Transcript of interview with Marilyn Glovinsky and Melissa Lemoine by Barbara Tabach, April 2, 2015

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARILYN GLOVINSKY AND MELISSA LEMOINE An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach The Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Marilyn Glovinsky was born January 20, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a teacher, Lilyan, and police sergeant, Solomon Goldberg. Marilyn split her childhood between New York City and Los Angeles, where she spent the summers with her maternal grandparents. In 1963, she graduated with a bachelor?s degree in speech pathology from Brooklyn College. A year later she married, and the couple soon moved to Salt Lake City, where her husband had been hired as a graduate assistant at the University of Utah. In Salt Lake City, Marilyn worked as a first grade teacher. It was there that she attended her first High Holidays service, at the Reform synagogue. It wasn?t long before her husband enlisted in the United States Navy, and they were stationed Camp Legeune, North Carolina, for nearly three years. The couple later moved back to Utah, where their children Melissa and David were born. In June of 1974, Marilyn and her family moved to Las Vegas. She quickly integrated herself into the Jewish community, and was amongst a small group of families that started Congregation Ner Tamid. She went on to play a critical role in the growth of the synagogue, including taking on an interim operations management role at one time, and also leading the development of the Hebrew School, to tremendous success. Marilyn?s daughter has emulated her mother?s dedication to making Judaism accessible to members of the local community, particularly through education and social activities. Even as a fifth grader at the Hebrew Academy, Melissa took on additional responsibilities, assisting in the school office. Now, in addition to her job as a teacher at Doral Academy, Melissa teaches b?nai mitzvah, conversion and Hebrew School classes at Ner Tamid. She also leads programming for NextGen, a group dedicated to creating community amongst young Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s. Melissa is married to Todd Lemoine, and they have one child named Colton. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Marilyn Glovinksy and Melissa Lemoine on April 2, 2015 by Barbara Tabach in Las Vegas, Nevada Preface?????????????????????????????????..?..iv Marilyn discusses her family history; maternal grandparents emigrating from Poland to New York, via Canada; moving to Los Angeles later in life. Talks about childhood in New York; spending summers in California; strong Jewish identity of Brooklyn neighborhood. Meets husband in college; couple moves to Salt Lake City; becomes involved with Reform congregation. Reflects upon husband enlisting in Navy; moving to North Carolina????..1-7 Marilyn talks about decision to move to Las Vegas. Describes being involved with group to start Congregation Ner Tamid; hiring first rabbi, Steven Weisberg; support from Jewish Federation; initial low budget, grassroots methods to market services; relationship with Temple Beth Shalom; starting and growth of Hebrew School. Articulates motives for dedication to building Jewish community. Mentions sixth grade centers; sending daughter to Hebrew Academy?.8-17 Melissa talks about attending Hebrew Academy; both discuss sixth grade centers. Marilyn recalls Ralph Engelstad?s Hitler party; attending his daughter?s wedding. Melissa reflects on her involvement with Ner Tamid; teaching B?nai Mitzvah, Hebrew School, conversion classes. Talks about NextGen program, working with JewEL on activities, including innovative Passover Sedar. Shares perspectives on young Jewish community; how to best engage???..??18-23 Marilyn reflects upon the challenges of hiring a rabbi for Ner Tamid; managing administrative activities in interim capacity; eventually hiring Rabbi Akselrad. More about NextGen; Melissa?s efforts to recruit members, promote engagement. Melissa talks about getting bat mitzvah?d; inspiring her to tutor others in their preparations for b?nai mitzvot, including her mother......24-28 Marilyn contemplates changes in Las Vegas, especially within Jewish community, since arriving; compares to Los Angeles. Recounts story of being treated by Chabad doctor at Southern Hills Hospital. Reflects upon experiences with anti-Semitism, both in Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas?????????..???.?...29-35 Index........................................................................................................................................36-37 vi 1 1 This is Barbara Tabach. Today is April 2, 2015. I'm in the Las Vegas home of Marilyn and with her daughter, Melissa. I'm going to have you say and spell your name for the transcriber and then we'll get started with the storytelling. Marilyn Glovinsky. M-A-R-I-L-Y-N. And Glovinsky is G-L-O-V-I-N-S-K-Y. Melissa Lemoine; M-E-L-I-S-S-A, L-E-M-O-I-N-E. And also sitting with us, Marilyn, is your mother. My mother, Lilyan Goldberg. L-I-L-Y-A-N. Goldberg, G-O-L-D-B-E-R-G. Just for the record, she's about ready to celebrate her birthday you told me. [Mrs. Goldberg was present during the interview.] Yes. She will be one hundred and one on April fourteenth, in two weeks. Wow. That's marvelous. We're going to start with the family roots. I'd love for you to tell me how far back in your family ancestry you can go. We can only go back to my grandparents although somewhere we had a picture of my great-grandparents. They grew up in Poland in a town called Kielce. The two families were friends and neighbors, and each of them was the youngest in their family. They each came from very large families, seven or eight siblings. My grandfather claimed that when he was about fourteen the Russians came and impressed all the young men into the Russian Army; they sent them to Siberia and he was there for about three or four years. He finally was able to come back. He and my grandmother had been playmates as children and school chums. I never got the true feeling of whether it was an arranged marriage or it was just convenient or what because she was the only girl in both families. Was this on your maternal or paternal side? My mom's side. So they were married. As a gift from the families, they sent them to Belgium on a 2 honeymoon, and they had a certain amount of jewelry that they had given them as their gifts. The plan was for them to go to Brussels to turn in their return ticket?they had to have a return ticket; they were supposed to come back?and sell some of the jewelry to buy passage to the United States, which is what they did. They came on a ship and went to Montreal. We thought for many years that they had gone to maybe Ellis Island, but we couldn't find any information. My cousin did some digging and she found that they had gone to Montreal. We don't know how, but they managed to come into this country through Vermont and came down to New York where my grandmother had two older brothers that she really didn't know. They had left Europe when she was just a young child. One had gone into business and the other one owned an appetizing store in the Bronx. They had some other relatives. And so, like so many others, they started out on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My grandfather was a butcher and my grandmother was an incredibly wonderful cook and did catering, but not for long because my mother was born quite soon after, and then her brother, and then ten years later my Aunt Ruth. So that's how they came to this country. My grandfather was a heavy smoker and had probably the beginnings of emphysema, and my grandmother heard that the weather in California was much better than it was in New York. So in 1947, she and a friend took the train to Los Angeles, and while she was there she bought a house for about three thousand dollars. She came back to tell us. I was five. She told us that they had bought a house and they were moving. They had an adventuresome spirit because they've gone halfway around the world. They lived in that house for quite a while. They had a good life. It started out rough with the pogroms in Poland. We lived in New York. My dad was a policeman; my mom was a teacher. Every summer vacation we would go to California. I'd spend three, sometimes four months, in California every year. So 3 I feel like I've grown up in both places. You had roots in both places. How did your parents meet, if you know? Yes, I do. My mother was just about to graduate from college and my dad was a policeman. My mother worked part-time at a dry cleaning store called Rand's. It was a chain in the New York area. They would dry clean policemen's uniforms and their heavy overcoats free. So they all brought their cleaning to Rand's. He had brought his overcoat in, and he came back to get it and they couldn't find it. So she and the other gal who was a good friend of hers searched the store from top to bottom and they couldn't find the coat. They called the manager, the area manager. They sent people out to all the stores to look for my dad's coat. So my dad came by every day to check on his coat, and they developed a friendship and he asked her out. She graduated from college and she had a job teaching at a girls' boarding school, Upstate New York, in Ardsley, New York. He used to go up there every weekend. He would drive there in his car that would barely make it. But he was determined to win her hand and finally she said yes. So here we are. He met her. He put her on a pedestal and never let her come down from it. Isn't that wonderful? That's so romantic. Yes. They were married for fifty-seven years and he passed away. How many children did they have? My brother and myself. Are you the oldest? I'm the oldest. My brother is five years younger than I am. So you were raised in New York, for the most part? Yes, from September to June I was raised in New York; and from late June to mid-September I was raised in Los Angeles, by the same family. It was odd, but it worked for us. 4 What kind of Jewish upbringing did you have? I was raised in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn in those days was?at least my neighborhood?90 percent Jewish, 95 maybe. We lived in row houses. Two doors down was an Italian family who had a daughter my age, Sarah, and Peter was my brother's age. We're friends to this day. Peter lives in Connecticut and Sarah lives in New Jersey. We're long-distance friends, but we're in touch several times a year. But other than that I didn't know anybody who wasn't either Jewish or Catholic until I was in college, and even then it was rare because I went to Brooklyn College, which was also like 95 percent Jewish at that point because it drew from the community. It was a subway school; you'd take the bus or the subway to get to it. There were no dormitories or anything. What were you studying there? My parents were very encouraging to have me study education. My father thought that because my mother was a teacher and she was perfect?which she was?that I should be a teacher. I didn't really want to be a teacher. So I rebelled just enough to take speech therapy. I always had a secret wish that I wanted to be an accountant. I don't know why. I was good at numbers. But I got a degree in speech. In those days it was actually speech and theater because they were in one department; now it would be speech pathology. I met my former husband at college and we married about a year and a half afterwards. He applied to several schools in the West for a graduate school assistantship, and so I applied for jobs in the same cities as the universities to which he applied. Simultaneously, he got an assistantship at the University of Utah and I got a job teaching for the Salt Lake schools. Tell me about the idea of moving to Utah. What do you remember about that? The year we got married was the year they had the World's Fair in New York City. So that would have been? 5 Nineteen sixty-four. We had gone several times to the World's Fair because you couldn't take it all in in one shot. We went to the Utah Pavilion and we signed in; we went through the dioramas and all the interesting things that they showed. It was an interesting place and I had been through Southern Utah before on one of our trips because from the time I was six till the time I got married, which I was twenty-two, our family had gone back and forth to California to visit my grandparents. So I had seen quite a bit of the United States because we had gone by car a lot. Wow. That's a long drive. Yes. But we enjoyed it. We always had a good time, my brother, my parents and I. It was our time to not have any interruptions and just be together and have a lot of fun. I'm curious. How long would that drive take? In the early days, in the '40s, it took a full seven days. Just to drive across. Yes. We drove in an old Woodie station wagon and there weren't many super highways in 1947, '8, '9, 1950. They started coming in in the mid '50s. When President Eisenhower became president, he did the highway system. He was responsible for the interstate highways. I remember each year there would be more to the Pennsylvania turnpike; we'd get on it sooner and we'd go further on it. So you literally grew up with the interstate. Yes. We learned an awful lot about the United States. It was a really educational thing without making it sound boring. It was fun. We stopped at lots of different places. I remember going to Gallup, New Mexico, where they still wore heavy Indian dress. It was an interesting time of my life. But my husband and I?we weren't married yet?we went to that Utah thing and we said, "Well, it sounds interesting. It's only a year or two. Let's try it." So we accepted the different offers, drove out to Utah and got ourselves an apartment. I didn't really look for a synagogue or anything. But along came 6 Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and my husband said, "Well, I'm just going to go to work. I have to go to school." I told my principal, because I was teaching a first grade class, that it was a religious holiday for me and I was going to go to temple, and I did. That was the first High Holiday service I went to evidently because we never went to services. We never belonged to a synagogue when I was growing up. At one point I went to Hebrew school for a year and I hated it because I had to take the bus by myself. And so my parents said I didn't have to go anymore. I went to the Reform temple in Salt Lake. They were very welcoming. I said I was new to town. They said, "Come in, have a seat." They sat me down, I stayed for services and went home; I kind of liked it. I knew that there was a small Conservative synagogue and a small Reform synagogue. And this was in Salt Lake itself? Yes, in the middle of town, downtown Salt Lake, Fourth Street. We stayed there for a year. This was the time when people were being drafted; men were being drafted out of graduate programs and all kinds of situations to go into the Army for the Vietnam War. My husband decided that he would rather see if he couldn't volunteer and go in as an officer in his own field. He was a psychologist. He was able to do that. So he was inducted into the Navy and he came back. They said originally we would go to Washington, D.C. So we packed up our stuff, went back to New York and stayed with my parents until he had to report to Bethesda Naval Station in November. We were there for four months, and while we were there, we went to services at a chapel. I don't even remember where. But I enjoyed going. I enjoyed the feeling of going to a synagogue and being part of it. It struck a chord in me. Then he was assigned to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, which is on the coast. It was a huge, huge base, and at its height, when we were there, there were about seventy thousand people. It was right next to a small community called Jacksonville, North Carolina that had about fifteen thousand people. So we lived on the base because you couldn't live on the community; it was just too small and the base 7 overpowered it. He worked as a psychologist at the naval hospital. The base was so large that it had its own school system, and so I applied for a job as a speech therapist. I worked there for the two and a half years that we were there. So he was based there for an extended period of time. Yes, two years and nine months. What years would that have been? We got there at the end of February in '66, and we left in November of '68 and went back to Salt Lake. While I was there I had a tubal pregnancy and they were doing some tests to see if I could become pregnant or not. Thirty years, thirty-five, forty years later we found out that there was a situation of toxic water on the base. Oh, wow. That's what my cancer is attributed to. So things come and get you from behind. Wow. But that has nothing to do with being Jewish. While we were there, there wasn't always a rabbi on base, about 50 percent of the time. We had two or three rabbis in that almost three-year period. We would meet in the downstairs of a barracks building; it was an NCO barrack. There was this young man named Benjie who used to blow the shofar for us and he'd practice. He would tell us, "I think I've practiced enough because the other people in the barracks are getting upset with me." They had no idea of what kind of a horn he was blowing. There were about twenty-five Jewish families there. Mostly three-quarters of them were doctors and the rest were military people. It was an interesting life. I would not have been upset if we had stayed in the military. My brother actually went into the Army. He was in ROTC at UCLA, and then went into the Army and retired as a colonel. 8 Wow. There aren't many Colonel Goldbergs. No, I bet not. So you went back to Salt Lake City. We went back to Salt Lake. How do you eventually end up in Las Vegas? Is there a connection there? Yes. We went from one place to the other. My husband completed his Ph.D. in psychology, and Melissa and David came along. I guess it was about two years after he got his Ph.D., he was dissatisfied with...he was working for a community mental health center in Provo. We were living in Salt Lake and it was about fifty miles each way to work. It was in the dead of winter. He'd had a couple of accidents, not his fault, because of the black ice and [realized] how difficult it was to survive in that kind of climate. He came home one day and he said, "I think we need to look for another place to live." I said, "Fine with me. I'm not upset." He said, "Well, do you want to go to California? Do you want to go to?Where would you like to go?" And I said, "Anyplace warm." He started looking in the journals to see. A month or two later he found one in Las Vegas with the state mental health center, and he said, "What about Las Vegas?" I said, "Well, when I was a kid we'd always stop in Las Vegas going to my grandparents' house and I love Las Vegas." So he said, "Okay." He called and applied and flew down for an interview and came back. All of this was taking place in January, February, and March. Nineteen seventy-four? Nineteen seventy-four. They called him and hired him. So in April he and I drove down. We left the kids in Salt Lake with friends. We had the name of a real estate agent that another friend of ours who was moving down here had. We called this man, but he couldn't see us and we met this other lady. She took us around and I didn't like a lot of the places she showed us. 9 Then I went over to the temple and got in to see Leo Wilner, who was the executive director of Temple Beth Sholom. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. He was just incredible. He said, "Well, there isn't a Jewish neighborhood. You just kind of find a house that you like and make friends with your neighbors and come to temple." So I went and looked some more and we found a house that we liked. What part of town were you in at that time? We found this house on the east side of town. It was on Viking Road near Eastern, right opposite Helen J. Stewart School. It was forty-seven thousand dollars. Hard to believe, isn't it? I know. The first house we bought in Salt Lake was twenty-one thousand. Oh, my. It's just amazing when you think about it. So we decided to buy that house. We went to temple that Friday night before we left to drive home. I was thirty-two; he was thirty-five. In Salt Lake we went to services every Friday night. Of course, the rabbi was my age, two years younger than me, actually. We had a group of friends and we all went out for ice cream afterwards. It was a very nice arrangement for all of us. So it was a nice social community as well. Yes, as a religious community. We were thirty-two and thirty-five. We looked around and the closest in age to us was maybe sixty-five, which is eight years younger than I am now. I thought that was terribly old and how are we going to have a social arrangement, the kind of thing that we had before? That really worried me. My husband said, "Well, we don't have to go to temple." And I said, "No, we do. We have two children. We want them to have a Jewish upbringing. We want them to know what it's like to be Jewish, to live in a Jewish community." We went back to Salt Lake. We packed up. We moved down here the first week of June of 1974. 10 My husband went to work and found out that we didn't have health insurance; we had two young children, an eight-month-old and a four-and-a-half-year old. He said, "Well, they told me that we should just get ninety-day insurance because in ninety days I'll be covered." We'd been here about three or four days before he went to work because we unpacked and all that kind of stuff. A couple of days later we were at Sears to get something; I saw the Allstate thing and I said, "Let's go and ask if they have health insurance." So we went over and talked to this gentleman. I was wearing a chai or a star or something, and he noticed it and said, "Oh, I see your jewelry." I said, "Yes." He said, "Are you?," and I said, "Yes." He said, "So am I. Are you going to join the temple?" Marv said, "Well, I don't know. The crowd looks a little bit older than we're used to." He said, "Well, there's a group that's going to form a Reform temple." I perked up and I said, "Really?" He said, "Yes, my wife and I are going to the meeting tomorrow night. We could pick you up. Where do you live?" Who is this person you're speaking of? Shel Sabera. He and his wife, Roz, became good friends. We haven't seen them in a long time because they're all the way on the other side of the community and they belong to Midbar. Midbar Kodesh? Midbar Kodesh. Anyway, I got a neighbor to babysit for the kids and they picked us up and took us to Gene and Marlin Kirshbaum?s home. It was June 13, 1974. We got really involved. I volunteered to head the school committee and my husband was on the rabbi selection committee. Rabbi Irv Herman came from the UHC in California and he gave us a lot of guidance. We went home after the meeting and called my parents, and I said, "We just got involved with a group of people." My parents were living in Los Angeles then. I said, "We're going to start a Reform congregation." My mother said, "How long have you been there?" I said, "Ten days." Oh, my goodness. That's amazing. 11 It took over our lives. What is it like to start a congregation? It's like having a baby because I go now, forty years later, and I watch all the people coming in, most of whom I don't know. If I get introduced to anybody, it's as Melissa's mother. "Oh, this is Marilyn Glovinsky. You know Melissa Lemoine, that beautiful tall blond? This is her mother." Not introduced as one of the founders. No, no. But it's wonderful because there was a time for many years...I have a very good friend who now lives in Ohio who used to live here. We used to go to services, to special services, the Megillah reading, the?I can't even think of the names. We would go because we were afraid nobody would show up and there wouldn't be enough people. While we don't go strictly by the rule of the minyan, we didn't want the rabbi to be embarrassed by having seven or ten people there. So we would go to every service. One time we were sitting at a Megillah service, a Purim service, and we looked at each other and said, "We don't have to do this anymore. There's a big crowd here." Our kids were grown by then. We decided that we were not going to do every single service anymore. You had done a really good job. We'd finally gotten to that point; like the parents with the children on the bike, we didn't have to run along the side anymore. Tell me about hiring the first rabbi. Rabbi Herman actually found him for us. His name was Steven Weisberg. He and his wife, Deedee, had four children. They were young children. The youngest was Melissa's age, so four and a half, five. He had taken a sabbatical from wherever he had been. I don't remember where or what the details were. He looked like a kid. He had kind of long hair with bangs, not very long but halfway down the nape of his neck. He was very nice. He was kind of nebbishy looking, but very, very bright and very, very capable. 12 He came for a couple of interviews, and there were a couple of other people interviewed. We took him out to dinner and he ordered...It's got a name, but I can't remember, but it's steak with crab and asparagus on top. There's a name to that. Oscar. Oscar, yes. Thank you. Steak Oscar. There were maybe twelve people at dinner and a couple of people raised eyebrows. And he noticed it, but that's what he was looking for. For the non-Jewish person who might be listening to this, you would raise your eyebrows because of the...? Crab is a shellfish and for those who keep kosher...the Reform Movement says if you want to that's fine; if you don't want to that's also fine. But for anybody who thinks about a rabbi they think maybe I don't keep kosher, but I'm sure the rabbi does. So the rabbi even of a Reform congregation is put on a slightly different... Yes, and there's an expectation. He wanted to be sure that nobody continued that expectation. He said, "This is a statement that I'm making with my choice of food. I am not kosher. I don't keep kosher. I can give you books on keeping kosher, but I don't keep kosher." It was a statement of his position, which I thought was fascinating. Someone found him a house that was close to them, that had been for sale, and he bought the house. Jewish Federation helped us with a grant for twenty-four thousand dollars, which was, in fact, the amount of his salary for the year except that it was supposed to be for running the school, support of education, because they couldn't support hiring a rabbi; they could only support education at that time. I see. So whatever they gave you had to go to education, not to somebody's salary. Right. But it happened to be the same amount as his salary. We tried always to keep the amount of money in the bank equal to the rest of his salary for a year. So the money that came in we used to pay him 13 and we used some of the money in the bank for running the school and renting space. Let me ask you before we continue with him, on this committee or these people who are helping choose him?you said there were a bunch of people at dinner?who were some of the others you can remember involved in that process? David Wasserman, probably. I can't picture the group. It's too long ago. But my best guess would be David, who was there from the beginning; Eugene Kirshbaum; probably Shel Sabera; Leon Danzig who passed away, he was a doctor here; and probably Dr. Morrie Perlman, who also passed away quite a while ago. We're trying to get an idea of some of the people who were the other founding, active people. So how did you let people know that this new congregation had formed and where services were held? Tell me about that. Our first service was at the Gold Room, which does not exist anymore, at the convention center. It was right on the edge of the convention center. So you didn't have to go through anything to get there. It had its own parking lot and a door right there. The convention center gave us the room for Rosh Hashanah eve and day. We just did one day, Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur morning. You have to remember the town was a lot smaller then and a lot more things were done person to person rather than officially. Gene Kirshbaum was a veterinarian and he knew half of the town. He knew so many people because of all the people that came to him to take care of their animals. He knew somebody who was in the union of the people that did the audio/visual stuff at the convention center. The union, I think, was bigger than the convention center, but he knew this union guy. He said, "Do you think we could get a break from the union because the convention center has given us the room?" The guy said, "I'll work out something for you." So we didn't have to pay...I think there were two or three people that had to be there the whole time we were there and did the setup. We had some teenagers that helped with 14 the setup of chairs. We had to set it up twice, one for the evening service and then take it down after the day service, both holidays. We put up a larger committee that was for High Holidays. Met with the rabbi and he talked about having aliyahs, how many aliyahs and that kind of thing, and the rest of us did the nuts and bolts. We printed up fliers. In those days you had to go to Kinko's or someplace like that, or a school that might mimeograph it for you. We got all these fliers printed up. There were several people who were dealers at the different hotels, and they took all these fliers. Each hotel had several break rooms for the dealers and anybody else that worked there, and they put these fliers in the break rooms. If we didn't know anybody at a couple of hotels, other people would go and find the break rooms and do that. Then we put a small ad in the Review-Journal and the Sun saying that a Reform service was being held at the Gold Room and there was no fee. If you wanted to go to Temple Beth Sholom, it was expensive if you were not a member. I don't remember what it was, but it was expensive for those days. Leo Wilner wasn't really encouraging us because he kept saying, "Why do you want to do this?" Because he was the competition, so to speak, right? Yes, exactly. He said, "Why would you want to do this? We'll do a second Friday night service that's more Reform." They offered a lot of things. But we said, "No. The town is ready for it. We're ready for it." Of course, I didn't know if the town was ready for it or not; I had only been there a couple of months. I just went by what the others were telling me. But he helped us even though he felt we were competition. He had a very strong feeling that anything Jewish was a good thing. He was a wonderful man. I don't know if you've gotten his son to talk with you. No, I haven't, no. I'll make a note of that. He and his wife both. His wife, Mickie, was a wonderful person. 15 Who was the rabbi at Temple Beth Sholom at that time? Rabbi Schneerson, I think. He was there