DAVID AND LINDA ROITMAN
By Helen Belitsky
A nascent ambition and determination spurred David Roitman early on, though he grew up in the steadily declining 1940’s Boynton Avenue Bronx neighborhood , with its pre-war apartment buildings and neglected playing area benches.
David was inspired by a hard-working, ambitious father, who, after working in the family paper business, went into business for himself. He prospered, finally merging his new business with the family business and becoming its president and major partner.
“It was his life’s work,” recalls David. “It was always a struggle, and it was no life of luxury. Like many businesses, it exposed the seamy side of human nature, but my father, along with many other Jewish families, managed to maintain his values, though many of them did not know from where the money for food would come.”
David loved Hebrew school and was drawn to yiddishkeit. In his neighborhood Hebrew school, boys started cheder when they were 10, which David did. In his last year of cheder, along with the other boys studying for their bar mitzvah, he remained after class four days a week, to review and be tested for the event. He was the first in his synagogue to both recite the haftorah and daven all of shacharis.
The ambition and discipline with which David was blessed expressed itself in his school career as well. “As I moved from class to class,” recalls David, “I realized that I had nothing in common with my junior high school classmates. I knew if I stayed there, I’d be pulled down, rather than moving ahead. Kids who wanted to get ahead,” he continued, “moved into music class. I decided to audition, with thoughts of playing in the brass section.”
As it turned out, the brass section was full, and David auditioned for the string section – successfully, and became a viola player. He became proficient, and playing a Haydn sonata, he auditioned for a music scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music. He won a scholarship to a famous music camp, and auditioned successfully for the All City Orchestra, which played once a year at Carnegie Hall.
Music was magic for the young boy. “I marveled at composers who could hear these sounds and write them down,” he recalls with feeling. “I fell in love with opera and with the familiar stories on which the operas were based. I came to see Bach as pure math.”
Linda, David’s wife of 43 and a half years, grew up in Queens, the daughter of immigrant parents from the Ukraine and Austria. Her father, Benjamin Lomazoff, she says was “a real neighborhood pharmacist on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Among her warmest memories are of the times she spent at his old-fashioned soda fountain counter. Members of the Forest Hills Jewish Center, the family moved to a private home in Queens when she was 5. Her parents observed the laws of kashrut and attended High Holy Day services.
Linda planned to prepare herself for a teaching career, and her mother urged her to attend Cornell University, which had an excellent child development program. She received her B.S. in child development, and went on for a Master’s in early childhood education at Columbia University.
Cornell, which had one of the finest engineering programs in the country, was the pinnacle of David’s academic aspirations, and he was gratified to gain acceptance. His family couldn’t afford the tuition, and his father refusing to apply for financial aid, took out a loan instead, as did Linda’s parents. They were both awarded regional and state scholarships that covered 20 percent of tuition only.
While in her second year at Cornell, Linda met David, a third year student. It was bashert. They clicked on the first date. They were married in December 1966.
David dropped his engineering aspirations after three semesters, finding it too confining and unexciting. He transferred to the liberal arts curriculum, majoring in economics. When David was in his senior year, his father begged him to go into the business he had so assiduously built. David acceded. Living with Linda in Queens, he traveled up to two hours each way in rush hour traffic, and joined his parents in the business, which was then in Brooklyn.
As an ROTC commissioned officer, David went into the Service in March, 1968 as a second lieutenant. “It was different, it was interesting, it was fascinating,” he says, looking back on what became a challenging and at times dangerous venture. He escaped a one-year tour of Vietnam by volunteering for what was billed as a “3-year luxury assignment in Panama.” He accepted it because the first alternative would have been a separation from Linda, who was pregnant with her first. It was with the understanding that he would later serve in Vietnam, which extended his army obligation by a year and three months.
The assignment turned out to be with the Green Berets, a challenging and dangerous venture, which required parachuting into South American and Latin American territory from time to time. It turned into a life transforming experience for David.
“My dangerous assignment with the Green Berets,” he asserts, “taught me that we were capable of more things we ever could have dreamt of, and shattered forever any images the world harbored of the helpless Eastern European Jews who were led to concentration camps. This is not who we really are, I told myself. We can rise and find the strength and wherewithal to do what any other people can do.
“A Green Beret has to be in perfect physical condition at all times.” Continues David, describing the challenge. “He could be called to readiness in the jungles of Panama that are geographically more challenging than Vietnam.
“I did get through Green Beret training,” David recalls proudly, “though the days were grueling. At the end of the day, I could barely crawl the stairs to my home, shower and go to bed, watching as Linda assiduously polished my brass belt buckle night after night. When you think things are insurmountable, you learn you can do it.”
“And along the way,” he continues, “we became more committed Jews and more sensitive to our Torah experience. It was a transforming experience – I was no longer just a sheltered Jewish boy from the Bronx. The Green Berets taught me to handle mental stress. I became more worldly and more in tune with the non-Jewish world.”
Linda and David moved 13 times in 6 years. They developed a special family closeness granted to families who are forced into a unique self-sufficiency. Their oldest son Brian was born in Panama, the only white baby in the nursery. Mitchell was born in Oklahoma and Ari in Cherry Hill. “Those years are filled with good memories,” says Linda.
Life took on a different hue for David and Linda when they moved to Cherry Hill in January, 1972, both professionally and religiously. They were well-primed for their new responsibilities in both arenas. David’s dad had purchased the Grant Paper Co. in Philadelphia, and David became involved in all aspects of the business, as his Dad began wintering in Florida.
“I had to run the business,” recalls David, “which had encountered badly muddled accounting problems. I struggled to get it going – and I met the challenge of rescuing the business from crisis, though it took several years.”
Cherry Hill offered new religious opportunities for the family. Their Jewish life, Jewish consciousness and Jewish practice flourished. “We didn’t plan a Jewish life,” says David, but we drew closer and closer to tradition.”
David and Linda joined Beth El, enrolled their two children in the Kellman Academy nursery school, and developed an increasing circle of warm friendships.
And then a new presence arrived on the scene, which was to dramatically alter the lives of Linda and David and their family. Rabbi Mendy Mangel established the first area Chabad in a storefront in Cherry Hill, and David began what was to be a lifetime of inspiration and study with his religious and spiritual mentor.
“I was totally captivated the first time I met Mendy,” says David. “He fed into my own early learnings. His depth of knowledge is extraordinary. No matter what challenge you offer, he not only has an answer but a persuasive solution. All of this – and his style is almost self-deprecating.”
Though it took Linda a while to feel comfortable with the mechitza, the warm welcome the family received from Dinie and Mendy – including an invitation early on to their Seder – far outweighed any initial adjustments. The Mangels were kind enough to make Sheva B’rachos for, our children, Mitchell and Jamie,” Linda recounts. “I will always remember Dinie pushing her stroller that bore bagels and challahs for the Kiddush. We began to come on a regular basis.” When the present Chabad synagogue opened, David walked the 2.3 miles each way every Shabbat.
“Once the new building was established,” continues Linda, I really go into the work that needed to be done, including painting the walls. This was now our spiritual home and we came to Chabad exclusively. I accommodated to the service, and I welcomed the shul’s diversity.”
“I feel I owe everything to Mendy,” David says. “He made Judaism beautiful, and was the greatest support in my life during the two-and-a-half years of my grandson Kerav’s illness. He allowed me to talk bluntly and challengingly during those years.”
Kerav was both the greatest miracle and the greatest tragedy of David and Linda’s life. The child, born to Brian and Sonia in 2006, had non-functioning kidneys. The wonder child survived for two-and-a-half years with the benefits of pioneering medical treatments never before ventured, including a home dialysis protocol specific to hospital use, which Brian pushed the FDA to achieve. Living and enduring day by bay and month to month, Kerav was a pioneer, and the wonder of doctors. Each month of survival had the doctors baffled. Their belief in miracles was born.
“One thing that always struck us,” says David, “was this baby’s personality. He smiled and hugged and did the sign language for love. He was affectionate and happy, could squeal excitedly when we benched after meals. He was a very spiritual baby.”
Brian and Sonia were at Kerav’s did for the months and years of his survival. David and Linda lived in Connecticut with the family, Rebecca, Max and Ben, for seven and a half months. “For two-and-a-half years, Mendy and I talked about the miracle of Kerav’s survival,” says David. “Sonia and Brian’s faith was superhuman.”
On the first day of the Nine Days of Av, Kerav was taken by God. Bruised and heartbroken, David says, “I was angry, trying to understand why G-d brought him through agonizing crises to this end. But I realized that Hashem was acknowledging in many ways that Kerav was very special to Him. The first of Av was, after all, Rosh Chodesh, and in this case, Shabbos as well.!
The walk to the gravesite was dampened by a sprinkling of rain from the heavens. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mendy told David. “G-D’s tears were falling for your grandson.” As the entourage left the gravesite and walked back to the cars, a magnificent rainbow appeared. “I felt Kerav was smiling at us,” says Linda.
On the first of Av this past summer, the family observed the baby’s first yahrzeit. The child’s memory has been honored in extraordinary ways. Brian and Sonia and the children received consistent support during the life of Kerav from the Stamford Jewish community. The Roitman family, with contributions from the Jewish community, donated the Keravtanu Chaim Roitman Children’s Library at Stamford Chabad. The Young Israel of Stamford commissioned a Torah in Kerav’s memory. The children, bruised in so many ways during the tragedy, began to heal.
“It is so gratifying to see how close the children and their families are,” says David.” On the same day, on January 22, a new miracle was granted to the Roitman family. Keren Temimah was born to Sonia and Brian, and Ari and Rebecca celebrated the birth of Benjamin Lev, their first.
There is a chapter in David and Linda’s life that is perhaps now known in it entirety, but it is one that speaks to the couple’s charity, compassion, diligence and wisdom. The tireless work they did on behalf of Cherry Hill’s newly resettled Soviet Jewish ‘émigré’s in the early 90’s is not chronicled in any official document. But it is indelibly recorded in the hearts of those psychologically wounded families, whose morals were destroyed by 70 years of an abusive Communist regime, and who struggled with the difficult physical and psychological adjustment to their new country.
David and Linda were among the volunteers recruited by the Jewish Family and Children’s Service and by their synagogue, Congregation Beth El. In 1988, David had retired from the business, and he and Linda’s work with Soviet Jewry took up their entire day. They prepared living quarters for numerous families, obtained furniture, filled their refrigerators with food and their pantries with supplies, and shopped for clothing. They set up medical appointments, helped with laborious job searches, and schooled them in their new language.
“The Russian books I inherited from my father came in handy,” recalls Linda. “David started studying Russian in order to communicate with the families we helped.”
“There was so much need,” David remembers, “and we just kept on going. We became the program. We helped the young ones with scholarships so they could enter the Solomon Schecter School. And we realized that the critical need centered on the 16-and 17-year olds. They needed to get into college, for they would be the future support of their families.”
And so began the work of enrolling these young people in college, work that David took on his own shoulders. “I took over their lives one by one,” David recalls, “and they literally lived here. I picked them up at school, we went into my computer room, and worked until it was time to go to bed.”
Over the course of several years, David used all of his university connections, and sometimes battled the administration, and got four young people into Cornell University. “You’ve got to take a chance on these young people,” I urged.
Where are these young people now? They are attorneys, businessmen, architects and nutritionists. Many are still in touch with the Roitmans, as are their families.
David and Linda have many accomplishments, but of their work with Soviet Jews they say, “This is the best work we’ve ever done.”
The families they helped would agree. Ann and Mark Vershinin emigrated to Cherry Hill in the early 90’s with their sons Alex, 17 and Vlad, 10. “David,” Anna recounts, “offered us all kinds of help, but all we wanted was education for Alex. Linda and David adopted him. It was so amazing to receive help from people who live not just for themselves but for other people. We came to America and knew nothing. Every single day they took care of us – and not just us – they did it for so many people, without formality, but from the bottom of their hearts.”