In Memory of George Harris

Duty and Justice

One memorable anecdote from a different era of my rabbinic career relates to becoming senior rabbi of a synagogue. I had aimed for that position as a goal and once I got there, was interested in finding ways to make immediate and impactful change for the better. I spoke to a mentor who said, “New senior rabbis often have a small window to break one thing and rebuild it. What has the best chance of succeeding”

That was easy to answer. As a rabbi who has always placed education and the value of Jewish learning at the center of my work, I answered him immediately: “The Religious School!”

I had been saying playfully for a couple years already that no kid between the ages of 6 and 18 had any interesting in being “religious” or going to “school” after school. I mean, this was the late 90s and early 2000s when branding was king. In addition, this particular learning program met on Sundays and Wednesdays which meant that on Shabbat specifically, there was no regular, consistent educational program for kids and families. A typical Saturday at the synagogue gave the impression, especially at a well-attended bar or bat mitzvah, that the house was full. But really, there was a relatively small aggregation of synagogue members, the bar/bat mitzvah family, and then 150 or so guests each week. Without the bar/bat mitzvah rite, this small aggregation of 15-20 regular members would meet and worship on their own. They were learned themselves and in fact didn’t always need a rabbi to lead their service. This of course, is the laudatory goal of any Jewish institution: to learn in order to teach. After all, this is what we recite daily in our morning prayers:

אָבִֽינוּ הָאָב הָרַחֲמָן הַמְ֒רַחֵם רַחֵם עָלֵֽינוּ וְתֵן בְּלִבֵּֽנוּ לְהָבִין וּלְהַשְׂכִּיל לִשְׁמֹֽעַ לִלְמֹד וּלְ֒לַמֵּד לִשְׁמֹר וְלַעֲשׂוֹת וּלְקַיֵּם אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵי תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָתֶֽךָ בְּאַהֲבָה:

Our Father, merciful Father, Who acts with compassion, have compassion on us and put into our hearts to comprehend, and to be intellectually creative, to listen, to learn, and to teach, to preserve, to practice, and to fulfill all the words of instruction in Your Torah with love.

So, with a small group of parents and leaders, we started asking questions would shed light on a new path forward for learning.

What if we moved religious school from Sunday to Saturday? At the time, nearly 350 kids were enrolled in the Sunday/Wednesday program. Imagine a sanctuary filled with kids and their parents — their very presence would be double the size of guests and convey a sense of participation and vibrancy that would joyful and prideful to experience.

What if rather than offer only one option of learning during the week — Wednesday — we offered classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as well? Families and their kids juggle so many activities from learning enrichment, sports, and arts that creating more opportunities for connection could actually increase participation.

What if we had Tot Shabbat — a popular monthly sing-a-long for pre-school families — every Saturday morning, just at the time when parents of little ones are DYING to get out of the house and do something, ANYTHING, to not go stir-crazy?

What if we built a faculty of well-trained teachers, not just show-up-in-the-nick-of-time Hebrew school teachers? Imagine a faculty that worked together all week long, taught a number of classes to a number of grades on different days of the week, creating opportunities for collaboration and reinvention of traditional educational approaches.

Our questions led to a proposal to be brought before the board: To redesign religious school in its entirety, with the main goal being to increase family-based education throughout the week at the synagogue, with the culmination of each week being a robust and participatory Shabbat experience for the whole community. There were questions and objections, to be sure. Change is rarely easy. My favorite objection was a parent who said, “Sunday is my alone time for yoga and sex and you’re screwing that up!” Well, I answered, we’re all being challenged to be creative in new ways.

Kidding aside, there was basic agreement on moving forward but there were understandable concerns from the traditional old guard that we were proposing to change something that had never been changed. It had ALWAYS been Religious School. It was ALWAYS on Sundays. That kind of thing.

One such member of the old guard, and a past president of the synagogue with whom I had a great relationship, stood up at the board meeting the night of the vote and announced, “You don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs! I support the rabbi’s new idea.”

That settled that.

Twenty years since those deliberations, you can walk past Congregation Beth Elohim on any given Saturday morning and find family educational programs and worship programs bursting at the seams — on Shabbat! It remains one of my proudest achievements and I have my late friend and old guard member George Harris to thank in part for that.

George died on May 26 at age 98. A Jew from Beechhurst, Queens, George graduated from Bayside High School and joined the U.S. Marines, serving his country in the Second World War, as he and his family always said, from a sense of “duty and justice.” A graduate of Queens College and Harvard Law, George loved telling me stories about the war years, law school, his law career and long-serving work on local Democratic politics in Brooklyn. He was a brilliant man and an avid reader who adored his wife, daughters and grandkids.

We worked on two projects together over the years, one related to scholarship and the other dedicated to honoring the dead. George had a law school friend on the board of the Lucius Littauer Foundation and was therefore instrumental in helping secure philanthropic support to publish a festschrift in honor of our mutual friend and teacher, Rabbi Dr. Stanley Dreyfus, who had served CBE’s neighbor, Union Temple and was a placement director as well as prayerbook committee chair for the Central Conference of American Rabbis. My friend and colleague Rabbi Dr. Dan Bronstein solicited and edited the articles for Rabbi Dreyfus and with George’s generous support, we were able to publish a special edition of the CCAR Journal. It was just the kind of quiet scholarly contribution (one such example linked here) that befit a man of Stanley’s humility and George’s reverence for rabbinic wisdom.

Rabbi Jonathan Stein, of blessed memory, wrote about Dan and me in the introduction to the festschrift, “They labored long and hard to reach this moment. They solicited all the articles that follow, and with great perseverance and determination, followed up with each author. They collected, reviewed and helped to edit each submission. They personally raised the additional funds that were necessary to make this Festschrift a reality… Rabbi Dreyfus is among that handful of our colleagues whose unique combination of erudition, intelligence, and humanity has earned him such respect and honor. As Stanley and his beloved wife Marianne enjoy the fruits of their many years of service, we wish them good health and long life. Would that each of us earn the affection and Shem Tov that would motivate our students to produce a Festschrift such as this one.”

And it was George Harris, behind the scenes and not named, from whom the “additional funds” were raised, while we ate lunch at the “H Club,” heard stories about Marine basic training, being a Jew at Harvard after war, the trench warfare of Brooklyn Democratic politics, and always, the latest news of the world. Never one to gossip, George was always laser focused on the task before us.

The other project we collaborated on had to do with recovering the lost cemetery plots in the Beth Elohim section of Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. Sometime in the past, George had chaired the committee tasked with trying to get the plots back from a family which had been given some 150 of them in exchange for loaning the Temple money in 1929, just after the market crashed, so that the congregation could complete the building of the Temple House at 8th and Garfield — an approximately $100,000 loan that would be the equivalent of $2 million today. The deeds to the plots remained in the possession of this family, which over the course of the 20th century, had left Judaism entirely. Needling through the file George gave me, I called the only living relative of this family that I could find — a practicing Episcopalian, whose grandfather had made the initial loan, who said to me when I called, “I’ll give you the plots for free if you can just figure out the legality of it all.”

We contacted our fellow member Nick Pisano, who was then working at the Green-Wood Cemetery and understood New York State cemetery law as well as anyone. Nick and congregational officers filed the necessary paperwork with the state and after a few bureaucratic steps, were able to reclaim the ownership of the plots, the sale of which supports the synagogue and its activities to this day. While George is buried up in Syracuse, his brother Jack is in those plots in Queens and every time I pass through to visit and say Kaddish for old friends there, I stop by to see Jack as well.

One of the last times I saw George was around the time I made the decision to leave CBE in 2015. I’m a restless soul and ten years was a good long run for me. I’ll never forget what George said to me at the celebration after my last service: “Don’t leave. You’re having a midlife crisis. Buy a sports car!”

We had a good laugh and gave each other a bear hug, like two guys who respect those who serve from a place of “duty and justice.”

My deepest condolences to his daughters Maud and Louise and to his grandsons Samuel and Jesse. Zichrono livracha. May George Harris’s memory be a blessing.

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An obituary for George, published by CBE here follows.

“George grew up in Beechhurst, a neighborhood in Queens, NY. After graduating from Bayside High School, George served in the U.S. Marine Corp as a Private First Class during World War II out of a sense of duty to fight for his country and for justice abroad. Upon his honorable discharge, George studied government at Queens College and Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude. There, he met his wife, Katherine Safford Harris, the love of his life with whom he was married for 71 years, who predeceased him on March 15, 2024.

George graduated from Harvard Law School, received an MBA in Business Administration from NYU, and obtained an LLM in trade regulation from NYU Law School, after which he became Partner at the firms of Burke & Burke and Langer & Charles. He loved the law and serving his clients, and reveled in tricky legal issues to which he could put his sharp mind. George could often be found on warm summer nights engaging in spirited discussions with family and friends on law, politics, and history on the front porch of his summer home in Heath, Massachusetts. He loved the opera, wine, and Kathy’s wonderful meals, and was a voracious reader, reading books until he no longer physically could.

George believed giving back and fighting for just outcomes was part of being a virtuous human being. He served as President of Congregation Beth Elohim and later was a member of Temple Concord in Syracuse, NY. He was Distinguished Trustee on the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Hospital Center and served on Community School Board 15 in Park Slope. He helped found the West Brooklyn Independent Democrats, ran for local office, and gave throughout his life to progressive causes and candidates. George believed deeply in putting in the hard work to leave the world a better place than he found it.

He and Kathy had two daughters, Maud White and Louise Harris, who they loved deeply and who they taught to be similarly empathetic and intellectually curious. George is survived by Maud and Louise, his son-in-law Alvin White, and his grandsons Samuel White and Jesse White. George’s family loved him and will miss him very much. He was predeceased by his brother, Jack, and his parents, Harry and Beatrice Harris.

George is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Syracuse, NY, where he and Kathy presided in their final years. In lieu of flowers, the family asks donations be provided in George’s memory to the Harris Fund at Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, NY.”