Eddie Nathan was a man without a shul when he first set foot in a Chabad minyan ll years ago. “Chabad was a simple storefront,” he recalls, “formerly home to an adult movie store. The Torah rested on a makeshift wooden architect’s table. We had to ask the bagel guy in the shopping center to help us make a minyan. It was informal and haimish, and Mendy was young and idealistic, wound up as on a spring, on a mission and ready to go.”
Many milestones have been celebrated since Chabad’s early beginnings—from Lazar Mengel’s bris to the dedication of Chabad’s current home. Eddie has been there to celebrate them all.
Eddie is a towering figure in Chabad right now, not only because he is head and shoulders above nearly everyone, but because of his towering contributions to our shul. He’s a regular baal tfila--a musaf specialist-- and the chief chef on Lag B’Omer. He helps
out in numerous men’s club events, brings his son Ezra to complete the minyan on Friday nights, and lends his strength and talents to putting up the sukkah every year. According to another old- timer, Martin Rosenfeld, who joined Chabad within a few weeks of Eddie, “He’s been an asset to the shul from its very beginnings, always willing to lend his talents whenever and wherever they’re needed.”
Born in Nottingham in l964, to a single mother, Eddie was adopted in London by Donal Nathan and his wife Sonja when he was three months old. He grew up in London. Visible as he is, his family history is probably little known. About that history he says, “We’re poster boys for the wandering Jew. Anything that happened in Jewish history in the past l50 years, my family was involved in.”
Arrested by the Nazis, his maternal grandfather Leo Alpern was thrown out of Germany and exiled to Poland. Unwanted there, he was exiled to a no man’s land between Poland and Germany. Eddie’s mother, Sonja, took an historic journey at the age of 4, sent with her brother and sisters on the first Kindertransport to a foster home in England. His grandparents went along as chaperones, settling in Devon. Considered hostile aliens in the new country, his grandfather established himself nevertheless, as so many thousands of Jews were wont to do in so many cities and countries to which they were exiled, working first as a chazzan and caretaker in a shul and then as a bellboy in a hotel in Devon. After the war, he was reunited with his children.
Eddie’s father, Donal Nathan, was born and raised in Cork, Ireland, where Eddie still has cousins. Donal met his wife, Sonja, in London, where they settled until Eddie was 5. In 1970, Israel beckoned, and on the last voyage of the famous Zim line’s ship THE DAN, Eddie and his parents and his younger brother and sister, left Marseille for Israel, settling in Kfar Chabad. “It was an ideological move,” Eddie says, who recounts that the family moved from there to Rechovot, ending up in Gush Etzion. Growing up in Israel, Eddie had an thoroughgoing Jewish education through high school, He served in the Israeli Army from, l983-86, the tail end of the war in Lebanon.
The summer of l987 was a landmark year in Eddie’s life. It was a year in which the Jewish concept of bashert found its mark with Susan, 25, a schoolteacher and an American volunteer from Vineland, New Jersey and the 23-year-old Eddie. “My father,” recalls Eddie laughingly, “thought Susan said she was from IRELAND, mistaking her VINELAND for my father’s birthplace. He invited her for Shabbat dinner.”
The rest is history. By December of that year, Eddie’s family legacy –the speed with which his ancestors uprooted themselves and settled in a new land—took hold for the young couple. Unable to bear the separation from Susan, Eddie packed his meager belongings and his life savings and flew the now defunct Pan Am to New Jersey to reunite with Susan. They were married that spring.
Susan and Eddie have two children, Ezra, fifteen-and- a- half, and Ilana, fourteen- and–a-half. Both attend Cherry Hill East. Eddie has been assistant store manager for Rite-Aid for the past l7 years.
“If my children presented me with the same romantic scenario as I presented to my parents,” laughs Eddie, “I’d say to them ‘good luck’. I’d offer them the same opportunity my parents offered me.”
What was Eddie looking for in Chabad? And what did he find? “When I was 8 or 9 years old,” he recalls, “my dad and a few other men were starting a shul, Ohel Shai it was called, named after the late chief rabbi of our kibbutz. I had the same feeling about Chabad that I remembered about that minyan—the small group developed, the core got bigger and bigger, but it remained very personal… with Dinie and Mendy warm and understanding and open to whoever and whatever you were. Thank you very much for helping me with my personal growth.”