Jewish Contributions to Humanity #1 in a series

ON FAMILY, TRADITIONS AND
COMMUNITY

Q: Share a little about your family
and educational background.
BL: For as long as I can remember, my
family lived in Corpus Christi. My moth-
er was from Russia; my father was from
New York and came to Corpus because
it was a seaport and had a great water-
front. He planned to move on to Dallas,
but when he came to Corpus, he fell in
love with the town, then fell in love with
my mother.
I grew up in a traditional Jewish
home, the youngest of three children.
We were a strong, close-knit family —
one of 100 Jewish families in Corpus
— all very connected to one another. I
have very happy memories of big fam-
ily dinners every Sunday with aunts
and uncles, great-aunts and great-
uncles and cousins, all who lived just
blocks away.
My grandmother was Orthodox
and lived with us, kept a kosher
household, didn’t ride on Shabbat or
turn on the lights. The way she’d get
to services on the High Holidays was
to take the grandchildren the night
before. So, we all slept with her at the
synagogue; we liked to call the ner
tamid our “nightlight.”
Our tradition was very important
to us and has kept us connected. I still
have family in Corpus Christi, and my
brother and sister still live in Houston.
Arthur came from a similarly strong
family background in Detroit; his par-
ents started Adat Shalom Synagogue on
Curtis Avenue.

Q: What brought you to Detroit?
How did you meet Arthur?
BL: As cliché as this sounds, it was love
at first sight.
The backstory: I graduated from the
University of Texas in Austin with a
degree in social work and nursing. After
college, I moved to Houston, where both
my brother and sister were living, and I
started working in foster care and adop-
tion for the state of Texas Department
of Child Welfare.
My best friend — also a social worker
— was getting married and while plan-
ning the wedding, asked if I would go
out with her fiancé’s cousin, a law stu-
dent from Wayne State University com-
ing in from Detroit. I said no! I thought
I was about to get engaged to someone
else. As it turned out, I broke up with
the guy and decided to meet the law stu-
dent a week before my friend’s wedding.
When Arthur came to the door, I said
to myself, “Here’s the man I’m going
to marry.” On the other side of the door,
Arthur had the very same thought: “I’m
going to marry her.” Crazy as this
sounds, when I went to get my sweater,
my roommate took one look at us
together, took me aside and said, “You’re
going to marry him,” and I said, “I know.”
That same night Arthur and I

laughed about it and decided that
this was it: We were going to get mar-
ried … when and where we couldn’t
say … details to follow. That week-
end, I met Arthur’s parents at the
wedding and even they agreed, we
were beshert, meant for each other.
After three dates, including my
friend’s wedding, Arthur sent me a ticket
to Detroit to introduce me to Michigan
snow and ice for the first time. Three
months later, during Passover, we were
engaged. It’s amazing, we never had
a regular dating relationship — and I
think we’re still finding out things about
each other we didn’t know after 45
years.

PATHS THROUGH FEDERATION TO
COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP

Q: How did you first get involved with
Federation?
BL: Arthur was in law school when
we got married, and when I moved
to Detroit, we started our family right
away. As a mom with young children,
I came to the pivotal point of getting
active with Federation along with our
friends in what was then called the
Junior Division. Working at phonathons
and attending events led me naturally
to the Women’s Division — the precur-
sor of the Women’s Department, now
Women’s Philanthropy — and I started
serving on committees. Back in the day,
if you were asked to be on a committee,
it felt like a big deal, like you had just
been given an achievement award.
Q: What were some of your sweetest
memories or proudest achievements
at that time?
BL: There was a program called Spring
Forum I chaired, and I think of that as
an outstanding moment. There was
a series of fundraisers called Choices,
where we brought in Joan Rivers,
Suzanne Somers, Joan Lunden, Henry
Winkler, big names with 800 women in
attendance at an event.
I was in my 30s when I was invited to
the Young Leadership Cabinet, a nation-
al position with the Jewish Federations
of North America, and that’s where I
met a cohort of women — all at the
same stages of life, raising small children
at the same time and working toward
the betterment of our community.

ON THE JEWISH WOMEN’S
FOUNDATION

Q: How do you see your new role at
Federation playing into the mission
of the Jewish Women’s Foundation
(JWF), where you had a leadership
role?
BL: I think there is a niche JWF still fills
in the community. I was president of
the Women’s Department at the time;
Penny was president of Federation and,
with my good friend Margot Halperin,
we created the Foundation because
we thought there was a need to serve
women. We were deliberate not to
impose on the integrity of Federation’s

How Did
Jews Help
Discover The
New World?

ABRAHAM CRESQUES (1325-1387) b. Majorca, Spain.
The Mapmaker. A distinguished Spanish mapmaker and com-
pass expert from the island of Majorca, Cresques was a leading
member of the Majorcan cartographic school, a term attributed to
the mostly Jewish cartographers and navigational engineers who
had a huge impact on exploration until the Spanish Inquisition in the
15th Century. Prince John of Aragon tasked Cresques and his son,
JUDAH CRESQUES, with designing that day’s most accurate maps
to describe and illustrate the world as it existed west of the Strait of
Gibralter. Their work became known as the Catalan Atlas, the most
important Catalan map of the Middle Ages.

ABRAHAM ZACUTO (1452-1515) b. Salamanca, Spain.
A guide for Columbus. The impact of Jews on navigation
was so profound that had it not been for Zacuto, the discover-
ies of Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama (the first Eu-
ropean to reach India by sea) may not have happened. Zacuto,
a Spanish rabbi, astronomer, mathematician, and historian,
created the first truly useful astrolabe for marine navigation. His
astrolabe helped determine a ship’s latitudinal position by using
the position of the sun. And his astronomical tables were used
by Columbus and de Gama, who was thoroughly consulted by
Zacuto before his 1496 voyage to India.
Legend has it that Zacuto’s astronomical tables may have actually saved the lives of
Columbus and his crew when natives in America attacked them. Columbus told the na-
tives that if he was harmed, he would extinguish the sun and the moon, depriving them of
light. Why did the natives believe him? Because Columbus—using Zacuto’s astronomical
table—accurately predicted an eclipse that appeared.
Another Jew who played an integral role in Columbus’s dis-
covery of the New World was LUIS DE TORRES, the interpreter
on Columbus’s first voyage and the first Jew to settle in America.
He converted to Catholicism just before the voyage in order to
avoid an expulsion edict against Spain’s Jews. Sent by Columbus
to Cuba, de Torres was warmly greeted in an Indian village and
it was there that he became the first European to ever encounter
tobacco.

LEVI BEN GERSHOM (1288-1344) b. Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France.
The rabbi astronomer. One of the most brilliant and least
known Jewish philosophers, Rabbi Levi was a pioneering 14th
century French mathematician whose invention, the Jacob’s staff,
could determine the angles between landmarks and celestial ob-
jects, such as the horizon and the moon, an exceedingly useful
tool for explorers for about 200 years. Rabbi Levi, also known
as Gersonides, may have also been the first astronomer to ac-
curately determine stellar distances—the distance between stars,
by discovering that the stars did not rotate around the earth. His
refutation of the Ptolemaic or geocentric model helped lead to
Copernicus’ heliocentric model.

Original Research by Walter L. Field Sponsored by Irwin S. Field Written by Jared Sichel

continued on page 18

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January 11 • 2018

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