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How a Catholic university amassed a treasure trove of Jewish artifacts from the Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) – A Catholic university may be the unlikeliest place for what may be the largest depository dedicated to the Jewish history of the Bronx.
But at Fordham University — the private, Jesuit institution in the Bronx — decades worth of archival documents and artifacts from the local Jewish community have found a home, thanks to its Jewish studies department.
For the last three years, Fordham has been collecting and cataloging items that detail a once-thriving Jewish community in the Bronx: yearbooks full of Jewish last names, Bar Mitzvah invitations, phonebooks full of Jewish-owned businesses — all the simple transactions that define an era in history.
The archive at Fordham is one of the only physical collections of everyday material from Jewish residents of the borough, according to Magda Teter, the chair of the Center for Jewish Studies at the university, who spearheaded the project.
“It’s not only preserving a piece of New York Jewish history, but also a way of life,” Teter told the New York Jewish Week. “Bringing this voice to the dominant Christian identity of Fordham and teaching about Jews [as a minority] within the dominant cultures is very important.”
A song and dance book in the Fordham University collection features the lyrics for “Hatikvah” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and a “Jewish dictionary.” (Julia Gergely)
During the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish life thrived in the Bronx. There were 260 registered synagogues in 1940, and the borough produced some of the biggest Jewish names in show business, fashion, literature and more: designer Ralph Lauren, politician Bella Abzug, novelist E.L. Doctorow, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Miss America Bess Myerson, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Robert Lefkowitz.
At the community’s peak in 1930, the Bronx was approximately 49% Jewish, according to the borough’s official historian, Lloyd Ultan. South of Tremont Avenue, the number reached 80%. Most of the Jewish Bronx was of Eastern European descent; many were first generation Americans whose parents had immigrated and lived on the Lower East Side, but who could now afford to live in less cramped neighborhoods with more trees and wider streets.
Though there is a strong Jewish community in the neighborhood of Riverdale, most of the Jewish community moved out of the Bronx for the suburbs after World War II when mortgages for white would-be homeowners were being subsidized by the government and Blacks and Latinos were steered to Bronx neighborhoods they couldn’t afford or that the city had chosen to neglect. The Jewish population of the Bronx dropped from 650,000 in 1948 to 45,000 in 2003. Many of the synagogues have been converted for other uses, and the physical legacy of the Jewish community there has begun to erode over time, making an archive all the more necessary.
While Teter was always interested in collecting items from the Jewish Bronx, the archive got an unexpected boost from a member of the public. In the spring of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Fordham hosted a virtual event, “Remnants: Photographs of the Jewish Bronx,” which featured evidence of the area’s faded Jewish history gathered by writer and photographer Julian Voloj. (Voloj is the husband of the New York Jewish Week’s managing editor, Lisa Keys.)
An invitation for the bar mitzvah of Freddie Rothberg, which took place on Oct. 6, 1951 at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol. (Julia Gergely)
In the audience was Ellen Meshnick, who had grown up in New York and now lives in Georgia. Inspired, she offered Fordham a trove of material her parents, Frank and Martha Meshnick, had kept throughout their lives in the Bronx. The boxes included donated yearbooks from Morris High School and Walton High School, songbooks, bar mitzvah invitations, a marriage certificate, receipts for a flower delivery — even a document from the hospital from when she was born — mostly from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The donation significantly bolstered what materials Fordham already had on hand, which included less personal but still unique items like matchbooks from kosher restaurants. Now, Teter is growing the archive through other private donations and occasionally by purchasing materials online — personal family archives, books about Bronx Jewish history, songsheets and the like.
The marriage certificate, or ketubah, recognizing the marriage between Frank Meshnick and Martha Farber on Aug. 23, 1942. The certificate was part of an archive donated to Fordham University by the couple’s daughter Ellen. (Julia Gergely)
“They may not be the most beautiful things, but we are interested in what people actually used and lived with,” Teter said.
Teter said that while the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan does collect the types of quotidian and personal items that American Jews kept with them in the last few centuries, they don’t have much that uniquely focuses on Jewish life in the Bronx.
The entire collection is part of a greater effort by Teter, the Jewish studies department and the librarians at Fordham to increase awareness about Judaism and Jewish people. “I will not hide that I think it’s an important way to fight antisemitism — to teach Jewish history and Jewish culture in all its colors and in all its experiences,” she said. “It enriches the students’ appreciation and understanding of Jewish life beyond how Jews are usually portrayed.”
The Jewish studies department at Fordham is relatively new: The college began offering a Jewish studies minor in 2016, and opened the department in 2017. At the time, the highlight of the library’s archives was the Rosenblatt Holocaust collection, which was funded by an alumnus. Since 1992, the library has amassed over 11,000 titles, videos and artifacts on the Holocaust, according to librarian Linda Loschiavo.
When Teter arrived, Loschiavo worked with her to bring in historical Passover haggadahs from all over the world. Fordham now possesses two Italian haggadahs from the 1660s, as well as Jewish artifacts from unexpected places, like playbills from Jewish Bollywood.
Last month the university opened the Henry S. Miller Judaica Research Room on the fourth floor of the campus’ main library — named for Fordham’s first Jewish student, who graduated in 1968. Miller, a leader of a financial restructuring firm, is now a trustee of the college.
Fordham President Tania Tetlow described herself jokingly as “a wannabe Jew” at the room’s unveiling. “I’ve understood how deeply intertwined Judaism and Catholicism are,” she said, “and the connections we have of the deep intellectualism of both faiths, of the desire to study text and the interpretation of text going back for thousands of years, of the love of ritual — and the central place of food and guilt!”
The former Jacob Schiff Center on Valentine Avenue. (Julian Voloj)
“At the moment, we envision that the research room will be a space for exhibitions that would foster the curatorial skills of our students and that will bring Jewish art and artists to campus,” Teter said. “We would now be able to display their art and combine the exhibitions with some items from the Judaica collection.”
The research room is currently displaying Voloj’s Bronx photographs, along with some of the recently acquired local archival materials, curated by sophomore Reyna Stovall, who is interning in Fordham’s Jewish studies department this semester.
“It is really, really rewarding,” said Stovall, who is Jewish. Stovall became involved in the Jewish studies department because of her interest in Holocaust studies, but as she began her internship, she was excited to work on the archives cataloging the once thriving Jewish history of the Bronx.
The yearbook photo of Frank Meshnick (bottom right), who graduated from Morris High School in Morrisania in 1931. (Julia Gergely)
“It’s pretty amazing that they have the collection to begin with,” she added. “It really shows Fordham’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity that they’re willing to take on this massive collection of Judaica, even though that’s not the religion that the school was founded on.”
Teter estimates there are about 300 Jews among the school’s 15,000 undergrads. As a result, the Center for Jewish Studies and the research room offers students from all backgrounds the opportunity to learn more about Judaism — as well as marginalized communities in general, and connect their stories to their own lives.
“Our identity grew to showcase Jewish studies at the intersection and in conversation with other fields and areas of study,” Teter explained.
The Center’s goal, she added, is “to make students, faculty and the public realize that studying Jews is not just for Jews, and that they can learn so much about the areas of their own concern and interest by studying Jews.”
“Something magical happens when you give students the opportunity to work with historical artifacts, and really touch history,” Teter said. “That’s what I think inspired the director of the library to devote that space to that kind of research and to that kind of student experience.”
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She was a dancer who leapt to the top of her field — then the Trump administration fired her
When she walked up to the Kennedy Center on the first day of her internship in 2013, she was Jane Rabinovitz, a recent grad from William & Mary, fresh off a stint as stage manager for an Argentine aerial tango company performing in Miami, and newly determined to forge a career in the arts.
By the time security escorted her out with her personal belongings 12 years later, she was Jane (Rabinovitz) Raleigh, a veteran employee who’d risen in the ranks to become director of dance programming. In August, she and her small team were fired amidst the upheaval fomented by President Donald Trump, who in his second term has installed himself as Kennedy Center chairman and attempted to reshape the institution.
The team was dismissed on a Thursday. By Monday, the center announced its new dance director: former Washington Ballet dancer Stephen Nakagawa. Raleigh was hardly shocked. She’d known since early March about the letter Nakagawa had sent to Richard Grenell, the center’s new president, praising Trump and lamenting “radical leftist ideologies” and the “rise of ‘woke’ culture” in the ballet world.
For six months, Raleigh saw firsthand that “what was happening inside of the Kennedy Center very much mirrored the general chaos that was happening in the government, the DOGE experience that people were having,” she told me over Zoom from her home in D.C. “You’re watching the chess pieces be moved around the board, but it’s people’s lives.”
“There was definitely an overarching feeling of waiting for the shoe to drop,” Raleigh said. “I was committed to staying until I was removed,” she added. But “I did believe from the beginning that everyone would be fired at some point.”
When her time came, the choreography felt familiar. “The cadence of it mirrored what had been happening at the center for many months,” she said. In some cases, entire teams were erased and their programs sunset. In other cases, like hers, “the leader would be fired, and then one, two, or three days later, a new person would just show up.” Often, she said, that person had some connection to Trump or Grenell. (Grenell and the Kennedy Center press office have not responded to multiple requests for comment.)
In the five or seven minutes Raleigh said it took for her and her two assistant managers to be fired, she was informed that this move was the result of “a loss of confidence in my leadership and a loss of confidence in the team’s ability to align with leadership’s vision.”
According to Raleigh, Grenell had communicated that vision in a meeting only the previous week, suggesting they present more “broadly appealing” programming in the vein of So You Think You Can Dance or Paula Abdul. She left the conversation with “a directive to start exploring more commercial offerings,” and immediately began reaching out to agents to pursue it. But before she had a chance to share a proposal, the team was out.
“I didn’t really have a chance to even try,” she said.
From Purim spiels and horas to a career in the arts
Raleigh was born in Washington, D.C., and raised just across the river in Virginia by her Jewish father — that’s the Rabinovitz — and her Catholic mother. Theirs was a mixed household, like the one Raleigh now shares with her husband, who grew up Catholic. But her parents decided to raise their kids Jewish and joined Temple Rodef Shalom, a reform synagogue in Falls Church, Virginia.
A language lover and future Spanish major, Raleigh “ate up” Hebrew school lessons, even “practicing writing secret notes in Hebrew to myself,” she said. She connected to her Jewish community primarily through the arts. She sang in the youth choir and later became a founding member of the teen choir, Kol Machar. And for many years she performed in the Purim spiels her dad wrote and directed as a hobby. One year when she was in college, the woman playing Esther dropped out of the Tarzan-themed Purim spiel at the last minute. “My dad called me,” she recalled, “and he was like, either you can be Esther or I’m gonna have to be Esther.”
Raleigh danced a formative hora at her bat mitzvah and another at her wedding a few years ago. “The hora and Jewish artistic experiences have always been a moment to blend my Jewish life and my secular life,” said Raleigh.
In her secular life, she trained seriously in ballet. She minored in dance at William & Mary, led the student dance company, and interned one summer at the American Dance Festival. Soon after graduation, she decided to pursue a career in the arts instead. She grew up going to the Kennedy Center frequently, so that’s where she went.
Her path there led from intern all the way up to dance director. Raleigh curated ballet seasons and contracted, budgeted, and presented both ballet and contemporary dance with an eye toward exposing audiences to a broader variety of work. She brought in Alonzo King LINES Ballet from San Francisco for their Kennedy Center debut in 2024, for example, introducing audiences familiar with classical, narrative productions to a more contemporary vision of ballet by an important living artist.
Raleigh says she felt lucky to put the center’s ample resources to use to support local and emerging artists and present some of the world’s best companies in a worthy setting. “I frequently would have striking moments of realization sitting in the Opera House, when the curtains would go up on shows that I’d be working on,” she said.
“That sense of wonder,” she added, “does not go away.”
A Trump tailspin
Trump took little interest in the Kennedy Center during his first term. He never attended performances back then, Raleigh said, though his daughter Ivanka Trump frequently came to the ballet. Like other presidents before him, he did appoint new members to the historically bipartisan board; Raleigh said she worked closely over the years with a few who were “real ballet supporters.” Unlike his predecessors, Trump repeatedly skipped the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
“We had lived through a previous term, so there was certainly no expectation that anything would be different,” Raleigh said. Until Trump posted on social media in February, shortly after his second inauguration, announcing his intentions to take over as chairman, oust board members, and shake up programming in order to “make the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. GREAT AGAIN” and usher in “a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
Raleigh found out about Trump’s plan when the public did. At first, she didn’t give it much credence — Trump had said a lot of things during his first administration that he hadn’t acted upon, she said. However, it quickly became clear he would follow through this time, and it “put everybody into a tailspin.”
The purge began immediately. Several board members and longtime chair David Rubenstein were dismissed and replaced by Trump and his appointees. Center president Deborah Rutter was removed after an 11-year tenure, to be succeeded by Grenell.
“Every single day you would come in and be like, what will have happened today?” Raleigh said. A pattern emerged where “basically every payday Friday was mass firings day.” Sometimes it was three people, she remembered, and sometimes 20. Those waves of dismissals were “the most chaotic, traumatic, repeatedly painful thing.”
In response to the uncertainty and upheaval, staff at the Kennedy Center began working to form a union. “The Kennedy Center’s new management has communicated its intention to radically alter the Center’s programming priorities, eliminate staff, and dismantle our mission-essential programs,” the union website states. “We no longer believe our institution trusts us and we no longer trust our institution.” Raleigh said her team participated in the organizing effort — which members hoped would help them fight to protect jobs, working conditions, creative autonomy, and more — and she was vocal in backing it.
When she and her team were notified around 11:40 a.m. on Aug. 21 of a meeting that was to take place in the HR suite five minutes later, they knew what was coming. It took just a few minutes for HR and legal to fire them and hand over their termination paperwork, Raleigh recalled.
On the way back to their desks, Raleigh and her team sent a few texts to share the news and “staff from every corner of the building” showed up, as they had done for others so many times by then. They had an hour to say goodbye, get their things, and get out.
Suddenly jobless, they set up at her apartment, divvied up the list of artists they were presenting in the upcoming season, and called them all to share the unfortunate update. It felt particularly difficult to digest the fact that they couldn’t be behind the scenes to support the performances scheduled to take place that weekend as part of the center’s local dance commissioning project. “The piece was about how Black women can support other Black women and femmes to have rest and resilience in the world,” Raleigh said. Without a team, they worried, “Who’s going to take care of this piece of art?”
Next steps
Raleigh’s fears extend beyond the Kennedy Center. She told me she’s concerned about the fate of dance and the arts in the face of the “dismantling, essentially, of the NEA” by the Trump administration and recent shifts by key arts funders, with reports that longtime supporters like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, and Ford Foundation are now focusing on other priorities. And all this while arts organizations are still recovering from the pandemic’s crushing blow.
“The dance field has not been in a moment of incredible glory and surplus in my entire lifetime,” Raleigh said. So while the current state of affairs is “horrible,” perhaps “this is a moment for us to be thinking about what are new ways and new paths that we can chart going forward.”
Since her departure from the Kennedy Center, she’s been focused not only on the search for a new full-time job, but also on launching the DC Dance Network. It’s an effort to connect artists to resources and one another. “If we want to build a better fabric, a more supportive fabric, of the dance community nationally, why not start at the tiniest, most local version?” said Raleigh, whose fledgling organization announced its first commission in early November.
Living through the turmoil at the Kennedy Center and witnessing the tumult in the government “has totally transformed my approach to community, my approach to what it means to be a good neighbor,” Raleigh said. “This idea is very Jewish, that we’re commanded to do mitzvot so that we have the opportunity to do more in the future, that we’re compelled to repair the world through tikkun olam. All of that has really been informed from my Jewish childhood.”
She’s stayed in touch with her former colleagues and the union and participated in advocacy efforts. She was part of a group that showed up at the Kennedy Center to personally deliver a petition with more than 1,600 signatures collected by Hands Off the Arts demanding the organization reinstate wrongfullly terminated employees, recognize the union, and more. “They’re not getting off the hook,” she said.
Raleigh is waiting to see what kind of dance season, if any, the Kennedy Center announces for 2026-27. It remains to be seen which companies will agree to perform there and whether audiences will attend. In the meantime, Raleigh’s been heartened to see that none of her programming — which runs through June 2026 — seems to have been changed or canceled.
And she’s returned as a spectator, back in the seats where she fell in love with the arts as a kid. In October, she went to see the Stuttgart Ballet perform at the Kennedy Center for the first time in more than 30 years. At the first intermission, the older woman sitting next to her — who said she’d seen the company during their last visit — turned to Raleigh and said, “Isn’t this amazing?!”
“In that moment, we were just audience members having the same transformative experience at the ballet,” Raleigh said. “She clearly didn’t know who I was,” Raleigh added, and “I just got to revel in the ballet with her.”
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Northwestern agrees to pay $75M, void encampment deal to end Trump’s antisemitism investigation
(JTA) — Northwestern University will pay $75 million to the Trump administration to recover nearly $800 million in federal funding frozen by an ongoing antisemitism investigation, in the second-largest agreement of its kind.
The deal, which will last for three years, also means the Chicago-area private university will no longer abide by an earlier agreement it struck with pro-Palestinian protesters that included a commitment to dedicate space on campus for Muslim and North African students.
“The cost of a legal fight was too high and the risks too grave,” the offices of Northwestern’s interim president Henry Bienen posted in a lengthy statement explaining why the school capitulated to Trump’s demands. “If our $790 million in federal research funding remained frozen, the freeze threatened to gut our labs, drive away faculty, and set back entire fields of discovery. Our overarching goal is to protect people and preserve the institution, and to enable life-saving research to continue.”
Northwestern’s deal with the Trump administration was announced late Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.
“The Northwestern agreement is a huge win for current and future Northwestern students, alumni, faculty, and for the future of American higher education,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement praising the agreement. “The deal cements policy changes that will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination, and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions.”
Northwestern is the sixth university to strike an agreement with the Trump administration to end investigations and free up federal funding; its payout is second only to Columbia’s $221 million. Trump’s team has continued to apply pressure on schools like Harvard and UCLA to compel them to sign similar agreements. Critics of the agreements have compared them to shakedowns, questioned their relevance to fighting antisemitism, and claimed they threaten academic freedom.
Northwestern denied that final allegation, with Bienen stating, “Northwestern runs Northwestern.” Yet the terms of the agreement also address other conservative culture-war topics unrelated to antisemitism, including policies on race-based hiring and transgender athletes.
Unique to Northwestern’s deal is its voiding of what the school refers to as the earlier “Deering Meadow agreement” with its protesters, which dated back to 2024. The school’s former president Michael Schill, who is Jewish, had struck the agreement in order to compel the pro-Palestinian encampment to disperse peacefully without involving law enforcement.
Schill received vociferous criticism from some corners, including Jewish staff and prominent alumni such as Jonathan Greenblatt, who felt the agreement was rewarding antisemitic behavior. He was soon forced to testify before Congress, and this fall stepped down from the presidency.
Now, following the agreement with the Trump administration, Northwestern is no longer offering what had been billed as a temporary space for Muslim and North African students that it created as a result of the encampment agreement, and it is no longer committing to building a promised permanent space for those students.
The school’s leading pro-Palestinian student groups did not immediately respond publicly to the deal with the Trump administration. A request for comment to the school’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, which was a member of the encampment coalition that struck the now-invalidated Deering Meadow Agreement, was not immediately returned.
The Chicago Jewish Alliance, the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, and other Jewish activist groups praised the agreement. CAAN, a primarily alumni-driven group that also lists Northwestern Hillel and Chabad as partners, thanked what it called “our federal partners” for “their continued commitment to protecting Jewish students and faculty.”
Under the new agreement, Northwestern has agreed to implement a climate survey of the type that has surfaced concerns about antisemitism on other campuses. A detailed section of the agreement dealing with Jewish students reaffirms a host of other policies that the school says it was already implementing, including specific prohibitions on protest activities and on-campus demonstrations. A Jewish advisory council to the president, established after the dissolution of a similar advisory council effort under Schill, will continue as well.
“Over the past two years, Northwestern has implemented numerous measures to strengthen our campus environment: new training requirements, expanded reporting systems and greater support for Jewish students. All of those measures predated this agreement,” the school’s FAQ page states. “Incidents have significantly declined as a result.”
But even following the leadership change, Northwestern’s campus has experienced tensions around antisemitism. This fall a few dozen incoming students refused to take a new mandatory antisemitism training session, saying the framing was “unscholarly” and “morally harmful.” Those students were blocked from enrollment following a federal judge order.
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How a troublemaking private school dropout became the Johnny Appleseed of tech
David Lerner was a difficult mensch.
Lerner passed away on Nov. 12 at the age of 72 and in the days that followed some who were close to the man recounted his kindnesses but they also used the word “difficult” to describe him.
“He was a difficult man but he was still my guy,” his wife Lorren Erstad told me.
Jan Albert, who met Lerner when they were both teenagers volunteering at the countercultural radio station WBAI, posted on Facebook: “I will always remember David for his immense generosity and the fact that he was an unfailingly fair and ethical (if difficult) human being.”
And Harold Berkowitz, who volunteered with Lerner at the Lifelong Peer Learning Program (LP2), offered perhaps the most eloquent description of how he was difficult. Berkowitz wrote that Lerner was “gruff but kind, curmudgeonly but sweet, blunt but tactful, modest yet very knowing.”
As for the mensch that was David Lerner, Ruth Mackaman, another LP2 volunteer, recalled that during the COVID lockdown Lerner got the organization up and running on Zoom, then shelled out his own money to buy iPads for at least ten members who didn’t have computers. He then proceeded to pedal around Manhattan and Brooklyn on a Citibike and give them away. This prompted one of his friends to joke about Lerner being the Johnny Appleseed of tech.
From time to time, Lerner would ask me about the radio stories I was working on. When I told him I had just finished a piece about a young woman in the South Bronx afflicted with cerebral palsy who had no voluntary movement of her arms and legs, the Johnny Appleseed of tech sent her a new iPad.
He was a baal tzedakah, a master of charity, and lived his life by the most important line in our holy texts: Justice, justice, thou shalt seek. The line comes from the Torah, specifically the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 20. Go look it up.
Most New Yorkers know Lerner from Tekserve, the independent Macintosh computer store he cofounded in Chelsea and helped to run for close to 30 years. Over the course of that time the business grew from occupying half of his partner Dick Demenus’ loft to a cavernous 25,000-square-foot storefront on West 23rd Street.
After news of Lerner’s passing reached them, former Tekserve employees and customers all over these United States shared memories of Lerner the mensch online. Former Tekserve workers thanked Lerner for being such an uncommon boss. And not just because he and Demenus provided health insurance and free lunch to their employees.
One Tekserve alum recalled that when his father passed away, Lerner offered to cover his airfare to North Dakota to spread the man’s ashes. Another who now runs a store in Scranton, PA wrote: “He taught me more about business than anyone.” A former Tekserve customer praised Lerner for dispensing advice on the NY Macintosh Users Group (NYMUG) bulletin board before the web existed. Another remembered that Tekserve printed and gave away the booklets Lerner wrote with answers to Frequently Asked Questions about keeping a Mac running.
Perhaps Lerner’s Tekserve partner Demenus put it best in a poem he wrote and posted on Facebook — “So many of us have counted on you for so much.”
Lerner and Demenus ran Tekserve as a capitalist enterprise — in 2011, the store had $100 million in revenue from sales and services — but the impact of their years at WBAI was apparent in the diversity of Tekserve’s workforce.
In the 1970’s, WBAI was housed in a church where it became home to a bunch of Jewish troublemakers. Bob Fass, who helped start the Yippies, referred to his radio audience as “The Cabal.” Margot Adler, the granddaughter of Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler, went to Mississippi to register African-American voters during the civil rights movement. And the Yeshiva of Flatbush graduate Paul Fischer anchored the station’s legendary Vietnam War summary before moving on to write for Dan Rather at CBS.
In 1969, Lerner dropped out of an elite private school on the Upper West Side and joined the fun at WBAI. He was 16 at the time. He and Demenus worked out of the tiny engineering office at the church which was identified by a sign that read “Department of Redundancy Department.” Back then, the only thing to indicate that Lerner was another troublemaker was the letter of reprimand sent to his parents from the management of the Peter Cooper Village housing complex. Young David was cited for unauthorized use of a water gun on the premises. The framed letter hung on the wall of his Manhattan apartment many years later.
There is no doubt that there are some who feel that it was a subversive act to run a profitable business like Tekserve and treat your workers like they were family.
Derek Davis, who started the pro audio division at Tekserve and is now the head archery coach at Columbia University, described Lerner as “the most honest and fair person” he has ever worked for. The day Davis came into the store for an interview Lerner hired him on the spot.
“It was years later,” Davis wrote on Facebook, “that I figured out that David wasn’t hiring workers. He was hiring family members.
David Lerner sent financial support to an eclectic assortment of non-profits. He contributed to the Hebrew Free Loan Association and, it turns out The Forward. But his wife Lorren said his favorite charity was the Catholic Worker, which may seem an odd entity for a Jew to support.
But Lerner knew that the Catholic Worker fed, sheltered and clothed the poor less than a mile away from his West Village home.
A memorial for David Lerner will take place on Dec. 8 at Poster House, the museum that now occupies Tekserve’s home on West 23rd Street.
When a Jew like David Lerner leaves us, it is customary to say May his memory be a blessing.
The expression comes from the Book of Proverbs 10:7. Go look it up.
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