Journey Through the Minefields: From Vietnam to Washington, An Orthodox Surgeon's Odyssey

Early Life

I was born February 6, 1937 in East Flatbush, New York. Yet to make vividly clear who I am, where I came from, and what I am all about, I need to take you back long before my birth to the world of my parents and even my parents’ parents.

I never had the opportunity to meet my father’s parents, both of whom died long before I was born. I experience an electric sense of personal connection whenever I look at one of the few remaining pictures of my paternal grandfather, Mendel, and see the unmistakable family resemblance between the two of us. He was a Lubavitcher Hasid who came to New York from Yanovitz in White Russia in the early years of the century and ended up as a Rebbe (teacher) in East Flatbush, where he died of cancer at the age of sixty four in 1933. His wife, my grandmother, Sara, also died prematurely of cancer four years earlier at the age of fifty four.

My father, Morris Ganchrow, was a strong man, even a tough man, but also a profoundly good and decent one. He was almost universally beloved by everyone who had dealings with him. I loved him deeply until the day he died at the much too young age of fifty seven in 1962.

My father was not a politically correct parent by modern-day standards. He was a sharp disciplinarian with a strong temper who believed in hitting his children with a strap when they did something wrong. Yet he was, above all else, a kind man, a devoted family man who loved his wife and children with all his heart and soul and was totally dedicated to providing for us. And when it came to corporal punishment, the threat was usually enough to make unnecessary the actual act.

Morris Ganchrow was born July 5, 1905, in Brooklyn, but he spoke Yiddish perfectly. He was one of four surviving children, himself and three sisters, but he was the only child who stayed truly Orthodox; that is, lived an Orthodox lifestyle throughout his adult life. Perhaps that is because my father received a rock-solid foundation whereas his sisters did not; he went through the yeshiva system from his early childhood until the end of high school; attending Yeshiva Chaim Berlin and then the new Yeshiva University High School (Talmudic Academy) before getting a private smicha (rabbinic ordination).

Economic survival necessitated that my father go to work right after graduating. I do not recall him ever making mention of being sorry or disappointed that he was unable to attend college, but he did give the impression he was distinctly aware that he never had higher education and was therefore sharply limited in what he might otherwise have accomplished.

If Morris Ganchrow maintained strong links to the faith and traditions of his parents, he was unmistakably a native-born American. My father’s spiritual home was the Young Israel movement. Young Israel, which opened its first congregation in a storefront shtiebel (synagogue) on the Lower East Side and soon expanded to Williamsburg and Brownsville in Brooklyn, where Morris was a member, was composed of young American-born and English-speaking Orthodox Jews who were very different from their Yiddish-speaking fathers and grandfathers who had arrived a decade or two earlier from Eastern and Central Europe. The Young Israel movement encouraged the singing of songs during services, which explained why so many young men like my father became chazanim (cantors). The young people conducted their own services and had parties where young men and women could meet in an Orthodox context. I believe it is not too much to say that in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, it was Young Israel that saved Orthodoxy in America. The movement certainly created a network that has lasted a lifetime. Even today, I often meet old men at Orthodox events who will approach me and say, I remember your father so well. He was such a wonderful guy.

Morris Ganchrow was a product of his own time and place, specifically of the America of the 1930’s, the Depression era. My father had seen his own parents modest savings go up in smoke when the stock market crashed, so he never tried to save money after that. He never bought a stock or bond in his life and he didn’t trust banks. Indeed, when he died he left my mother nothing more than eight hundred dollars in the vault and considerable debt.

For if my father did not save money, he did do what he had to in order to provide his family—my mother, myself, and my two younger brothers—with the nicer things in life. He bought a house with a considerable mortgage that he struggled to come up with every month, and always rented the family a summer bungalow in the Catskills (He never had the courage to put the money down to buy a summer house despite all the dollars he continued to pour into rentals). When I was growing up we had a car, unlike most of the struggling families around us. But clearly the experience of the Depression had caused my father to conclude that putting money aside was a bad idea; who knew if it would be there tomorrow?

My father scrambled to find a variety of ways to pull together a living. Possessed of a marvelous singing voice, even though he had no formal musical training and could barely read a note, he made a living as an itinerant or free-lance cantor, serving in a wide variety of congregations around Brooklyn and also traveled widely around the United States and Canada. Always a public personality in the Jewish community and beyond, he served as a host for a time of a Yiddish-language program on WEVD, a Jewish-oriented radio station with a large audience. He was also a highly talented public speaker. In his determination to provide for his family, my father considered no job, however humble, to be beneath himself. Even though he was a renowned cantor and radio personality, he also taught the haftorah (readings from the prophets) to bar mitzvah kids. From the time I was conscious, I used to sit in my playpen and listen and by the time I was three years old, I could sing the whole haftorah. Indeed, as a toddler I would sing the haftorah while my mother wheeled me in my carriage down Eastern Parkway. Sometimes, women would eye me disapprovingly and say to my mother, "This is an ayin hara (evil eye), a devil. Its unnatural for such a small child to be able to do that."

Although music was my father’s first love, he had to do other jobs to make ends meet for his growing family. As a young man, he delivered kosher chickens to people’s homes. Much later, during the last twenty years of his life he became a professional fund-raiser, primarily for Yeshiva University. He was also an honorary chaplain to the Shomrim Society and the Ner Tamid Society (respectively the Jewish fraternal orders of the New York City Police and Fire Departments), as well as to the Sea Scouts and the Police Athletic League.

In all of the many professional and honorary roles that he played, my father was absolutely incorruptible. For him nothing could be worse than taking a bribe or even cutting corners in a quasi-legal way and his proximity to politics caused him to stress the evils of corruption and bribery by public officials. He was adamant that his own children should absorb that lesson. He explained to us sternly that not only are all forms of bribery against the Torah, but that when a person is in public service, he has an obligation to uphold the public trust by being scrupulously honest with public money. My father said that a person is honor bound to uphold an even higher ethical standard with public money than he would with his own finances.

That training made a lifelong impression on me. Although I have served in top leadership positions in several Jewish organizations, I have never wanted to touch money, to serve, for example, as an organizational treasurer. When I started HUVPAC in 1982, we didn’t have a computer. In the beginning I would sit for hours in our kitchen with my wife Sheila and my kids making mailing labels by hand. Several times when I spoke in synagogues on behalf of HUVPAC in the early days someone would approach me and ask, How do you keep your records? Are they computerized? I would respond in the negative and the person would offer to help us computerize our records until I asked, By the way, can you do it on a volunteer basis? Invariably, those eager beavers would look at me like I was crazy and walk awkwardly away.

Finally, realizing that the labeling and record keeping was becoming an impossible job as HUVPAC grew rapidly, I broke down and spent $3000-$4000 of my own money on an IBM computer. For many years, my total computer expertise was generating labels. I no more thought of billing HUVPAC for that considerable expense than I did for the scores of telephone calls I made every month from my own home and business phones to senators and congressmen in Washington and around the country. That sense of personal rectitude came to me thanks to the training I received from my father.

Morris was first and foremost a people person. People loved him and he responded in kind. He loved politics and had friends in high places. He had close ties with the Brooklyn Democratic machine and many good friends in the labor unions. My father was very close also to Abe Stark, the Borough President of Brooklyn. I remember vividly that when my parents celebrated their twenty fifth wedding anniversary, Mayor Paul O’Dwyer presented them with a beautiful tea set as a gift.

My father had many non-Jewish friends, especially Italian-Americans. He had a particularly close friend named Johnny Votta, who was a World War II veteran and American Legion leader. Johnny and his large family and friends apparently didn’t trust their priest very much, because they all used to come to my father for advice. When my father’s sister desperately needed blood for an operation, ten members at the American Legion showed up at the hospital to donate blood. When Israel needed guns in 1948 to stop an invasion by Arab armies, the same group from the American Legion collected firearms to send to the new Jewish state. On one memorable night, we learned that one of my father’s Italian-American friends had been stopped by the police on Ocean Parkway for a traffic violation and promptly been arrested when they found the car contained a cache of firearms. The man had been on the way to deliver the arms to a ship that was about to sail for Israel.

My father’s friendships with people like Johnny Votta taught me an invaluable lesson about how to conduct my own life. My father never made a distinction between Jews and non-Jews. He taught me that all people—Jewish and non-Jewish—are equal human beings and that you should treat all people, as you would want them to treat you. Certainly, I never heard my father preach hatred against anyone. At the same time, he was emphatic to my brothers and I that it is important to live as a strictly observant Orthodox Jew. He taught us that people of all backgrounds will respect you if you uphold your own traditions honestly and proudly, but that they will despise you if you try to hide who you are.

The neighborhood where my father and mother raised my two younger brothers and I, East Flatbush and Crown Heights, was very different then than it is today. It was a friendly middle class neighborhood that was overwhelmingly white—primarily Jewish, but with a large Italian population. Not only was the Lubavitch community, that has come to loom so large in recent decades, very small at that time, there were relatively few Orthodox Jews in general in relation to the larger Jewish population, which was mainly non-affiliated with substantial Conservative and Reform communities. Later of course, as the American black and Caribbean population of the area grew apace, the non-Orthodox Jews and Italians mainly fled to the suburbs. Many mainstream Orthodox Jews also left for the Five Towns and other suburban areas or relocated to Boro Park and other heavily Jewish parts of Brooklyn. Only the Lubavitch community chose to stay, since they believed that the highest blessing was to live close to their Rebbe, who had let it be known that he would never leave Crown Heights.

When I was growing up, the neighborhood was warm, heimisch and safe. One rarely heard about people getting robbed and my childhood was unscarred by incidents of anti-Semitism. My family never had much money, but neither did most of the families growing up around us. Unlike so many other diaspora Jews who have grown up with a sense of marginality, I felt secure and at home, loved and provided for by my parents and truly at home, in a vibrant community that was overwhelmingly Jewish. Still, I attribute my sense of self-confidence; the belief that I could accomplish whatever I set my mind to, primarily to the inspiring example of my father. He combined a mixture of high expectations, encouragement, and love toward me and my brothers.

My father was best known in the community as a cantor. Synagogues advertised for the cantors in the Yiddish newspapers, and my father would grandly arrive with a double choir in tow. People literally mobbed the shuls to hear them, and my father and his company traveled to synagogues throughout the U.S. and Canada to perform.

My father taught us to appreciate cantorial music and sometimes we would walk two or three miles on a shabbos to hear a particular cantor perform. Often, we would take the guest cantor home with us for lunch, walking the same long shlep (trek) home in reverse. Song was always in our house. My brothers Saul and Jacob and I learned the repetoires of some of the great choirs of those days like the Oscar Julius Choir, the Henry Spector Choir or the Abe Nadell Choir. I loved to sing chazunis (the cantorial chant), but the only problem was that I had no voice. I had good nusuch (tune or melody), but no voice. When I was in the shower or driving alone in the car my voice was terrific.

Perhaps because he felt he himself had not received sufficient education, my father was very strict with my own schooling. Every few weeks, he would show up unannounced at my school to ask my teachers how I was doing. God forbid the consequences for me if I got a bad mark on my report card. On the few occasions it did happen, my father insisted that I bring a note home from my teacher every day explaining that I was making sufficient progress. Thank God, I mainly did quite well academically.

My father loved baseball and imbued me with an almost fanatical devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers. He took me to Dodgers games all the time. Often, he would pick me up from school around 4pm and we would drive down to Ebbetts Field together to catch the last few innings of a day game. Since my father knew all the cops in the area, we were able to park right next to the ballpark and walk right in. I also got a fire line card through my father’s proteksia (connections) that allowed the bearer to pass through police lines to get close to a fire. On a couple of occasions, I was driving around on a date with Sheila before we were married and hearing the wailing of a fire engine siren would shout impulsively, C’mon we are going to a fire. No doubt she thought I was completely crazy.

Morris Ganchrow was a wonderful man, but when I did wrong, I knew I might be in line for punishment. When I was little, I used to try to call my grandfather on the phone to tell him to protect me from my father and occasionally my mother so I wouldn’t get punished—except that I didn’t know how to dial the phone and would keep getting the wrong number. Finally, the phone company called my mother and asked who was making all those wrong number calls. After that, my mother taught me how to dial correctly.

What I learned from my father was controlled anger. If you are angry all the time, people will avoid you, but if you never get angry, people will take advantage of you. Indeed, ninety nine percent of the time, my father was a soft and giving person, especially in his relationships with his children. I have sweet memories of many times when he came home from work with toys for me. Other times he would surprise and thrill me by saying out of the blue, Hey, Mendy, lets go to a movie or I have two tickets for the Dodgers game. Do you want to come? Of course, I did!

I myself feel today that spanking, or the threat of it, can be an effective disciplinary tool, provided it is not overdone. Often, it will suffice for a parent to show the errant child a scowl or point to his belt buckle. The truth is that kids need discipline, just as I did in my childhood, if they are to learn to function effectively in the world. I was a high-spirited kid and was frequently full of mischief. I respected and loved my father and knew if he struck me, it was because I did something wrong. I also knew that if I did something good, I would be rewarded. Believe me, I was rewarded many more times than I was disciplined.

My mother, like her late husband, is a person of great intellect and goodness. Blessedly, she is still with us and in 2001 celebrated her 90th birthday. She did not seek to make her mark in the world, but like other women of her generation did everything she could to give her children the foundation of love and understanding we needed to build successful lives. She remains totally aware of current events and seems to have forgotten no episode or personality from her rich life. She was always a voracious reader of books and newspapers; but, sadly, is no longer able to read due to partial blindness caused by macular degeneration. Nevertheless, she is still able to enjoy watching movies and shows, and listening to talking books.

My mother’s father, Jacob Wallach, came to America from Poland in 1904 when he was already married with a small child, but waited six years until he had made enough money to bring over his wife and child to Brownsville, Brooklyn. One year later, July 16, 1911, my mother was born. My grandfather had been a yeshiva student in Poland, and during the years he lived alone in New York, despite the economic pressure, he never violated the laws of kashruth or shabbat. I knew him only slightly and remember him as a thin person who always rolled his own cigarettes. Of course I loved him very much and complained to him if I felt my parents were picking on me.

After his family joined him in Brownsville, Jacob Wallach tried a number of ways to make a living, but was never very successful. For a time, he worked as a presser in a factory, and then opened a business that was soon destroyed by a fire. Later, he opened a fruit stand in East New York that went bankrupt, and finally operated a series of fruit pushcarts—until he broke his leg and became disabled.

My maternal grandmother, Anna Wallach, was extremely religious. She covered her hair and was meticulous in keeping the Shabbat and the laws of mikveh. As I grew up, I often went to her house to pick her up to walk together to shul on the Shabbat. As an adolescent, my mother helped her father at the fruit stand, until she got a job as a secretary at a local bank shortly after graduating from high school. It was while working at the bank that she met my father. Since my own mother grew up with such an observant mother and had a number of other religious aunts and uncles, she readily acceded to my father’s desire that his wife-to-be should keep a rigorously Orthodox home. They were married July 7, 1935.

She continued to work even after they were married, but quit when the children were born. Later on, she went back to work as a statistical typist. She worked for many years but never received health insurance or the benefit of a pension.

Like her husband, my mother was American-born, but absorbed much of the culture and flavor of Jewish Eastern Europe in her mother’s milk. She was a very good cook in an old world sort of way, but her concept of vegetables were kishke and kugel (stuffed derma and potato or noodle pudding). Each Friday morning, we would awake to the sound of my mother chopping pike, white fish and carp in a wooden bowl to prepare gefilte fish. If we didn’t finish all the food on our plate, she would remind us of all the children in Europe who were starving.

My mother was the peacemaker in the family. Whenever my father was fighting with one of his sisters, my mother would be the one to patch things up. To this day, even though she is in her 90’s, if I don’t call my brother, Jacob, for two or three days, she will call me and say none too subtly, I spoke to Jacob today and he says he hasn’t heard from you for a while.

I have two brothers, Saul who is three years younger than myself, and Jacob, who is six years younger. Saul and I shared a bedroom when we were little. We grew up being close, going to baseball games, and doing many other things together. Because of the substantial age difference between my younger brother Jacob and myself, I related to him more as a baby brother when growing up, but we began to feel like equals after his reaching adulthood. Both of my brothers went on to teaching careers in the New York City public school system, and both worked every summer as chefs in Zionist camps in the Catskills. Just as I have, they and their children and grandchildren have remained rooted in the traditions and lifestyles our parents implanted in us so many years ago.

As for my mother; while she may have deferred to my father in many decisions, if she felt strongly about something, she was adamant about putting her foot down. For example, when it came time for me to go to elementary school, my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and attend Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, which was located near our home. However, when he and my mother entered the building to register me for class, my sharp-nosed mother smelled urine in the hall. She immediately turned to my father and said emphatically, That’s it. Mendy is not going here. I will never send a child of mine to such a school. Nothing my father could say would change her mind, and he agreed that I would instead be enrolled at the Crown Heights Yeshiva, a more modern Zionistic-style school where Judaic studies were taught in Hebrew instead of Yiddish. Being transferred to the Crown Heights Yeshiva had fateful consequences for me. If I had gone to Chaim Berlin, I would surely never have become a physician, because higher secular education was not a prime goal of that devoutly religious, old world style institution.

Actually, the truth is that my father never wanted me to become a doctor. He badly wanted me to be a rabbi or failing that, a lawyer. But from a very early age, I knew I wanted to be a doctor, in particular a surgeon who saved peoples’ lives. When I was a young boy, my father was often sick and I would always marvel at the ability of the doctors who would frequently come to our house to treat him. Then, when I was nine or ten, my father became desperately ill with pneumonia. We were unable to visit him in the hospital and I was fearful that he would die. I prayed hard and recited psalms. I can’t recall whether or not I made a formal pledge, but I recall promising God that if he allowed my father to live, I would become a better Jew and a better person. Miraculously, he recovered, and I resolved to serve God to the best of my ability.

Ironically, as I grew older I came to understand that the best way for me to accomplish that was not to make my life’s work as a rabbi. I saw too many Orthodox rabbis making compromises in upholding halacha (Jewish law), for the sake of securing and maintaining lucrative rabbinical positions. For example, I was appalled to observe Orthodox rabbis accepting positions in synagogues without separate sections for men and women or where the rabbi spoke with a microphone from the bimah (center podium).

Once when I was a college student at Yeshiva University, I was sent to an Orthodox shul in Rochester, N.Y. to serve as a guest rabbi during the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The shul had a balcony for women, but in the middle of the afternoon service, two women came downstairs to sit in the back. I asked someone to go over to them to ask them to sit in the women’s section, but the reply came back to me that they did not want to leave where they were sitting. Their response was a flagrant violation of Orthodox law, which requires that the sexes should be separated by a divider, a facet of Jewish religious observance that originated in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

Feeling that I had no choice, I stopped the service. I announced that I did not want to embarrass anyone but that the service could not go on unless the two women in the back vacated their seats and went to the women’s section. At that point, they got up and went upstairs, but later I was informed that I would not be rehired the following year because I was too rigid.

This tendency by a growing number of rabbis to cut halachic corners so as not to offend powerful congregants was part of a wider phenomenon that began after World War II and has continued until this day known as checkbook Judaism. If you had the money, you could make yourself into a Jewish leader and gain, in effect, the ability to set Jewish law. Throughout American Jewry, there was the same distasteful picture; the ascendancy of Jewishly illiterate so-called communal leaders who attained their exalted positions because of the fortunes they had made, or even because of what I have called lucky sperm, being the son or daughter of one of those self-made tycoons.

This virus was even affecting the Orthodox community, which until now had been the most devoted to upholding Torah-true Judaism. Jewish institutions have had guests of honor at their dinners and events that are intermarried. Sadly, intermarriage has not proven an insurmountable barrier to becoming president of a major Jewish organization if the person in question has a large enough checkbook and is willing to contribute lavishly. I find this tendency to be completely unacceptable.

Actually, I am not so rigid by nature. I am a pragmatic person in many aspects of life, and have often, for example, been willing to make compromises on political issues. But I will not compromise on the basic tenets of my Orthodox Jewish religious faith. I therefore decided early on that I would be more valuable as a strong Jewish lay leader than as a rabbi.

In truth, I had another, perhaps less noble reason, for deciding against the rabbinate. I certainly had the intellect to be a rabbi, but I decided early on that I doubted I had the zitzfleisch, the perseverance, to sit and learn Judaism for so many years with the kind of intensity I would need to become a first-rate rabbinic leader. I have never wanted to do anything halfway, so unless I believed that I could become top of the line at anything I set my mind to do, I chose not to start.

There was another field that attracted me greatly—politics. Fascinated by my father’s closeness to the world of politics in Brooklyn, I myself started mixing it up as an aspiring politician when I was still a school kid. My first campaign was for president of the General Organization (Student Council) of Crown Heights Yeshiva, a position for which I ran in seventh or eighth grade. My uncle, Dave Greenberg, who had a printing shop, printed up cards and posters for me with the legend Vote for Mendy Ganchrow. I lost that race, but got hooked on the process. I went on to become president of the student body of the Brooklyn Talmudic Academy (Yeshiva University High School), not once but two times.

What was it about politics that so appealed to me? Since my childhood, I have loved the game—the art form—of politics. I love the art of the deal. It is like watching Marlon Brando in The Godfather—that little whisper in the ear and the handshake—the expressions of loyalty. Politics is filled with fascinating ritual and is replete with the best and the worst of human relations. I was fascinated by the power of Carmine De Sapio, who was the undisputed leader of Tammany Hall during my youth and who ended up going to jail.

From an early age, I read the New York Times and followed national politics. During the summer of 1948, when I was eleven, I placed the radio under my pillow late at night so that I was able to listen to the Republican and Democratic Conventions. The latter event was especially exciting when the delegations from the southern states took part in a dramatic walkout over civil rights. I would also stay up way past my bedtime, listening to speeches by Henry Wallace, who ran a quixotic but memorable campaign on the Progressive ticket. It was an incredible political year; right down to President Harry Truman’s stunning come-from-behind victory over the heavily favored Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey.

In 1951, I got to see Harry Truman in person, when he came to speak at the Eastern Parkway Arena in Brooklyn. Needless to say, it was the first time I had ever seen a President of the United States and I was giddy with excitement. My father knew the Secret Service agents in charge of security, and I was allowed into the arena before it opened and got a seat in the second or third row. The President was in the middle of his speech when the mother of a Korean War soldier suddenly rushed toward the podium; screaming something like You killed my son! Six Secret Service agents instantly materialized, wrestled the woman to the ground and then carried her off as though she was a piece of flypaper. Amidst the pandemonium, someone in the audience shouted, ‘Give ‘em hell, Harry! Gesticulating dramatically with his arms, the president responded in his distinctive Missouri accent; I’m gonna, if you give me a chance." The crowd applauded wildly in appreciation.

So given my love of politics, one might have expected that, having decided against the rabbinate, I would have applied myself in getting into a good law school, in preparation for a political career. But by the time I was in high school, I had already decided that I didn’t want to become a professional politician. I realized that, all too often, politics has a very high level of dishonesty and corruption. I decided that it would be better to dabble in politics in order to advance causes in which I believed, while making my living from a medical practice, rather than becoming a professional politician. In this too, I would be like my father, who knew the key players of the political world, but was not directly part of it.

I was an excellent student at Crown Heights Yeshiva—I had to be, what with my father checking up on me all the time. But I also knew how to have a good time. Like my father, my first love was the Brooklyn Dodgers. For most of my childhood, I went to about twenty five or thirty Dodger games a year, and the ones I was unable to attend I listened to on the radio. Whether sitting in a bleacher seat at Ebbetts Field or listening to the game on a radio at home, I would score every pitch, including foul balls. My knowledge of the minutia of the game was awe-inspiring. How many times did I correct Red Barber on the radio? He’d be calling the balls and strikes when the other team was up and he’d say something like, This batter has a .242 record. I would immediately shout out, You jerk, he is batting .239. A minute later Barber would say, Sorry, folks, I was mistaken. His actual batting average is .239. I impressed a lot of people that way. In fact, I can still recite by heart the batting averages of all of the members of the 1950 Dodgers.

How many people today remember that there was also a Brooklyn Dodgers football team that played in the NFL for a few years? I even went to see one of their games at Ebbetts Field. Like I said, I was the truest of Brooklyn sports fans and literally bled Dodger blue.

I ended my sports mania at the age of twenty, when the Dodgers suddenly deserted Brooklyn for Los Angeles after the 1957 season. I had been such a rabidly loyal fan, living and dying with the team and I just couldn’t take the betrayal by Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. Like so many other Brooklynites, I realized in a flash that I had been snookered. O’Malley, had been doing it all along as a business—and it was definitely not my business! Then I thought, Hey, this guy is making millions and I’m making nothing. Why should I give him love, affection and loyalty?’

I did follow the Dodgers for a few years after they moved to Los Angeles. When I was in medical school in Chicago, I went to see them play the Cubs at Wrigley Field a couple of times. Once, I was watching the Dodgers in batting practice and shouting at my favorite player, Carl Furillo, like we did back in Brooklyn. Hey Carl, how ya doing baby? Good eye, Carl, good eye and the next thing I know this hillybilly from Wisconsin goes over to the ushers and asks them to have me evicted for making too much noise. Obviously, he had never been to Ebbets Field. So the ushers come over and tell me to tone it down and I say, Whaddaya mean? That’s what you do at a ballgame. Anyway, the ushers eventually left me alone and gave the guys who complained some other seats.

Later on, they built an apartment house on the site of Ebbetts Field, called the Ebbetts Field Apartments. When I was a resident rotating through pathology at Brookdale Hospital, I got a job making house calls at night. I got a call to the Ebbetts Field Apartments. I went there and saw the patient, but when I left I started to cry. I said to myself, That’s it. I will never take another call at Ebbetts Field. It just hurt too much.

Today, my children and grandchildren don’t understand my seeming lack of interest in sports. They ask; "How can you live in this world and not be interested in sports? They follow various sports like hockey and basketball in which I have no interest whatsoever. What they don’t understand is that I actually loved sports, was a more hard-core fan than any of them will ever be, but that when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I felt that sports had abused me. I also find it obscene nowadays to see ball players making twenty million dollars a year while teachers and civil servants are struggling. For me, that is a sign that there is something seriously askew with the values of our society.

When I was in college I used to spend the summers working as a busboy or waiter at various hotels in the Catskills, and often played on the hotel softball teams. On one memorable game day morning during one of those lazy, long-ago Catskills summers, a player from the other team called me to confirm we would be playing them that afternoon and then said, Oh, by the way, Johnny Podres will be pitching for us. Do you have any problem with that? I laughed, assuming he was pulling my leg. The idea of Johnny Podres, the Dodgers pitching ace, showing up to pitch for a Borscht Belt team composed mainly of overweight Jewish kids seemed about as likely as if he were to say that President Eisenhower would be playing center field.

Anyway, when we arrived at the ball field, sure enough, there was Johnny Podres with a big convertible car and a beautiful girl on his arm, signing autographs. When I had recovered from my shock, I went up to him and said, Johnny, we are honored to have you here, but I should warn you that we play seriously, sliding into bases and things. We don’t want you to get hurt. Johnny gave me a none-too-friendly look and sort of growled, OK, kid, just play the game.

He pitched—not like he pitched in the majors of course—but underhand, according to softball rules. He had a terrible team behind him so our team won the game and since I was the pitcher opposing him, I have been able to claim all of these years that I beat Johnny Podres. It was remarkable to watch Johnny run the bases with all the beauty and form of a top-notch professional athlete. When I picked up the New York Post the next day, there was a column on the sports page mentioning that Podres had been sent home for a few days in the middle of a Dodgers’ road trip so that he could rest his ailing arm. And there he was making a few bucks pitching softball in the Catskills —which was definitely a no no for major league pitchers supposedly resting their arms. I doubt the Dodgers had any idea that Johnny was moonlighting during his down time.

As much as I adored baseball as a kid, I actually offered to give up going to Dodger games in 1948, when I was eleven, so that my parents could save on all those sixty-cent bleacher tickets and buy a television for us. Television had suddenly become the craze of America, with Howdy Doody and Milton Berle. I pleaded with my parents for a TV set, but they kept insisting it was too expensive. One day my father came home from work and found me standing in front of our house with a picket sign shouting that my parents were not fair because they were denying me a television. When that didn’t work, I swallowed my pride and offered to give up baseball games and trips to the movies as well.

One of my friends in those days and a classmate at Crown Heights Yeshiva was Erich Segal, later to go on to fame as the author of Love Story. On Sundays, the gang would go to his house, a big sprawling place that looked like a castle and hang out with our club, which we called The Sages.

Nineteen-fifty was a big year for me. I was both bar mitzvah’d and graduated from Crown Heights Yeshiva. My father wrote my bar mitzvah speech for me in Yiddish which I did not understand, but which I memorized to recite in the synagogue. I recited it by heart and somehow managed to repeat a page without anyone noticing. It must have been a real spellbinder. Overall, though, it was a gala event at which my father served as cantor with a 24-piece-choir in the Park Place Synagogue in Brooklyn. Somehow over two thousand people packed into the shul for the event, which had been advertised in the Jewish newspapers.

After the services, my parents had a small reception for family and friends with herring, kugel and kichel, followed by a formal affair the following evening at a catering hall.

Under my picture in my yearbook from my graduating year at Crown Heights Yeshiva is the notation that I wanted to be a physician as well as a surgeon. Then it was on to the Brooklyn Talmudic Academy (BTA), which was another name for the boys’ school at Yeshiva University High School. I vividly remember the school, which had two small buildings at the corner of Bedford and President Streets, just three blocks from Ebbetts Field. We had no gym; but we played all kinds of sports outside in an adjoining used car lot and in the street.

I thrived at BTA both academically and socially. I was inspired by two rabbi-teachers, Rabbi Harold Kanotopsky and Rabbi Peretz Yogel, of blessed memory. Rabbi Kanotopsky, whom I considered to be my Rebbe, was an American-born mathematics teacher who was also rabbi of the Young Israel of Eastern Parkway. He was a great Torah scholar, whose method of imparting both the intricacies and the majestic sweep of Torah Judaism was so lucid and eloquent that to this day when I am preparing a major talk, I refer to his books for incisive lessons in the teachings of our tradition. He was also a very approachable all-American kind of guy who used to play baseball with us. Often when I was pitching, he would be right behind me playing second base and I would shout, C’mon Rabbi, make that play. Here was a man with immense moral authority but who never held himself aloof. He was very informal and treated all his students with respect and kindness.

Rabbi Kanotopsky used to say that it is proper to stand up whenever the Torah is being read in the synagogue as a show of respect to the Torah, which was given to us by God. Still, he cautioned one should not stand if the local rabbi himself did not stand up, as one should never do anything to embarrass the rabbi. This is a lesson that I took very much to heart and passed along to my own children.

Rabbi Yogel was a very different kind of rebbe; a refugee from Europe who fled Hitler together with the rest of his yeshiva by way of Japan and Shanghai, where he spent the war years. He was a deeply devout Jew who dressed in a black frock, but was extremely knowledgeable on a wide range of secular subjects, from Shakespeare to medicine. One morning in class Rabbi Yogel noticed that I seemed distracted and said to me, Nu, Mendy, you don’t seem like you are paying attention to the Talmud. I responded that I was nervous because my brother was in the hospital that morning having an operation to have his appendix removed. So he sat me down and drew me a detailed diagram of the appendix and adjacent organs and explained the whole operation to me in detail, emphasizing that having one’s appendix out was gornischt (nothing) and there was absolutely no reason for me to worry. By the time he was finished, my mind was totally at ease.

Rabbi Yogel was a warm and compassionate person who cared deeply for his students and had a wonderful philosophy that emphasized that there is ample time for many aspects of life. Unlike some teachers who used to bemoan summer vacation as wasted time when students ought to continue studying, Rabbi Yogel would urge us to use our summers in camp to relax and enjoy ourselves so that we would come back to school in September well rested and ready to study hard.

As I mentioned, I spent a lot of time and energy in high school perfecting my political skills in student government. I figured it wouldn’t hurt my re-election bid if I used some of my father’s political contacts to dazzle my fellow students, so at my behest, my father invited his friend, New York State Supreme Court Justice Hymie Barshay to come to speak to the student body on the subject of Justice. Barshay was himself running for office at that moment, so the speech he delivered before our student body came across as an out and out campaign speech about why he should be re-elected. It was sort of embarrassing, so when Barshay paused in the middle of his speech, my father leaned forward and whispered in his ear; Judge, you are supposed to be speaking about justice. Barshay smiled and addressed the student body, saying, I have just been informed by Rabbi Ganchrow that I am supposed to speak about justice. Well, it would certainly be justice if I was re-elected.

Besides running for political office, my favorite extra-curricular activity was the school debating team. The manager of our team was an individual one class behind me named Avi Dershowitz, who later became Professor Alan Dershowitz, the famous Harvard Law School professor, author and television commentator. Another member of the team was Steve Riskin, who later became Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the Chief Rabbi of Efrat and a famous figure in Israel and throughout the Orthodox world. I have had the honor of introducing Rabbi Riskin at various events over the years, and always point out on those occasions that among the three people pictured in the front row of the debating team of the 1954 school yearbook, the Elchanite of BTA, two of them, Riskin and Dershowitz had changed their first names. Only Mendy Ganchrow kept his original name, but, alas, did not attain the world renown of the other two.

Sometimes, when people meet me the first time, they assume that because I am an Orthodox Jewish leader, I must be prim and straight-laced. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth about me or about the world I grew up in. In fact, it was a milieu of fun and good-natured practical jokes in which I often took part. At BTA, we used to take advantage of some of our teachers, including a soft-spoken and chronically forgetful Spanish teacher everyone called Senor. We would sometimes put bricks in his briefcase and then break out into laughter when he would pick it up and frown, not understanding what was weighing him down. He would walk down the halls of the school lugging his briefcase, leaning to the right at close to a ninety-degree angle.

The most memorable prank I can remember was played by a notorious kibbitzer (practical joker) in our class on our own dear Rebbe. At that time, the whole country was abuzz about news that the notorious bank robber, Willie Sutton, had been recaptured after an escape from prison due to information supplied by an FBI informer named Arnold Schuster. Shortly thereafter, Schuster was himself murdered and a substantial price was placed on the head of the murderer. One day, our kibbitzer brought a toy phone to class, which had a genuine sound ringing mechanism. When the phone rang, the kid stood up from his desk with the phone in hand and said, Hello operator, get me the police. Hello, police, do you know who killed Schuster? It was—. At that point another participant in the joke, seated on the other side of the room, jumped dramatically to his feet, extended a cap pistol and shouted, in fake mobster style, Take this you dirty rotten rat. Die you stoolie! and fired several rounds. The kibbitzer clutched his chest with a hand he had smeared with ketchup and cried, He got me. He got me. The Rebbe, who had been completely taken in, cried out, Oh no! They shot him! They shot him! and rushed over to the fallen student. The class was hysterical with laughter, but the Rebbe was so intent on trying to save the student’s life that it took a few moments before he realized he had been taken in.

During my freshman year at BTA, I myself went too far with a practical joke and ended up in a brush with the law. At the time, my whole family was angry with our landlady, who would often fail to provide heat and hot water to the four-family-house in which we were living—even in the winter. I belonged to a youth club at Young Israel of Eastern Parkway, from which we used to send postcards to remind members of upcoming sports and social events. One night, in a giddy mood, I took one of those postcards, addressed it to our landlady, and then crossed out the world Young Israel and wrote I will meet you in the graveyard. Urged on by a friend of mine, who is today a well-known rabbi, I went outside and put the postcard in a mailbox. Upon receiving the prank postcard, our landlady turned it over to the