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28 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1988
Sandee Nabat
Elaine Kovinsly
war. Many of the prominent Jewish leaders
of the Vietnam protests were veterans of
civil rights struggles.
The week of the 1968 Democratic Con-
vention, Bernie and Roz flipped on the
television set to watch the proceedings.
They were sickened by what they saw:
police attacking demonstrators with mass
clubbings, shoving demonstrators through
broken restaurant windows. If the Ebsteins
needed to be radicalized by what the war
was doing to the country, it happened that
night.
But a far more troubling revelation had
come to Bernie four monthS before, when
Martin Luther King was assassinated.
When Bernie heard the news he was
devastated. King stood for everything he
believed in._
Bernie was working at the ITT Research
institute, affiliated with the Illinois In-
stitute of 'Technology and located on 35th
Street on the South Side, right in the heart
of the South Side black belt and across the
street from a large black housing project.
The night of King's assassination on April
4, riots erupted on the West Side. The
South Side was tense as people wondered
whether riots would break out there as
well. For the next several weeks, it was a
tense time for a white man to be driving
into the heart of a black area. This was a
reality Bernie was reluctant to face: that
blacks could be so angry that they might
turn on him, just because he was white.
For almost a year David had practiced
for his bar mitzvah. True to tradition,
David had received a Cross pen-and-pencil
set for his bar mitzvah. One day one of the
black girls in his class, the one he feared
the most, grabbed his pen. David asked for
it back. When she refused, David went to
the teacher and reported her. He got back
the pen. As he walked back to his seat, the
girl leaned over and whispered, "Your ass
is mine after school." For the next week,
David made sure he went home early every
day, so he wouldn't have to face the girl
outside.
By 1969, the Jewish population of Mer-
ionette Manor had fallen by more than
half. Marshall Rosman, Roz's brother, had
moved to the neighborhood the year before
to run the teen program at the local Jewish
Community Center. Despite the departure
of many whites, the center was still a thriv-
ing, cacophonous place.
But now, Rosman would see moving
vans pulling in front of people's homes at
night. They would be moving, but too em-
barrassed to tell anyone. The Jewish Com-
munity Center began holding forums to
discuss the changes in the neighborhood.
They always seemed to break down into
angry shouting matches.
"We need to advertise for more white
families to move in," someone would say.
"That's racist," someone would shout
back.
The trend was clear. The Jewish Corn-
aboi
munity Center was having trouble fielding
teams for city-wide competitions. The
teenagers would sit around and reminisce
about the "good old days" — three or four
years earlier — when there were so many
kids to play with. Rosman made some con-
tact with the surrounding black communi-
ty in the hope that an organization there
might be willing to take over the center.
But in the end, negotiations fell through,
and in 1971 the center moved most of its
activities to a new building in Hyde Park,
in an integrated neighborhood near the
University of Chicago. Rosman moved out
of Merionette Manor to Hyde Park to
become the center's new director.
Meanwhile, the Ebsteins' synagogue was
facing the reality of declining membership.
At its peak it had close to 800 families. By
the late 1960s that was down to 500. Be-
tween 1969 and 1970, however, member-
ship began declining seriously. It was ob-
vious to Bernie and the other temple of-
ficers that it was only a short time before
there would not be enough people to sup-
port the congregation. The synagogue's
leaders decided to merge with Rodfei
Tzedek, a synagogue in Hyde Park. That
way, Bernie and the otkters felt, Jews re-
maining in Merionette Manor would still
be able to attend services and feel they had
a spiritual home.
Still, the Ebsteins would not give in. The
battle to keep Merionette Manor inte-
grated had come to dominate their lives.
Meetings spawned meetings. Every even-
ing, it seemed, they left the house to attend
a political meeting or a community organ-
ization meeting or a Manor Association
meeting. At night, exhausted, they would
lie in bed and fear would nibble at the
edges of their consciences. They would ask
each other: What are we going to do?
The summer of 1969 Roz took Steven,
David, and Ellen to Camp Ramah, a
Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin that
combined Hebrew school and Jewish
studies with the usual camping, swim-
ming, softball-playing, and arts and crafts.
When they came back after eight weeks,
half the homes on their street had been
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