What my grandfather Rabbi Harry Davidowitz never told me

There is a new street in Herzliya this week, a quaint little path linking Rabbi Abraham Kook Street with Hanna Rovina Street, and it is named after my grandfather. But who was he? And what did he do to deserve such an honor? He was, in short, my angel, and a blessing to all of Israel.

I was five years old when my grandfather, Rabbi Doctor Harry S. Davidowitz, began teaching me Torah. The first time, after a Shabbat dinner at my grandparents’ house, he asked me, “Why are we named after a thief, a conniver? Go, look into it.” Returning the next Shabbat, I rushed to tell him my thoughts, but my grandfather simply said, “Maybe, if someone as flawed as Jacob could become enlightened there is hope for someone like me? What do you think?”

This ritual continued for 18 years until his death in 1973. Eighteen years of sweetness, affection, guidance, questions and parables that kept getting deeper and more demanding. Nights were filled with Hasidic Nigunim (melodies) and tales, along with stories of his impoverished childhood in Lithuania.

My grandfather was so poor and so emaciated as a child that he barely survived his teens. Being the poorest child in the Hasidic school in his village, he was relegated to sitting at the far end of the table, reading the only copy of the Bible the school had, upside down. He then learned the Talmud upside down, and many other books of Jewish wisdom.

A full meal was eaten only once a week at his teacher’s home. The rest of the week, my grandfather ate dried bread and drank watered-down tea with sugar. He out-studied and outsmarted every other student from his first day in the Heder until he graduated from the Yeshiva in Kovno at age eighteen.

“He was a genius!” my grandmother would declare.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” my grandfather would reply, “she’s crazy in love with me.”

Following in the footsteps of his parents and siblings, Harry emigrated to America upon finishing his studies. He weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds when he arrived at Ellis Island, speaking Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Aramaic. A couple of years later, having learned English, he was accepted to Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in philosophy. From there he entered the Jewish Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Conservative rabbi. After his ordination, my grandfather served as a Conservative rabbi in Minneapolis, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.

In 1934, invited by my maternal great-grandfather Samuel Bloom, my grandfather made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael with his wife, Ida, and their three children, David, Suzanne, and my mother, Eve. There was no place for a Conservatively ordained rabbi in Palestine in those days, so my grandfather turned to secular affairs. But his inner Jewish fire never dimmed, and he remained thoroughly religious and fervently spiritual to the core until the day he died.

Every Shabbat evening at my grandparents’ house was filled with luminous enchantment. My secular family thoroughly enjoyed the meal and the company, but I just soaked in the light of the candles reflected in my grandfather’s eyes, the blessing of the wine, the chanting of the prayers, the singing of his Nigunim and the unmitigated joy emanating from his beaming face.

I once said to my grandfather, “Saba, you always say you are a Hasid but you don’t look like one.”

“Tatele,” he said, “being a Hasid is a condition of your soul – not a condition of your wardrobe.”

Walking with my grandfather through the streets of North Tel Aviv in the autumn of his life, he’d limp slowly, smiling at people passing by, stopping at various shops to wish the proprietors a good day.

“Why are you limping, Saba?” I’d ask.

“Ah, just some trouble with my hip,” he’d answer, waving it away with a big smile.

“He limps because he was wounded in the front lines in WWI,” my grandmother would explain.

Apparently, he served as one of the first Jewish chaplains in the US Army and was the first to be wounded in combat, in France, a fact I gleaned only from my grandmother. My grandfather, who, with one exception, never discussed his accomplishments with anyone, simply said, “Yehallelcha zar v’lo picha – Let a stranger extoll your virtues – not you.”

Lieutenant Rabbi Harry S. Davidowitz

One Shabbat I asked my grandfather how many languages he spoke. “Seven, I think,” he said and laughed, “maybe eight, including Arabic.”

“Why Arabic?” I asked.

“Who knows,” he said and patted me on the head. It was only last year that I learned that for his doctoral thesis at Dropsy College, in Philadelphia, my grandfather proved definitively, in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, that the P’rakim B’hatzalcha, for centuries attributed to Maimonides, were not actually written by the sage. His thesis was published in Jerusalem in 1939. Another achievement never mentioned by him.

The one humorous exception to this rule was my grandfather’s unblemished pride in his physical strength. He’d roll up his sleeves and say: “Want to see my muscles dance?” He’d hum a Hasidic niggun and flex his muscles to the beat of the tune, grinning like a little child.

It was during his studies at Columbia University that my grandfather, the formerly emaciated Hasid, began doing gymnastics, lifting weights, and wrestling. Well into his sixties, he’d walk down to the Tel Aviv beach to wrestle with the young lifeguards.

Other times, I’d sit for hours watching Saba Harry run his fountain pen along ivory sheets of paper, coaxing a reluctant Shakespeare to land a phrase on Hebrew soil, a phrase that could be accepted somehow and even be allowed to blossom and become native in our arid land. He’d tap his fingers rhythmically on his desk, saying the words out loud, singing them, teasing out their meaning and clothing them in new garments, allowing them to be startled at first, finding themselves in alien surroundings.

These were sessions of lovemaking by a man who adored language and had transferred his Talmudic rigor to enriching the newly emerging Jewish state with the greatest magician of the English language, the playwright who knew the souls of biblical kings and understood the presence of the divine within every word, every syllable, every letter.

During the British Mandate in Palestine, a haughty house guest from England asked my grandfather, “So, Dr. Davidowitz, how’s the Bard faring in your terse, tortured language?”

“About as well as the Psalms are in your verbose one,” replied my grandfather.

In 1943 my grandfather received the first Tchernichovsky Prize in literature for his translation of Shakespeare’s works into Hebrew. I only knew that because of the ceremonial picture of my grandfather sitting next to the great poet, who my grandfather simply referred to as my aunt Zannie’s pediatrician.

On Israel’s Independence Day, in 2000, I received an email from Yoram Shachar, a doctoral student writing his thesis on Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Mr. Shachar, desperately looking for a relative of Rabbi Davidowitz, decided to Google the name one last time. Serendipitously, he came upon the name of my Off-Broadway show Wasting Time With Harry Davidowitz, which I had been performing for a number of years.

“Could you, by any chance, be related to Rabbi Harry S. Davidowitz?” Shachar asked. “If so, I may have some exciting information to share with you.” I immediately replied that I was, indeed, Rabbi Davidowitz’s grandson. What transpired was the revelation that my grandfather had helped write the first draft of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in his library on 11 Arnon Street, the apartment where I grew up as a toddler in Tel Aviv.

“Why did your grandfather not share that story with you?” Asked the incredulous researcher. I explained what you already know – that my grandfather never spoke of his accomplishments.

“V’Hatzneah lechet im Eloheicha – walk humbly with your God,” says the Prophet Micah, chapter six, verse eight. My Rebbe, Reb Shlomo Twersky, would say – be intimate as you walk with God. Private. Keep it to yourself.

This past Wednesday, December 11^th, 2024, (twenty-four years following my revelatory conversation with Yoram Shachar) in a modest ceremony in Hertzeliyah, attended by the mayor and deputy mayor and members of the Conservative movement, a sweet little walkway was named after my grandfather, Rabbi Doctor Harry S. Davidowitz, in great part due to the compassionate persistence of Dr. Yizhar Hess, vice chair and acting director of the World Zionist Organization. My entire family and I are beyond grateful for his efforts.

I hope that all who walk that pathway will feel some of the warmth and experience, some of the radiance of my grandfather’s wisdom as they head back safely to their homes or venture out into the world.

My grandfather’s last utterance on earth, sitting in an armchair at the hospice in old Tel Aviv was, “Eilecha – Towards you.” Always toward God, always toward the light, toward love, toward gratitude.

Zecher Tzadik Livracha. May the memory of the righteous be a blessing.