Jewish for Gentiles

Growing up Jewish in the Bronx, New York in the 1950s and the 1960s I thought that the whole world was Jewish. There was, in truth, a lot of "us" and a few of "them". By some strange twist of fate our entire Jewish neighborhood had in its midst a prestigious Catholic all boys school known as All Hollows. One side of the school was attached to our apartment building and we viewed it as "forbidden" territory. We would peer wistfully through the black iron bars that were inserted into a huge archway that stood between us and the most perfectly square gigantic playground we had ever seen.

While we had the brick walls that fronted the myriad of apartment buildings that made up our neighborhood, the city streets and a sporadic handful of parks in which to play – they had this tantalizing playground.

In the evenings, we would often walk around the corner to a small park like opening, which provided easy access for us into the playground. The fathers who taught at the school and lived on the premises always seemed to turn a friendly cheek the other way. We would play squash, slug and stickball as our parents watched us from outside. At evening's end we would disappear back into our world. They, the boys who attended kindergarten through twelfth grades, and who inhabited the hallways and classrooms of the school, would return in the morning to claim what was rightfully theirs. At the time, it seemed to all of us like an excellent working arrangement. There were times when we would pass one another in the street and even look at one another and smile timidly, but throughout all of my childhood years I could never recall an instance when "we" and "they" merged into "us". This would only occur once we grew up, educated ourselves, moved out of our protective and restrictive neighborhood existence and began to follow our dreams; our professions; our spouses; our destinies.

Today we find ourselves living in a world where our neighborhood, school, work and leisure time pursuits have led to the merger of "we" and "they" into "us". Working closely with and coming to know people from various religious and ethnic and racial backgrounds, we often take for granted that our new acquaintances and friends know all about our own customs and traditions. This cannot be further from the truth. It became apparent to me when I recently experienced the sudden death of my twenty-seven year old son. Upon my return to work, while being welcomed back, the one theme that resonated from my non-Jewish colleagues was that upon learning of the death of my son, they had all wanted to do the right thing according to Jewish-law, but were not quite certain what the right thing was! We talked at length about this. Two colleagues in particular, Kathleen Dylewski, and Maureen Senius, encouraged me to write this book by giving me a title for this book as a starting point and by meeting with me in order to highlight and out line which specific areas they felt a need to learn about. This reference book was born out of a tragic circumstance in my life. I hope that you will learn from it and find it especially useful when the need arises to turn unfamiliar situations into comfortable experiences. But most importantly, I hope that you will only have to refer to it for happy occasions.