What I Learned from the Founder of the Israel Day Parade

On Sunday, May 18, supporters of Israel will line Fifth Avenue to proudly celebrate the Jewish State. Today, the parade is the largest annual pro-Israel gathering in the diaspora. Historians trace its origins to 1965. But its story really began some 19 years earlier.

In 1946, at the age of 22, Ted Comet set off from New York to volunteer in France at a program run by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) to rehabilitate Jewish children orphaned by the war. A friend asked him to look up a cousin in Versailles. Ted had written the name and the address of the survivor on a little scrap of paper. He put the note in his pocket and forgot about it. Sure enough, the first place in France to which he was dispatched was a children’s home in Versailles.

He arrived late at night, met the director and in the morning had breakfast with “a very impressive teenager.” After going out for a walk, he remembered the cousin of his friend. He pulled out the note. To his amazement, the address was “63 Avenue de Paris,” which turned out to be the address of the children’s home. He approached the only person he knew other than the director, the young man with whom he had had breakfast, and asked him whether he knew someone named Elie Wiesel. Startled, the young man answered: “C’est moi,” that’s me.

That “c’est moi,” Ted once said, became transformed over time from a personal response to a prophetic affirmation. It was the deeper meaning of the Biblical hineini. The word rendered literally simply means, “here I am.” But in the larger sense, it connotes a willingness on the part of the Biblical hero to accept his mission. Elie Wiesel, Ted said, wasn’t just physically present; spiritually, he was ready to be a kind of divine agent who was destined for a higher calling.

Ted’s homily was intended as a tribute to his lifelong friend, but it was also autobiographical. In the course of his 100-year life, Ted answered a calling of his own. His experiences in the aftermath of the Holocaust taught him the value of being present. Devoting his life’s work to the Jewish people, he served as director of the American Zionist Youth Council; a leader at the Council of Jewish Federations; and associate executive vice president of the American Joint Distribution Committee. And in 1965, he helped found the Israel Day Parade.

He also established the Israel Folk Dance Festival and ran the Federation’s General Assembly. As volunteer coordinator at the Conference on Soviet Jewry, he organized the first major public demonstration of solidarity with Soviet Jews and led the first mission of federation leaders to the Soviet Union. Ted was the dean of American Jewish communal service.

But Ted’s commitment to the Jewish people went far beyond his professional life. His mantra was Toujours de plus, always more. There was always more to learn, more to know, more to give.

His late wife, Shoshana, a Holocaust survivor, gave expression to the trauma she endured by weaving five giant tapestries that told her story. The tapestries were a living testimony to Shoshana’s enduring belief that trauma could be transmuted into creative energy. Ted would invite visitors to his home to see Shoshana’s art and learn Shoshana’s story. In a museum of trauma transformed, Ted became the curator of hope and resilience.

Through a collaboration with Dorot, a nonprofit based on the Upper West Side, Ted welcomed to his home more than 1,300 visitors – and many more on Zoom. And this was after he had turned 90! Many of his guests were young people for whom the experience was utterly transformative. The preservation of Shoshana’s story – and the ethos of transmuting tragedy into triumph – is predicated on the sense that human beings are capable of growing, developing and becoming deeper people.

Ted had an insatiable and unending thirst for knowledge. Possessed of unbounded intellectual and emotional curiosity, he cherished the study of Torah; adored the opera and the symphony; and loved literature and the arts.

Great storytellers aren’t always great listeners. Ted was a great listener. Whenever he met someone knew, he wanted to understand them – to appreciate what they were about and what made them tick.

The breadth of his lived experience combined with his extraordinary capacity for empathy made Ted a font of wisdom. One could learn more about life by spending an hour with Ted than by reading a hundred great books.

By the time I arrived at The Jewish Center in 2004 as the rabbinic intern, Ted was a sage. We would meet regularly to review my sermons, but they were just a pretext for Ted to teach me about the world.

Technically, I was Ted’s rabbi and he was my congregant. But in practice, he always felt to me more like a grandfather. At the end of our meetings came a quiz. “Yosie,” he would say, “tell me what you’ve taken away from our time together. Tell me what you’re leaving with.” I’m not sure I always passed. But today I can say with confidence that for 100 years, Ted taught all those who were privileged to know him: What it means to lead a life of giving; how to transmute trauma into creative energy; how to love the Jewish people; how to listen deeply; how to retain a youthful curiosity at every stage of life; how to live every day with a sense of purpose; how to advocate for Israel; how to remain hopeful even in dark times; and how – when life demands the most of us – to always have the courage to answer, hineini.

As Ted would have put it, he taught us that by being more caring, more compassionate, more sensitive and more responsive, we become more human. And by becoming more human, we become a little closer to the divine.