Yiddishe Mamas (37 page)

Charlee Minkin was born November 13, 1981. She comes from Half Moon Bay, California. But don’t mess with her. Charlee, like her family, started judo at five, following the path blazed by her brother, Benzam, and sisters Zesa and Davina.

They’re tough like their mother, Carolyn Minkin, and their late father, Stephen Minkin, a Vietnam vet and Alaskan bush pilot. The family had planned to settle in Alaska, until his tragic death in a 1987 plane crash.

Mama Carolyn eventually became a black belt and the kids became judo champions. Davina trained in Israel for a year and worked with Yael Arad, an Israeli woman who won her country’s first Olympic silver medal in judo in 1992.

“That’s how we communicate—with touching and throwing and tripping and choking,” a laughing Carolyn Minkin told reporter Joe Eskenazi of the
Jewish News Weekly
of northern California.

Charlee has endured several surgeries on her knee and trained at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs while attending the University of Colorado. She won gold medals at several important 2003 tournaments and represented the United States in the Athens Olympics. She was, however, eliminated after she lost a match by the smallest of margins to Raffaella Imbriani of Germany.

As a youngster, Charlee lost herself in the sport after three years of watching her mother and her siblings. Two days after she took her first official lesson, she won her first tournament. Carolyn, a huge supporter of her children, was always on the job: carting them from Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco, to judo training, to weekend tournaments, and to Sunday school, while holding down a teaching job.

Table tennis was organized as a modern sport in the 1920s. It proved very popular with Jews. Lady Swaythling (1879-1965), president of the English Table Tennis Federation, donated the men’s world team cup (1926), which bears her name. Her son, Ivor Montagu, was the first chairman of the Table Tennis International Federation, and held the post for over forty years.

Considered the world’s greatest table tennis champion, Angelica Rozeanu won seventeen world titles. Rozeanu was born in Bucharest on October 15, 1921. She won her first international competition in 1938 at the Hungarian Open. Although her career was interrupted when the Nazis took over Romania, she kept training after the war, and married Hungarian Lou Rozeanu. During the 1950s she continued to win and served as a sports reporter for
Romania Libera.
She also received many sports honors by her government. In 1960, she and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Michaela, moved to Israel, where she then became a coach. Rozeanu is a member of both the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and the Table Tennis Hall of Fame. In 1998, she was cited in the
Guinness Book of World Records,
for holding the most women’s singles World Champion wins (six). Her daughter Michaela became a computer engineer in Haifa.

Activist and tennis enthusiast Gladys Heldman released the first issue of
World Tennis
magazine on May 13, 1953. A tennis player herself, she got into the sport in 1954 and went on to play at Wimbledon after giving birth to her two daughters.

Gladys Medalie Heldman was born May 13, 1922, in New York City. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, and in 1942 married Julius Heldman, a former United States junior tennis champion. Her daughters, Carrie and Julie, were also accomplished players—Julie was ranked number five in the world in 1969 and in 1974.

During the 1950s and 1960s her magazine’s goal was to develop equality for women in tennis. Heldman was concerned over the disparity in prize money between men and women,
and in 1970, she competed with the U.S. Open by organizing independent tournaments. She created the Virginia Slims Tour for female pros, but after the women who competed in her events were met with reprisals, three years of lawsuits and negotiations followed. Finally, the Virginia Slims Tour merged with the United States Lawn Tennis Association and in 1973, both sexes finally played in the same events for equal prizes.

In the mid-1970s, Heldman sold the
World Tennis
magazine to CBS. In 1958, her achievements were recognized with the J. P. Allen Memorial Award of the Lawn Tennis Writers’ Association of America. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1979, as well as the National Tennis Hall of Fame. Heldman died in 2003 in Santa Fe.

Grandmaster Susan Polgar earned her first checkmate when she was only four and a half and has since taken on the likes of Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, Garry Kasparov, and Anatoly Karpov.

She believes that chess is the game of life and has devoted herself to being an ambassador for the game. She established the Polgar Chess Center in Forest Hills, New York, where she teaches students and hosts major chess events. She has also established the Susan Polgar Foundation to introduce the social, educational, and competitive benefits of chess to American children, in particular, girls.

The preference to educate females about the games no doubt dates back to her experience as a Jewish woman chess
player in her birthplace in Budapest, Hungary. Although chess was a man’s game, she was the first to break through, but even though she won awards (in Hungary), acceptance was not forthcoming. Polgar, born April 19, 1969, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, felt the subtle sting of anti-semitism early in her life.

Opposition to breaking the gender barrier was more open. At age fifteen, she was the top-ranked female in the world, but acceptance didn’t come until 1988 when she, and her sisters, Sofia and Judit, won the gold medal in the World Chess Olympiad for Hungary—a first victory over the Soviets. Then the government turned them into heroes. Polgar won nine other Olympic medals and was Women’s World Champion four times.

Although the birth of her sons Tom and Leeam led Polgar to focus more on promotion, in July 2005, she broke four international records at a single match in Palm Beach, Florida.

In October 2005, she joined former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev and seven-time World Champion Anatoly Karpov in Lindsborg, Kansas, to promote “Chess for Peace.” Polgar also participated in the second Clash of the Titans—Battle of the Genders match against Karpov, with Gorbachev making the first move for Karpov.

The woman whose name is a household word in Hungary and among chess enthusiasts everywhere is also one of the best-selling chess authors in the world. She has also released DVDs, is a columnist, and is a three-time winner of the Chess Oscar.

Some Jews favored more “exotic” fare. In which sport do Jews comprise a quarter of the top-ranked? Sumo wrestling? Feh! More guts are needed for
this
sport—competitive eating—which is growing fast thanks to ESPN’s coverage of Nathan’s hot dog-eating contest and the [chicken] Wing Bowl. A top competitor is Don Lerman. Often attending these events dressed as Moses, he’s downed twelve matzo balls in two minutes and fifty seconds, breaking the world record.

Eating … a sport? According to Leon Feingold, ranked nineteenth in the world, pro eating requires competitiveness,
capacity, speed, and technique. “Jews are very competitive. They are intelligent, which makes them approach … technique … intelligently.
And they have Jewish mothers, which means they can’t leave the table until they’re done eating. This takes care of speed and capacity.”

On September 28, 1980, Ida Mintz, seventy-four, became the oldest woman to finish a marathon! Coached by her son, Dr. Alan Mintz, she joined over 4,600 runners in Chicago. A family affair, Ida raced with her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson—the first three-generation family to run a marathon. She then went on to run more marathons until she was eighty-five, when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Though ill, she gathered the strength to rise from her wheelchair to dance with her grandson at his wedding. She passed away on the eve of her eighty-sixth birthday. The last fifteen years of her life were filled with remarkable achievements and good health right up until her fatal illness.

I
n 1914, Claude Israel, sixteen, went to the Fiji Islands from Australia to join his uncle, Henry Marks, one of a group of successful Jewish importers and exporters. In 1914, he returned to Sydney to marry his bride, Doris Abraham, and brought her back to Fiji, where she raised two children in a country where cannibalism existed. During World War II, Doris, who was keenly interested in politics, ran a canteen for the 50,000 American soldiers stationed in the Fiji Islands—which included marines training for their landing in Guadalcanal.

Dr. Fanny Reading was born in Russia into a family tormented by pogroms. Fanny’s father left for London and then Australia. When Fanny was three, her mother took the courageous and difficult journey to Australia, surprising her husband, who was thrilled by the reunion. She gave birth to three sons “down under” and despite financial hardship, Fanny received her medical degree in 1922 and joined her brother’s practice. Within a year, she became the force behind creating the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia. She was also dedicated to social welfare, and in 1961, Dr. Reading received an MBE [Member of the British Empire], an honor conferred by Queen Elizabeth II.

Dr. Aviva Gileadi, renowned nuclear physicist, spent years teaching at the Technion, Israel’s famed institution of higher learning. She was born in Hungary during the reign of Nazi Germany. When Aviva was handed a shovel and told to dig, a former classmate warned her that she was digging her own grave—so she ran to the forest and remained in hiding. When Israel gained independence, she was determined to help. She completed her education in the United States, taught at Technion, married, and had two children. Soon after, the government of Puerto Rico asked her to establish a nuclear physics department in Santurce. She accepted, knowing she’d one day return to Israel, where her children would continue their studies.

In 1947, as a young woman, Shamsi Moradpour Hekmat, along with a small group of other women in Tehran, Iran, vowed to “to wash off the rust of ignorance, disease, and poverty from the innocent faces of the children of the
mahalleh
(ghetto).” They organized the Jewish Ladies’ Organization of Iran. She and her cofounders set up daycare centers for children of needy families, started training classes for nurses and nursery school teachers, and organized literacy classes for women. Hekmat also engaged in the fight for women’s rights, in particular the right to inherit from a male. This fight was won in 1966, when Israeli Sephardi Chief Rabbi Nissim came to Iran.

In 2005, for the first time the 77th Academy Awards honored a Jewish person of color. Sophie Okonedo was nominated for her work in
The Hotel Rwanda,
an acclaimed low-budget film about a hotel manager and his wife who housed 1,200 Tutsi refugees during the Rwanda genocide. Okonedo, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, was born in 1969 and raised by her British Jewish mother (she wore the Star of David during a Letterman appearance), and has a Nigerian father. She saw similarities in the film with the Jewish Holocaust and researched her role at the Belgian Shoah Museum. In 2005, Natalie Portman was the only other Jewish actor nominated and competing with Okanedo. (However, Cate Blanchett won for
The Aviator.)
Okonedo has one daughter, Aoife, whose father is Irish film editor Eoin Martin.

On December 15, 1997, Janet Rosenberg from Chicago was elected president of Guyana.

She was born in 1920 and married Cheddi Jagan, a Guyanese, in 1943. In 1950, the couple founded the People’s Progressive Party. Her husband was elected prime minister, but was deposed by Churchill. Husband and wife were jailed and placed under house arrest several times. In 1992, Cheddi Jagan was again elected prime minister when fair elections were held. Five years later, after his death, Rosenberg was elected to the post but then resigned for health reasons in 1999. A biographical film was made about Rosenberg, titled
Thunder in Guyana.
Her son Joey is also in politics in Guyana. The Guyanese consider this Jewish mama the mother of their nation.

W
e are all unique beings within our ethno-types. However, some have said and done the unusual, in achievement, comment, events—or just how they’ve chosen to live their lives. The following are surprising, fascinating, and at times remarkable facts that involve Jews and mothers and Jewish mothers.

Most of us know (and tell our children) that
A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
was no prize in school.

Albert was born in 1879, in Ulm Donnau, Germany. He was so backward in speech and math that he needed remedial study. Naturally this worried his parents, Hermann and Pauline Einstein. Einstein’s grandmother thought her grandson’s head was “Much too fat!” while his mother, Pauline, worried that baby Albert’s head was lopsided. “Alright, OK, so he’ll take violin lessons,” must have run through
her
head when she insisted her child, the
“nebekhl,”
study the instrument. Although young Albert initially hated the lessons, he grew to love music.