jews.

They came to escape the centuries old, deep seated discrimination and hatred that left them with no options for a better future for themselves or their children They came in mass.

Over 2 million of them typically bringing nothing with them except what they could carry.

From Western and Eastern Europe and points beyond.

For some, their journey brought them here to San Antonio This is their experience.

These are their stories.

I think they lived in a shtetl.

Life was sparse.

It was a time after the major pograms but anti-Semitism was still prevalent.

And my grandmother thought that America was a land of opportunity for three children and she embarked on her own.

My grandfather, Abraham Vexler, was from Romania.

He told his parents goodbye.

The age 16.

Never saw him again, knew he wasn't going to see him again And his parents wanted him out of there.

Okay.

There was a very little likelihood that he was going to make the age 20.

I think there were pogroms in in the village.

My grandmother learned to read and write by hiding behind the little fireplace when my grandfather was teaching the boys because girls didn't do that.

And I think she just I guess she just wanted a way out.

And she had a relative in Philadelphia where she went and worked as a maid for a while And then she met my grand- father and got married.

But, somewhere in the family archives, there is a letter in Yiddish from her father.

She wrote him when she got to the States.

A letter in Yiddish, of course.

And the letter back was.

Where did you learn to read and write?

I mean, he did.

He had no idea.

She was born in Romania.

My father was born in Russia.

I can't tell you where they married.

Because I don't know anything about him.

And even as we grew up, my mother just didn't talk about the bad things.

My father's father wanted him, apparently, to be a rabbi, and the Czar wanted him in his army.

So my father, not wanting to be either a rabbi or a soldier, decamped and went to England.

They came here in 1924.

My grandfather came to the States in 1908.

He had five children.

Left his wife with no means of support in Russia.

I mean, she didn't work.

So eventually the war ended.

During the war, you couldn█t bring anybody over for that.

That took us to 1918, when the war ended.

The revolution started.

You couldn't bring them during the revolution So that took them to 1924.

So in 1924, he brought the family over.

The journey was horrible, expensive by any measure.

Many spent every last kopek They had to buy the ticket, all the while with the desperate unease they could very well be turned away at the point of entry.

Ellis Island was the entry point for 12 million people, about three fourths of the migrants who entered the United States between 1892 and 1924.

On its busiest day, April 17th, 1907, Ellis Island officials processed almost 12,000 immigrants as they filed through the Great Hall.

After a few short years, it became clear that the living conditions for newly patrioted Jews living in Lower East Side tenements of New York were becoming desperate.

They faced overcrowding, rat infestation, and poverty.

This was not the Golden Medina they hoped to find.

The Galveston Movement was a program that had been organized in New York.

The leader was a financier named Jacob Schiff, who was one of the sort of more prominent, wealthy New Yorkers, New York Jews.

And Schiff had become concerned about the overcrowding of the Jewish neighborhoods in New York which was a genuine problem.

They were terribly overcrowded and uncomfortable.

And so what Schiff had hoped to do was kind of divert Jewish immigrants from Russia to some other American port where they would be distributed throughout the country.

And the idea was that way they're going to draw less attention to themselves.

He was concerned about anti-Semitism.

But also, they'll have better economic opportunities and will be competing with each other for the same jobs.

So it was partly a big jobs program to get everybody employed.

You know, wherever in the country there was a need.

So it was a pretty complex system.

But the focal point they chose was Galveston, Texas.

The way I heard the story is that, they were going to consider two ports of entry in the south and southwest.

One was in New Orleans and the other was Galveston.

New Orleans was a very desirable place.

There was a fear that they would stay there.

Galveston was not desirable at that time, because a few years before, it underwent that terrible storm of 1900.

So what happened is, the Jews, the decided the Jews were going to come through Galveston.

And when they got off the ship, Rabbi Henry Cohen, who was my predecessor when I was a rabbi at Galveston, he had been there 62 years.

He met them.

He spoke Yiddish.

He met them at the ship.

And, he and others had a directory, where certain occupations had to be filled.

For example, if a shoemaker was needed in Kansas City and somebody got off the boat that was from, as a shoemaker, that person would be asked to go to Kansas City.

A tailor If it was needed in Omaha, Nebraska, that person would be sent from the ship to Omaha, Nebraska.

And that's how a lot of the Jews of the Midwest and other parts of the South were settled.

After seven years, the Galveston project ended as U.S. immigration policy tightened until the doors were closed in 1924.

Those who were turned away after their arduous journey overseas were redirected to other areas, including Cuba, South America, Mexico, or wherever they could find refuge.

Among those who did make it to Ellis Island, Galveston, and other ports, some of them would eventually make their way to San Antonio to help build the city.

We know today.

In 1850, the boundaries of San Antonio extended just south of present day HemisFair Park and bordered by the San Antonio River to the west.

In the 2 to 3 decades since Louis Zork set up his small dry goods store, the San Antonio Jewish community was quickly finding its footing.

By the late 1800s, other Jewish families came, and they too set up shop.

The Halff█s on Commerce Street selling dry goods.

The Oppenheimer's one block down selling much of the same as the locals, came to purchase their goods, they often paid in cattle as a result, it wasn█t long before the Halff brothers became the largest cattle ranchers in Texas with over 1 million acres, and they became the third largest pro- ducer of cattle in the country.

Locals who had cash often asked merchants to hold their money for them in their store vaults, since it was illegal at the time to have state run banks.

As regulations changed, so did business.

After years of holding money for San Antonio customers, the Oppenheimer's opened the first bank in the area.

As the community grew, they set up Jewish institutions, founding Temple Beth-El in 1874, Agudas Achim in 1889, followed by Rodfei Shalom in 1917.

They founded charitable organizations such as NCJW and Hadassah, and the more established the Jewish community became.

The more Jews arrived.

In the early part of the 20th century, San Antonio progressed as the largest city in Texas.

Its economy was on sound footing as it effortlessly collected money for its military and logistics needs.

But San Antonio, which is an agriculture and ranching entrepot; i.e., it served agri- culture for most of its history, dating right back to the Spanish through the Mexican, through the Revolution and Republic.

This place served all of that agricul tural industry up in the Edwards Plateau, where the sheep and goat were raised, and down in this coastal plain where cattle were raised.

It was a poor town.

Layered on top of that poverty, because agriculture is not a robust economy anywhere.

Was the fact that there was an enormous amount of federal spending here, certainly by the middle 20th century.

This had always been a military town.

It was true for the Spanish.

It was the military's presence that actuall made the economy tick.

The same would be true for the M The same would be true in the Mexican-American War, ironically enough, that when the US Army came in in the middle 1840s, they basically started to rebuild the city in their own image because they understood how to turn a city's economy towards them, to help them do the work that they needed to do.

So saddle making, they needed hay.

So all of a sudden the German farmers up in Fredericksburg and elsewhere are are growing horses, they're bringing in meat, they're bringing in hay, they're bringing in wool because the military wants it.

So suddenly you start to create this little energy around the army.

But that's also pretty conservative.

It's a safe bet.

So why would you bet on something like the the railroad, which seemed a little wacky.

And so Houston bet on the railroad, and it won.

Dallas bet on the railroad and it won.

San Antonio was last in this process because its economic elite were torn.

They really like the wagons that took them down to Matamoros, like that made some of them really rich.

So why would they want a railroad that█s going to beat them out of their own trade?

They liked their wagon trains down to Corpus Christi.

That worked for them too.

Why would they want a rail line there?

So it█s really interesting that the city is, in effect, against itself, or at least those who had the chance to be entrepreneurs were against themselves.

And that's when Dallas and Houston start to take off.. And then when they strike oil game over.

The post-World War I years proved turbulent.

San Antonio's reliance on outside money, along with a reluctance to invest in itself, proved consequential Following World War I█s booming requirement for trained troops, the city's economy shuddered, while Dallas and Houston expanded rapidly in the postwar years.

San Antonio, which in 1920 was the largest city in Texas, slipped to third by 1930.

It would take a disaster of epic proportions to jolt the city into a new perspective.

In September of 1921, a slow moving hurricane inched ashore from Mexico as the hurricane spun over the Rio Grande Valley.

Six inches of rain fell in Laredo Thrall, Texas In Williamson County saw 38 inches of rain in 24 hours.

Austin, 18.

As the water crashed through the Edwards Plateau.

There was nothing to stop it.

The Olmos Dam, proposed after each flood that rushed through the city, would garner support in the immediate aftermath, and then fade with each passing sunny day.

Rivers and streams broke through their banks.

Houses and barns were ripped from their foundations, churches and synagogues like Agudas Achim, were completely destroyed.

On the west side the water became a torrent in less than half an hour, rising to more than eight feet in approximately 20 minutes.

Small homes and shacks floated away, crashing into whatever was in their path.

In this small area alone, over 50 people died.

Olmos Creek broke through its banks around midnight.

By the time it hit downstream and crashed into the San Antonio River, it was a 5 to 10ft wall of water rolling through the central business district.

The damage was catastrophic.

As the water receded, the city was devastated and it would take $4 million and many, many months to clean up the damage.

However, the Flood of ‘21 caused a shift in thinking and had a dramatic effect on the city's future.

Work began almost immediately on the 1900 foot structure that would become Olmos Dam designed specifically to protect downtown San Antonio, while protection of the poor vulnerable areas such as the West Side would have to wait almost 50 more years for protection against flooding.

Olmos Dam was a start, and it also set the tone for other ambitious ventures the city would undertake in the coming decades.

The city's long held sense of complacency had been shaken.

As the 20s went by, San Antonio rebuilt, the city actively invested in itself, and plans to preserve and enhance the Riverwalk were executed.

Businesses grew.

In 1917, there were 3000 Jews in San Antonio.

By 1938, there were over 6000.

Temple Beth-El had dedicated its third temple at its current location, Agudas Achim had rebuilt from the devastating flood and Rodfei Shalom had expanded through its merger with congregation B█nai Israel.

Then came the Great Depression.

Even as we grew up, my mother just didn't talk about the bad things.

She never talked about how poor we were, or she would tell us if we didn█t eat our food.

They're starving in Europe, you know, never in the United States, they█re starving in Europe.

You got to eat your food.

Okay.

But, she, you know, she didn't talk about it on a personal level.

We lived.

We never missed meals.

We had no money.

I worked Saturdays to support myself.

My older brother joined the, Navy early on and sent money home.

But we never had very much money or just we had enough to live.

Of course, our apartment probably cost $25 a month and things were a lot cheaper than they are now, but, you know, the depression was awful.

You just can't even think about how bad it was.

And that comes later.

Who wouldn't think about that at the time, we were, as I said, we're from the wrong side of the tracks.

All my friends are from the wrong side of the track.

So it doesn't matter.

We're all in the same big boat together.

Don't forget, we were children of the depression.

Really, his parents were poor.

My parents were poor.

But, I don't know if we as children understood that, but, so it, it really colored our lives and, and I think it was part Of it and part of Bob.

He was always aware that there were people who needed help, and that's what he did all his life.

When I graduated from Jefferson, I had saved enough money to buy my own suit.

Went to Joske█s basement, bought a suit with a coat and two pair of pants for $5.

I was given a scholarship to Western Reserve University.

This was depression time, and things were very, very hard.

Then I taught school in Cleveland for a couple of years.

Well, my husband, whom... do you want to hear all this?

I married my husband in secret.

He was a medical student in Chicago at the University of Chicago.

And in those days, because it was deep depression, If a schoolteacher got married, she lost her job.

I think the idea was that there should only be one wage earner in a family because my husband wasn█t earning anything, but... San Antonio was struck hard by the great Depression.

Military spending post-World War I dried up and personnel were furloughed.

Tourism suffered as people around the U.S. began cutting back, and the ancillary services that support tourism like travel, food and entertainment were no longer viably supported.

As the country fell increasingly under this dark economic cloud, journalists from all over came to San Antonio to see one of the hardest hit areas in the country.

They discovered that its poor regardless of race or ethnicity, lived in squalor that included a large number of San Antonio's 230,000 residents, particularly those Mexican migrants who had moved to the city in the 1910s and 1920s to escape the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.

These migrants lived in overcrowded conditions with no access to running water, indoor sanitation, paved roads or suitable housing.

Meanwhile, at the city level, tax delinquencies were on the rise and city, county and school district jobs suffered.

Hoover-era policies proved inadequate and local leaders resisted effort to provide assistance to the most desperate.

According to Julia Kirk Blackwelder, no major city in the U.S. fought the depression with fewer weapons than San Antonio.

Balancing the political and economic views of the congregation with the social justice philosophy of the rabbi led to historic divisions within one part of the Jewish community The 1938 pecan sheller strike proved to be a launching point for organized labor in San Antonio, as impoverished pecan sellers went on strike to protest low wages and horrible working conditions.

The owner was a prominent Jewish congregant of Temple Beth-El.

Rabbi Frisch of Temple Beth-El sided with the workers.

He came out of the Classical Reform tradition, which meant that there was a heavy accent on social action, social justice, and a minimal emphasis on Jewish ceremonial ritual.

His religion was really, standing up for justice, standing up for what's right.

And he took on many controversial causes.

He was fearless.

Some would call him foolhardy, depending on your perspective.

But he was very courageous.

One time, he gave a sermon and, an official of the congregation tried to silence him, and he said, you know, this is my pulpit and it's a free pulpit I'm going to speak my mind, and I'm going to tell you what's what's right according to Jewish morals and ethics.

San Antonio didn't have much of an industrial revolution.

Not until the middle 20th century could we have said that to be true.

Earlier, much of its industry, if we even want to use that term, really was hand labor Using bodies as machines.

And in one of the classic expressions of that was in the pecan industry.. By the 19-teens and 20s, pecan had become a kind of foodstuff for the nation.

And San Antonio was sitting at the nexus of this really interesting food with railroads.

Now that could take it anywhere in the country.

And so it's the Mexican labor that came up to San Antonio while the revolution was exploding in Mexico itself.

So labor was moving away from Mexico to get away from the violence.. And where they came to was San Antonio.

And the area that they lived is the west side, which became more and more dense and more and more crowded and more and more unsanitary.

And it's there that the pecan industry was located.

So imagine all of these new laborers moving in into a pecan industry that was not solely owned by Jewish, owners, but was largely owned by Jewish owners.

And the problem is that, two of the big pecan shelling companies were owned by prominent members of the temple.

And, they got crosswise with Rabbi Frisch because of that.

And so there we have a dynamic that proved to be, one of the most controversial in the city's economic history.

And the dynamic was simple.

The more labor there was, the cheaper you had to pay people, because there was an enormous demand for work.

And so therefore, that's what they did, how you made money on pecans, which you're not going to make a ton of money doing it.

The shellers are paid by the piece.

That is to say, the more they shell, the more they earned.

But per piece, they're not making a lot of money.

Poor wages and long hours and terrible working conditions.

You know, they're subject to all kinds of diseases.

And I don█t think there was proper ventilation.

This went on all over the country, it wasn█t unique to San Antonio.

That's why the labor unions formed in the first place.

And so the shellers began to think about their own well-being.

How could they survive in this economy when they're shelling pecans and those in the garment industry were having the exact same questions because they, too, are doing the work by piecework.

And that's that's great for the owners.

It's terrible for the labor.

And labor started to organize.

And so the way you started this process is you went out on strike, even if it's a wildcat strike, which means there's not a union, you're just going out on strike.

All of a sudden the question then became, okay, how do we get them back in to work?

We're not going to pay them more.

So you call on the police.

The police come in to break the strike.

Emma Tenayuca, who was the great organizer of this period, is one of those figures who rises up to confront the power of the police, to confront the city, to confront these Jewish owners and challenge them in terms of their willingness to pay workers a fair wage.

Alas, what happened over the decade was ultimately, the way they broke the strike was to acknowledge that they would pay workers more And then they started to, in fact, introduce machines which laid off labor and basically collapsed the union and threw people out into the streets, into the unemployment lines.

in the middle of the Great Depression.

He was involuntarily retired in 1942.

One of the outcomes of the strike was that organized labor would, less than two decades later, join forces with the Jewish and Latino community, the latter led by Henry B Gonzalez, to advocate for the Hispanic and African-American communities in years to come.

Rabbi Jacobson, also my predecessor Rabbi Frisch█s successor.

He also took some very strong stands, and he and Archbishop Lucey of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and Bishop Everett Jones of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas, the three of them were largely responsible for the peaceful and smooth desegregation of San Antonio in the mid 60s.

And they did it without any race riots.

They did it without any protests It was very quiet and very effective.

And, you know, some of the people in the congregation thought,, you know, you're going to hurt our comfortable position in the city.

They're, like, what are you doing?

Just let other people do it.

Of ourse, they were They were joined by some very prominent African-American ministers like Claude Black and S.H.

James.

But, those three, white clergy persons worked in harmony.

They were kind of the moral conscience of San Antonio for many years.

The three of them, they were like a triumvirate.

And whenever there's an issue of conscience that came up, people would go to them for, for advice and for counsel.

The three, three of these gentlemen.

And their wives, if they heard a rumor that they were not allowing black people at the restaurant, they would make dinner reservations, and the six of them would arrive with the minister.

and his wife.

And if they were turned away at the door, they were condemned By these six very powerful people.

It's very interesting the way they just very quietly... And so I have a date, before I met Toni and we're at, LaFonda on Main, on Broadway, and in comes David with a black companion, and they sit down at the table, and I think.

How wonderful.

LaFonda has integrated.

I didn't know that they weren't integrated, but they wouldn't they didn't make an issue of it.

And that was the first restaurant integrated in San Antonio.

And he did it.

And for for the city that is becoming increasingly post-World War II a tourist town.

It was, it was a tourist town before.

But now with HemisFair, and the like, there were opportunities that opened up a larger question about race, justice.

And in the case of segregation, segregation.

Right.

And so often the story is told through the lens of three figures an archbishop, a rabbi, and a minister who worked together to break segregation█s barriers.

That story is also told through a kind of chamber of commerce lens, which is the Chamber of Commerce realized that if this HemisFair was going to succeed, we could not have the National Guard coming in or the local police, which they did in the 1930s.

Now they're a little savvier.

That doesn't play well.

The optics are not good.

So they learned something from the 1930s.

They looked bad then and they weren't going to replicate that 30 years later..

So there is these pressures that are pushing.

But what gets lost in that story is the grassroots energy that is coming from the East Side, from the West and South Sides also.

When MALDEF was founded, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund and when LULAC was, up and running and when the GI Forum with the veterans from World War II was getting started, when COPS was created, Communities Organized for Public Services, there were Jewish names contributing the funds and Jewish leaders, providing intellectual, insights like Herky Bernard, Herky Bernard was the right-hand advisor to people like Henry B Gonzalez and Joe Bernal and Albert Pena in the years when they were daring to articulate a message of of of no longer accepting subservience, no longer accepting overt discrimination.

That was learned from San Antonio's Jewish advocates, Jewish civil rights leaders.

It couldn't have been done without their resources.

It couldn't have been done without their advice.

It couldn't have been done without their good counsel.

It couldn't have been done.

Bill Sinkin was this diminutive guy, maybe 5█-6”, very slight and well-known, he would sit at the counters of these restaurants.

And they all knew him.

And he said, I█m not leaving until you serve my friend Mr.. Sutton, who was a, black funeral home owner, and they sat for hours.

HemisFair was desegregated.

A pretty important step.

The busses were desegregated, a very important step.

Lunch counters were desegregated.

And differently than in Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, where Woolworth's, once it was clear that they would have to desegregate their lunch counters, they ripped them out so they wouldn't have to deal with it.

And that may have happened in San Antonio in some instances, but not everywhere.

And I think that's part of not just the beguiling nature of this city, but because a lot of people began to recognize that Jim Crow was dangerous to this town's economy and actually to its political lifeblood.

And I give them credit for that.

Everybody figured out we really need each other.

You know, out of necessity.

I don't have to like you.

I don█t have to agree with you.

But, you know, for us to succeed here, we█re going to have to get along.

Meanwhile, my grandmother, one of her brothers, had asthma.

And so San Antonio was hot, dry air.

Okay, which hard to believe today.

There were still sanitariums that I was aware of in San Antonio, where people would come to get the hot air to clear their lungs My father came to San Antonio in 1922.

So they were living actually in Chicago.

But at that time, my oldest uncle, his father-in-law had asthma, so people told him that San Antonio was the best place for asthmatics.

So he moved here and... We lived in New Jersey nd my sister got very sick each winter.

And one year she had a strep throat and we came close to losing her.

And my father said, that's it.

And he wrote letters.

He drew a line on a map.

And he said, South of this line is okay.

And it was Oklahoma and Texas primarily.

And he sent letters to the conservative synagogues.

The best letter he got was from Sam Hyman at congregation Agudas Achim.

Very nice letter.

And without ever setting foot in San Antonio, he bought a franchise for Rayco Seat Covers.

He had a little store.

Two by four.

Enough for him and his wife to to call on customers.

And that became a, store called El Nuevo Mundo.

Oh, goes back so far.

Then he opened LaFeria.

Bob and I got married and since we had relatives in San Antonio, Texas, the Sinkins, my father's cousins.

So we came and decided to we came by bus and we came by train and over the cold, cold was already December and it was so cold.

And we came into San Antonio downtown on the train, and it was the most magnificent day.

It was 70 degrees.

The sun was shining and our, and our family overwhelmed us with hospitality.

And as we were leaving, my cousin Ben Nathan offered Bob a job to, to open up a new lumber yard for him.

And I came here with my husband when he was stationed here in 1939.

And so we went all over, road around San Antonio.

We'd never seen it before, but it was so beautiful when we saw these people playing tennis.

And and San Pedro in the park, in shorts.

It was December.

And he said at that point, if I ever get out of this alive, I want to settle here.

And I was in practice in Baltimore.

I got a letter from the Army and it said, you got two choices.

You can come in as an officer, as a physician, or you can come in as a private.

They sent us a questionnaire of some sort, and Phyllis looked at it and she said, any place is okay except Texas.

So they sent me a response that will be assigned to Fort Sam, in Texas.

So I was assigned to the Army's Research and Development Group, young and single.

And I was looking forward to going to Washington, to Walter Reed and my orders, said Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

And my response was where█s that?

So I had already been coming to the JCC because at that time they had a military breakfast every Sunday.

Okay.

This was going started during the Second World War at the J.

And they would invite the military from all the different, all the Jewish military from all the different bases.

To come here on Sunday morning and have bagels and cream cheese and lox.

We left Baltimore in a snowstorm with about eight inches of snow at our doorstep.

Came here.

It was 72 degrees.

It was the 2nd of February.

Okay.

I was born in Hungary and it was a very small town.

Population was maybe 3000-4000.

And around 300 Jewish people lived there.

And then, you know he Jewish people's lives changed on March of 19, 1944, when the Germans invaded Hungary.

The Federation gave us the job.

They paid for our rent and maybe a few months, and then they'd be like, they gave us doctor, dentist.

Everything the Federation did for us in the beginning, it was very hard.

And none of us spoke a word of English.

And Federation when we saw that we don't need any help anymore Really and we tried to always help back as much as and still do.

Everything, everything, everything around us were ranches and farms and things like that.

I came here, I was so disappointed because I thought I█d see cowboys in the streets.

During polio season, I didn't get to graduate from elementary school because when I was in the sixth grade, that was when they had the epidemic in there.

It was quarantine, so nobody got to go to school to graduate.

But the movies were closed, the schools were closed.

Everything was closed.

The swimming pools, everything.

The whole summer.

And, we saved books of stamps for bonds.

You know, we would paste our stamps in and then we collected S&H Green Stamps.

My parents practically furnished their house.

They bought a card table and chairs with S&H Green Stamps and if you bought cartons of cigarettes, you'd get double stamps, so... Of your social life was the synagogue as well as AZA-BBG And they had a lot of activities And Boy Scouts, we had a troop nine out of Agudas Achim, and we used to have a very nice actually, it was a miserable summer camp, but we thought it was nice on the banks of the Guadalupe River in New Braunfels.

... ended up in high school at Jefferson High School.

And, in those days, BBYO was everything.

And that's really how Mike and I met.

And he was at Alamo Heights.

As Jewish kids growing up in San Antonio you, you stuck together because you weren't accepted.

And many we weren't accepted at the country clubs.

So the Jewish people formed two country clubs, Northview and Shady Wood.

In high school that were sororities that really Jewish kids did not get into.

So your friends, where you felt comfortable.

were with other Jewish kids.

Even before high school, I was going to Mark Twain.

And at that time we were infatuated with the boys from Peacock Military Academy.

And we would take the bus downtown, go to the Saint Anthony and sit in the little booths around the lobby, and the Peacock boys would come in.

We visit with them, we'd go to a movie, and then we'd go to the Manhattan and have pie.

But they would take the bus down and we would take the bus, and our parents let us go on the bus anywhere.

It was just, there wasn't a problem.

On Saturday nights we had dances.

We had high school fraternities and sororities.

It was 2 or 3 of the fraternities, and I don't remember but one of the sororities.

But we used to have regular dances at the, Part where you you wrote down, you got it filled out.

Dance cards.

The dance cards... Driving.

I think I was driving at 12 years old.

Really!

And I got my license maybe at 13, because I had a younger brother who I had to drive around.

There were no expressways.

The busiest street we were on was San Pedro.

I mean, cruising down San Pedro.

That was like heaven.

It was fun.

I mean, nobody got in wrecks.

Well, some did, but not it wasn't dangerous.

And then I went out and bought a car.

For $42.50.

‘29 Roadster.

and Larry had a ‘25 Studebaker four door with running boards.

And we used to change drivers by getting out of the running board and move over while the car was in motion, and The Jefferson Brackenridge football game.

It was it was it was the big thing of the year at Alamo Stadium.

We would go.

Oh, we would go to the, miniature golf course, like Cool Crest or whatever it was.

We would go to the Pig Stand, we would go to Earl Abel█s late at night, and we'd go to movies.

As a kid in the 40s, we would take the bus to Agudas And, the back side of Agudas was the Jewish Community Center and what it was was maybe ten classrooms that were used by Agudas for their Sunday school, and then a big auditorium that was also a somewhat of a gym.

That's where we congregated.

There was nothing else in this community.

North Star Mall was built.

That was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened in San Antonio.

And that was in the 60s.

They had a Handy Andy.

They had a theater.

Yeah.

So so we to this day, my friends and I try to remember what was there when we began, you know, we'd go through.

But that was the center of our world.

JCC was there, the North Star Mall.

We were broke, and I sent a telegram to all of our members and said, we have to have a meeting that the Jewish community is on the threshold.

We either are going to go forward or there will be no more Jewish Community Center.

And that was a real fact.

Well, from that point on, it got better.

We moved forward.

We built on to the old Jewish Community Center.

I remember we built a tennis court.

I was a tennis nut, and this tennis court was just asphalt black, ugly.

We were so excited.

And we had a tournament, tennis tournament.

And my partner and I, Willie Glasser.

Willie, has since passed away.

Willie Glasser and I won the championship.

Everybody said it was a frame up.

And we raised $17 million and we built it.

And it's just it's just fabulous You see it You drive by, they█re cars everywhere.

It's vibrant.

There are people everywhere.

And we never had that experience as teenagers.

We didn't have that facility.

It's hard to keep that Jewish culture and traditions, and I think that the campus has offered that opportunity, for our community.

We felt it was very, very important.

I think one of the biggest things that changed our city in my lifetime, was 1968. for HemisFair.

And of course, Bill Sinkin deserves a lot of credit for helping to make that happen.

Well, I was here for two years before HemisFair.

It was impossible to find a place besides a pancake house or something that was open after 10:00 at night.

Well, when I came to San Antonio it's hard probably for you to believe, but we didn't have liquor by the drink.

We had to wherever we went we brought a paper bag with a bottle of liquor in it.

And I think liquor by the drink started the hotel business.

That is basically because nobody wanted to have a hotel here, so nobody really wanted to come here and open restaurants and stuff until until we got that.

Figures like Bill Sinkin joined with Tom Frost and Henry Gonzalez, Walter McAllister, & HB Zachry to make the decisive event that created modern San Antonio, which is HemisFair.

They so badly needed housing for the tourists coming in.

It's hard to believe today, but they had very few hotels.

Zachry built a hotel in nine months, putting up layers of blocks one on top of another... And my kids were little and we had we'd go down all the time.

I remember going down to watch the big trucks that carried the Hilton hotel room by room up to, oh my gosh, was that fascinating And then when HemisFair came, I decided to build a little apartment project and, put furniture in all the rooms.

We had, bedroom furniture in the living room.

We had bedroom furniture everywhere.

And it was going to be great.

It was HemisFair.

Opening night.

Jack Benny was here.. Lewis Pitluck was the promoter.

I bought opening night Jack Benny for the JCC.

So I was underwriting, if there had been a shortfall, I would have made up the difference.

Anyway, we sold it out.

It was a dynamic night.

We made a lot of money.

We went we went often, we we went probably at least once a week.

We took guests.

It was a big thing.

It's too bad it didn't make any money because it was really a big thing in town for everyone.

Well, what happened was it rained almost every day during HemisFair.

It was the craziest weather and it really hurt.

The attendance.

And then two days before HemisFair, Martin Luther King got shot.

And instead of having 7 million, we had like 4.5 million.

And people who counted on HemisFair bringing a lot of people, it really didn't happen.

It happened later.

People did come in, but not as a tourist wave.

Certainly, Bill Sinkin was a critical person with regard to that very successful development So that really was the beginning of the opening of the city.

In 1947, just after World War II, San Antonio was the largest city in the United States without a medical school.

The city had the fewest hospital beds per capita of any major city in the United States, unable to handle a mass casualty or epidemic, polio and diphtheria were prevalent in those days.

In the poorer areas, homes still lacked basic sanitation services.

The Robert B Green Memorial Hospital near downtown was hampered by financial woes and temporarily halted some health care services.

Community leaders began discussing the possibility of bringing a medical school to San Antonio over the next three years, and through a tireless effort, they established the San Antonio Medical Foundation as a nonprofit corporation to formally pursue this goal.

Over 200 acres of land were donated, and the foundations for the medical center were laid There are a number of requirements to locate the school, and one was to have a county hospital that could serve as a teaching hospital.

And land available for building the medical school on a nonprofit corporation was founded and 600 acres were designated.

These were very prominent San Antonians, and they were very vocal that it needed to be large which is one reason we didn't go downtown to the Robert B Green, because they wouldn't be able to purchase land.

And there have been a lot of gifts from Jewish people of land, and it has expanded tremendously.

My grandfather was probably a wildcatter and maybe a little bit of a gambler.

He helped the Methodist raise the money to build the Methodist Hospital.

And I was very proud that they named a street in the Medical Center after he passed away, and then Daddy took his position after that.

And he was very involved in Methodist and the Medical Foundation.

There was a street named for him too.

The construction of the hospital new hospital underway.

Construction of the school began, recruitment of core faculty started.

And that's when Doctor Weser was recruited and came very early.

The founding chairman of medicine was, Doctor Leon Kander, who was Jewish himself.

Doctor Barry Beller, came from Columbia as an intern at Chicago, and he learned of the new school being developed in San Antonio and made inquiries and was asked to head the cardiology division by Doctor Kander.

Most of us were relatively young very excited about the opportunity to develop something new, knowing the tremendous needs in San Antonio.

And, there was great enthusiasm.

People worked day and night, literally.

We had one copying machine to make slides for our lectures.

And, what happened, after, the hospital was nearing completion was that they found they needed additional money for equipment to, complete the job of a new hospital, and a referendum was held, and it was turned down.

So here was this core of new faculty that had come within a year or two, and suddenly there wasn't money to finish the hospital.

So, through the efforts of some politically adept people and particularly, County Judge Blair Reeves, they voted to overcome this, this, this barrier and had a successful vote.

And, funds were made available to complete the hospital.

And we had volunteers that, the medical school, was actually just getting organized.

UT Health Science was just getting organized, and they were asking for volunteers.

We had some volunteers that worked in the labs once a week, just doing filing for the doctors and things.

I did once a week.

The role of interfaith efforts in the development and success of San Antonio cannot be overstated, and the spirit of cooperation the community has enjoyed continues to flourish.

When Rabbi Stahl came, we had, you know, a wonderful relationship.

Judy and Lynn and myself and Sam.

Especially, at a time like this, when in many communities, Orthodox rabbis, will not associate with Reform or Conservative rabbis.

There weren't issues.

For example, when the day school started, we all sat down.

We said anything which presents a issue to the other, we're just going to avoid.

You know, I have to tell you, when Sam was a young rabbi in Galveston, there were challenges between the two congregations, and he made up his mind when he came here that that was not going to be.

And now he is Sam is euphoric because he's in this new organization which is bringing in all these mainline Christian, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim clergy, and they're all working toward one goal, and that is to work on the whole issue of homelessness and affordable housing.

And they found an apolitical project.

So today, today, it is just such a fractiousness because everyone is so, so aggressive, and the orthodox, in both politically and, and also spiritually.

I mean, there's a everyone has seized the other as violating them.

So that that didn't exist and that it was tremendous.

In fact, we were the community was known and I say known, it was known nationally and internationally for the the sense of harmony that existed between all the factions of the city.

A prerequisite for a Jewish life is, social service, and improving the lives of other people.

And part of that was reaching out to other community leaders and being aware that Temple Beth-El and Agudas Achim and Rodfei were potential powerhouses to do good.

20 to 30 years in, these immigrants had found their footing.

Their businesses were thriving, their Jewish institutions were stable.

They then began to turn their attention outward.

Out of the dozens of philanthropic civic efforts in which the Jewish community has played a key role, here are just a few.

My father, he was well known.

He was a successful businessman.

After he graduated from high school, he couldn't afford to go to college.

And so, he just went and got a job.

And at age 21, he started his own business, and it was successful.

But that business lasted until my father died.

Until in 1963.

But he was a popular man.

He he had a number...

He fit into the San Antonio community.

He was he was president of Temple Bethel.

And I know he was campaign chair at the Federation, had a number of jobs for the city.

The first zoning ordinance for the city of San Antonio.

He was the chair, he was president of the Chamber of Commerce.

And I know he was the youngest president, and he was rather proud of the fact that he was the youngest president, the Chamber of Commerce thing.

So he was one of the founders, e.g., of the Community Chest, which became the United Way.

And his obituary was on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News.

So he he was a figure.

He made a name for himself and to some degree, he made a name for me.

He gave me an opportunity, here in San Antonio, that most people wouldn't have had.

And I had a very, very easy life And to some degree, because of him, he was a nice, he was a nice person.

In any event My uncle, who completely different personality.

His name was Buddy Goldsmith.

And when my father died, I remember my uncle.

He was saying that he should have been the one to die.

And then he came to me and he said, I want, I want you to do something in my father's memory.

And he would pay for it.

And he said, well, I mean, like, what are you talking about?

He said I could, I could pay $10,000 a year for ten years, $100,000.

Find something.

And I thought about it for a while.

And during, I was looking things up and I came across something that I knew nothing about, which was community foundations.

And I got a group together.

Some of them I knew and some of them were my father's friends, but they were prominent people in San Antonio, and we set up the Area Foundation, designed to meet local needs when they arose.

The easiest one to choose are the college scholarships, which started with basically nothing and are now around $50 million a year.

We fund a great many medical research projects.

We started, we're basically responsible for the no kill program in San Antonio, which went from 95% kill to 90% save.

I got involved with the Food Bank on a food drive.

I was chairman of the nominating committee when we were, we were went through two directors and, I was talking to Sam Bushetta, who was with the USDA, and I saw him at a meeting and he said, very grumpy guy.

And he said, what are you going to do now?

He said, you know, you got two strikes, one more and you're out.

And we were serving 16 counties at the time.

And, he said, you got to get the right man in here.

And, and so I told him, I said, I'm looking at, I had met this Eric Cooper at a gleaning convention in Scottsdale the year before and when we were, when we were going through the, for the second director, I called him and he said, no, I just bought built a new home.

I'm not ready.

He was working as assistant manager of the, of the Dallas Food Bank.

So the following year, when I was chairman of the nominating committee, I said, Eric, you're going to be, your name is going up.

And you said, you're going to get it.

You got to come here.

He said, well, okay.

So, it was between him and another one.

And I called the entire board of the nominating committee the night before we voted.

And I said, look, we need Eric.

And I said, if he doesn't work out, I'll pack my bags and you'll never hear from me again.

So we brought him in, and, I mean, it just, he's been such a, he has such vision.

I mean, he took us from this 40,000 square foot building to a 100,000 square foot building over in the Van de Walle Farm off of 151.

We're operating on it.

We're operating, with, debt free, facilities where we're $.98 out of every dollar goes to buying food And we were we were selected as one of the, one of the most efficient operating companies in the United States last year.

We now have, when Eric came here we had about four broken down trucks and 40,000ft█ and about 16 employees.

And we were we were producing about 16 million pounds of food.

Now we have we have, 200,000ft█ of space.

We have 225 employees, and we're doing about 70 million pounds of food.

And one day I received a phone call.

It was 1975.

I received a call from the head of the CRC, and she said to me that the head of the Social Studies department at the Northeast Independent School District had called the Federation and asked whether we could, the Jewish community could in some ways supply a supplementary lesson about the Holocaust, because nothing was in the textbooks, there was absolutely nothing.

The head of the CRC said, yes, I mean, so using a 15 or 20 minutes slide presentation that had been put together for, a Yom Hashoah program, we went into MacArthur High School in 1976.

There were three of us, Paula Kaufman and Phyllis Braverman and I.

We took this slide presentation into the high school, MacArthur High School, and we gave this presentation, which included some historic backgrounds, some question and answers.

We were there, we were at the school for two days, two consecutive days.

One of them was devoted completely to discussion.

And it became apparent on that very first day that this was a subject, first of all, that nobody knew very much about.

Second of all, the students were riveted by it.

Okay.

From that day forward, a project began to develop, first of all, teachers all over the northeast system and then the northside system and then the all over the the community began to call us for this.

And we began, a tremendous amount of work, improving what we had there.

There were, there were no, and there was nothing we could go to.

We had to create, what we were doing.

And for several years after that we were totally immersed in that I will tell you, without exaggeration, there were very few weeks in the school year that we were not in the schools with those presentations And of course, the three of us were completely inadequate for that kind of thing.

So we began to involve more people.

Well, one day Maxine Cohen called me, and so I said, well, I don't know anything.

You know, I don't know what I can do, but sure, I'll do it.

So she taught us, she and Phyllis Braverman.

We would take them into the classroom and and they would hear our presentations.

I don't know how many years we did that before the Federation came up with the money to have it automated so that we could do it without clicking the slides.

And so we we had somebody it wasn't me came up with the idea of maybe we should have a survivor come speak to the kids.

There were about, at one time, about 70 Holocaust survivors who were settled in San Antonio after the war.

It's at least three years that we were talking about that.

When Maxine was the president of the Holocaust Memorial.

And and since then, we, whenever we need it, I have it in my calendar and I have a lot.

And, actually, my sister persuaded me.

She, my sister, was already talking and I said, I cannot do this.

This is too sad, you know?

And then I think it was so good because, I mean, it's very sad and it hurts every time.

But then we saw that the people are interested.

Then it makes our pain worthwhile.

The message she was giving these children was, was double.

I mean, it had two messages.

One, that terrible things happen to you and You can, you can take charge of your life.

And she showed there were multiple, messages that these people gave and they were, and they continue to be extraord I mean, those who are still left who were still working in the program are incredible.

And I remember somebody rang our doorbell, I don't remember-- it was a very prominent Jewish woman, and I wish I could remember who it was, on a Sunday morning and she had a Tzedakah box in her hand.

And she was from the Federation.

They're going all around town.

And she gave me the box, and she said, if you'll put $0.10 a day, and it will help, that will be your pledge this year.

And so that was my pledge.

My very first Jewish experience was a Tzedakah box.

I did the Holocaust program for a long time.

I think I got involved with that through someone named Thelma Brenner.

In 1974, like, you know, every week, every year, different organizations would call me and ask me to get involved.

And yeah, I had seen my parents involvement.

So I think it was natural for me My parents were very active with Agudas Achim as soon as they arrived.

And San Antonio was an easy town, and still is, an easy town to break into.

If you want to do something, you can always find a niche.

Then I became an activist, and my kids said my mom, my mother keeps a soap box in the trunk of the car.

First one was the community guidance center, and Helen Jacobson was responsible for asking me to serve on the board.

That was a mental health agency.

Well, in my age group was very involved from the time we got here until probably five years ago or ten years ago.

Some of my friends are still involved in the community.

It was the thing to do.

So I did everything.

If ORT had a gift wrapping booth.

I was at the gift wrap.

If Federation had a luncheon, I was hosting the luncheon, because it really was as, as my peers were, the place to be, the thing to do, is to do anything Jewish.

The Council of Jewish Women, I was there and my friends were there., and the reason we could do it and my grandchildren and children couldn't, is because we could have full time live-in help very inexpensively, and we were free to do whatever we wanted.

In this day and time, the children are working.

They don't have time.

Daycare.

Daycare is expensive.

If an event is at night and babysitting is expensive.

So the whole I think the whole Jewish life has changed since I was a young girl.

We were free to do it.

It was very active.

We were all.

I was always active in the Sisterhood, the Temple Sisterhood.

I was an officer, I was there, we had ORT then.

We worked really hard on ORT raising money The Jewish community then everybody was kind of invo which was nice.

We were in plays.

The temple had plays to raise money and we all were in the play.

And I think part of that is that everybody can be a player.

I mean, you just have an idea and you share it with somebody else and they're happy to hear it.

It can go all the way up to the top.

And there is enthusiasm and passion for ideas.

And I think this is a unique community.

If you want to be involved.

You can be.

There's so much to look forward to.

I keep telling my children to make a mistake.

It's not the worst thing in the world, but if you make a mistake, and you learn from your mistakes then you█re that much ahead of the game.

There's no question in my mind that each of us, women and men, has amazing light and is able to give what our world needs.

The problem, I think, is when somehow or other, we don█t want to acknowledge our own truth and we want to be like someone else.

Don't live an unexamined life.

Don't be passive.

Don't be passive.

Don't just sit there.

Life doesn't just happen.

Get involved and and do things.

And that's, the lesson of the Holocaust.

But it█s also a lesson of life.

My motto to myself is a mitzvah a day.

You can do the little corner where you live, and if you do that, little things, another person.

Then you accomplish What, you know... Look out for your fellow man.

You know that, when there are people hungry out there that you have to reach out and help these people.

To be observant, and acceptance of people that are different.

A diversity.

I think that's very important.

Always have integrity and carry it forward through your political life.

Do your best.

Do it right.

Do it now.

Those those are the three things that are my standard.

I hope.

I hope they never forget they are Jewish.

We have so many underserved people in San Antonio.

If we had sustained things where we quietly can help people more on an ongoing basis, it would be great.

Certainly important then.

Every generation has its challenges and it has to rise to meet them.

Because today's world is very fragmented.

We Jews are considered Asirei Ha-tikvah we're prisoners of hope, and, And hope is a theme throughout Jewish life, like the national anthem of Israel Hatikvah, which means the hope.

So even in the worst of times, we always have to be hopeful.

So when I speak to to children in our community and my message to them is very simple.

It's that, I see you, I hear you, and you matter.

What you have to say and what your hopes and dreams are for our community are the most important thing that we can be listening to because the decisions that we make, the way that we make them, that can impact your future..

They will be living with the consequences the longest.

So we need them to, bear witness.

We need them to speak up, and know that we're always working, to support them and that they matter.

For over 100 years, you have taught us, you have inspired us, and you have shown us how we can do better individually and as a community.

There is much to learn from all you have accomplished.

As a Jewish community and as a city, we thank you.

You know, when we were first married, Bob and I were first married., we lived in a duplex on Olmos drive.

And the woman who lived upstairs of us, who was I guess a caricature of what we saw on TV.

Because if we turned the TV on, she would bang on the ceiling with her broomstick, I guess.

I don't know.

And she was just not someone who was friendly at all.

One day I was going to a luncheon and Shirley Mayor, who doesn't live here anymore, but she picked me up for lunch, and the lady upstairs had just been on one of her tirades.

And I got in the car and I said, I can't stand that woman upstairs.

And after I got through venting, she said, what's her name?

And I said, her name is Rosabelle Melon.

And Shirley started to laugh and she said, I hate to tell you this, but she's my cousin.

And we got to the party and I was mortified.

And the first person I encountered, I said, oh, you won't believe what's happened and this is what happened, and this is how Shirley reacted.

And she said, you better sit down.

She's our mutual cousin.

And that's how I learned that in San Antonio, everybody's related to everybody and you got to be careful what you say about them.