Arthur Markewitz

Note: March interview Tape 2 audio file is missing; September interview continues an additional 28 minutes longer than transcript. Remaining audio is of very poor quality, too difficult to hear to transcribe.

Glazer: Mr. Markewitz, do you remember your grandparents? 
MARKEWITZ: I remember my grandfather, my mother’s father, very well, and my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, quite well. I must have been six or seven when she died, but I had my grandfather with me. He lived to 94, and I was married, probably 33 or 34 years of age, before he passed away. 

Glazer: What do you remember about them? 
MARKEWITZ: I remember the stories that my grandfather used to tell me. That side of the family migrated from Alsace Lorraine to the United States. My grandmother on my mother’s side was named Bowman, and they came across and lived in England for several generations and then migrated to this country. As near as I know, my grandfather Lachman [sp?] came almost directly from Alsace Lorraine to the United States. They met as children coming across the Isthmus of Panama by mule team and then up the west coast by clipper ship. They were married later in San Francisco. 

Glazer: Why did she stay in England? 
MARKEWITZ: I never had an explanation of that, except that the family apparently settled and did very well. They prospered financially and had a pretty good social position and all. 

My grandfather never gave me much of his background or his family’s background. He did tell me about coming up to Oregon, coming to places like Jacksonville in the days of the old stage coaches. He told of how the places were covered with sod so that when the Indians attacked them, if they used flaming arrows shot on the roof, the sod would act as fire protection. He told me about the days of the Gold Rush and the vigilantes in San Francisco, and some of the characters that were hanged and so forth. He made it very interesting. 

I think one of the interesting factors there was that my great-grandfather, in other words his father, was a tailor in San Francisco, and my aunt, who was my mother’s sister, was married to a travelling salesman. When I was a little boy they made a trip, and my uncle went in to sell shoes to the Santa Clara Mission. It was a real hot day, and my aunt was sitting out in this old car that they drove. One of the brothers came out and asked if she wouldn’t like to come in where it was shady and have a cool drink, which she gladly accepted. Then just as a hunch she said, “My father, Lachman the tailor, used to tell us how he made robes for the monks at Santa Clara.” And by golly, the priest went back into their old books and found receipts and records of how he did that. 

The other side of my family came out to San Francisco two different ways. My father’s mother came across the plains by mule team from Missouri. Apparently they had stopped in Missouri because they mentioned Missouri several times. My father’s father came around the Horn, and that family background — aside from the other side being Alsatian, my dad’s family was from Hamburg, but I don’t know where my paternal grandmother came from. Her name was a very common Jewish name. I can’t think of it. I won’t take your time right now. If it comes to me I’ll tell you. 

Glazer: Why did they come to Oregon? 
MARKEWITZ: My grandfather liked Oregon. As I said, he used to come up here riding stagecoach. He liked it up here, and he came up and he read and studied for law. There were no laws schools, or if there were he wasn’t enrolled. The law at that time was that if you worked in an attorney’s office for a given length of time and then took certain examinations you could qualify. Someplace we have his certificate qualifying to practice law in Oregon. I’m going to find it. That’s one of the things I am going to give to the archives. 

Glazer: [inaudible question about father’s family] 
MARKEWITZ: Dad’s family actually stayed in California. Dad was born in San Francisco, but as a little boy they moved to Sacramento and he was raised there. His father, my grandfather, was a coppersmith and practiced that trade. I don’t know how well he did. I never felt that the family was extremely wealthy, but they apparently were comfortable for those days, and my dad’s brother went to dental school. Of course, my dad helped him, and he worked too. He was a practicing dentist up until about 15 or 16 years ago when he died. They had an old family home in the Jewish section of San Francisco. My dad’s family and the Politzes came up here from Sacramento at the same time. I can remember I always called the old lady Politz, Grandma Politz. That’s another family you should really delve into a little bit here in town. It’s Politz [spells out]. There is one son surviving, Charles S. Politz. 

Glazer: What did a coppersmith do? 
MARKEWITZ: The only thing I remember was that as a little boy I used to play with a copper baby shoe he had made. When he passed his apprenticeship examination he had made that. I remember that the tongue of the shoe had a piece of emery paper in the back of it, and it was used for an ashtray. The emery paper was used for striking a match. I don’t know exactly all that he did. They went into jewelry making too, to some degree. He made rings and little vases and things like that. I do recall those things around the house. 

Glazer: What tales do you remember about Jacksonville? 
MARKEWITZ: Only that they stopped there, and it was really quite a refuge. They went in there once after an Indian attack. He told me about that. Apparently there was quite a bit of banditry on the trail too. They always had to be on guard for holdup people and things like that. There was a lot of gold in that country in those days. Quite a bit of it came out. Actually, I found out more about Jacksonville just by going up to the old cemetery and studying the headstones. When you go into the Masonic section, there are many, many Jewish names. It was interesting. Also there were Jewish names with crosses in the Catholic area, so apparently there were people who converted and followed Catholicism in that area. He didn’t tell me too much about it. He talked about places like Virginia City and places that are quite well known, in California. I can’t remember the name of the city now. At that time they called it Hangtown [now Placerville]. It was up on the banks of the Sacramento River. 

Glazer: What other things did he tell you about early Oregon? 
MARKEWITZ: He told me about the formation of the synagogue here. Some of the stories, of course, came to life to me when I read the book The Ties Between. One of the things that interested me the most — as I grew up and became very conscious of it — this had a lot of bearing on how Portland developed as a Jewish community. Although my dad came from German stock, my mother always said there was nothing as egotistical as a German Jew. She just didn’t like them, but nevertheless she married one. The German Jews set up kind of an “aristocracy” here in town. They lived all over the area. 

My dad came up here, incidentally, as a stock cutter, in other words a paper cutter for the Crocker Company, which was the founder of Crocker National Bank and Crocker Union Lithograph and so forth. He came up here as an apprentice. He served his apprenticeship in California. He told me that the first six months he received no pay at all. The second six months he received 50¢ a week, and then the second year he was getting $1 a week. That was good pay, and they worked a 48-hour week. They worked all day, six days a week, eight hours a day, so there was quite a bit of difference in that. 

But he came up here, and then the company sold out to the Lewis & Dryden Printing Company. Lewis & Dryden published a book which is quite famous, The Marine History of the Northwest, but they didn’t investigate the market for it before they printed it, and they must have been in $7,000 or $8,000 that they just couldn’t pay off. So my dad and the office manager of the company, a fellow by the name of Will Bushong, went to Mr. Dryden and paid him $7,000 for the company. They signed notes at the US National Bank — and that was the only thing they put up, just their signatures on the note, $3,500 apiece — and got it. Think of the difference in financing today. That’s how they got started in business. Then he became a solicitor, that’s what it was called in those days, a salesman for the company. Eventually he was the president of the company. 

The May family, from Albany, one branch of them had moved up here. The Mays and the Senders were cousins; there was intermarriage. I don’t know whether you have interviewed Arthur Senders or not. He’s gone now, but you should contact his family before they’re all gone. There are one or two of the May sisters still living, I believe. Anyway, that can come up later on. Mr. May came up here and wanted to get into business, so he bought in and Mr. Bushong sold most of his stock to Mr. May. So Markewitz and May carried on Bushong & Company after Bushong was gone, though his widow still carried some stock in the company. Dad came up here primarily to go into the printing and bookbinding business, and he stayed in it all his life. 

I remember he said that he never had any great means or became affluent until the ’20s. Then he had problems trying to figure what to do with money. He’d worked with his hands all these years and never became a money manager. One of his closest friends was Arthur Eppstein, who founded the Oregon Automobile Insurance Company. Mr. Eppstein and Mr. Milton Kahn advised Dad and were also some of his good customers. 

The company grew, and then he put in a furniture department. Mr. May managed that. That was office furniture and stationery. That went on. We were pushed into a position where we had to sell out and close out about 1959, but it was a good-sized company for many years. 

Incidentally, many of the things that they published would be of interest to Jewish history. They printed the old, I think it was called the North Shore or South Shore magazine [actually the West Shore]. It was founded by the grandfather of Leo and Millard Samuel, who are still living in the city. Leo, incidentally, is very sick, and I think he should be contacted as soon as he is well enough for an interview. 

Mr. Samuel founded the Oregon Insurance Company. That later became the Oregon Mutual Insurance Company. He was forced out by the other stockholders. Later they changed the name to Standard Insurance Company, which is the biggest life writer in the State of Oregon today. It was founded by a Jewish family. There’s a lot of interest there. 

One of the other things you were asking about was the formation of a lodge, the B’nai B’rith. The original B’nai B’rith was founded by the German-Jewish immigrants to Oregon. Then when the southeastern and Russian Jews started migrating to this country, they started living in what was old South Portland. In the meantime, the German-Jewish families, the Meiers and the Franks, the Lipmans, Wolfes, all had done very well, and many of them lived on Portland Heights. Others lived in Northwest Portland, and some moved up here onto Westover, but the Jews, basically, were a westside-oriented group. 

Then as the Eastern European Jews became more affluent and whatnot, they started a migration to what is now Irvington and the Black district. Then as that area became more commonplace and not quite social enough for them, they started moving up onto the Alameda, down around Reed College and Eastmoreland. Eventually they moved into Southwest Portland, the predominant area of Jewish settlement today, out around Wilson and Jackson High Schools. So that accounts for it. 

But the original B’nai B’rith Lodge was largely Jewish. Aaron Frank, I think, at one time was the president, my grandfather Lachman was. My dad, Rabbi Wise — Jonah B. Wise, Henry Berkowitz, they were all active in the lodge. Then the European Jews formed a lodge of their own, so they were competitive. Those behind the Eastern European Jews started the B’nai B’rith Building. They got a lot of money from the German-Jewish families. In fact, Julius Meier was a major contributor to it, and that’s one of the reasons his plaque hangs in the Jewish Community Center lobby. 

But it was started as a settlement house, and unfortunately, it became competitive to the Neighborhood House. I don’t know exactly when the Neighborhood House was started, but it was before there was a Jewish Community Center. It was founded by the Council of Jewish Women, and incidentally, Laddie Trachtenberg can give you more history on that than anybody in town. Her aunts, the Loewenbergs, were deeply involved in it, and it served as a settlement house for the European Jews. The German-Jewish women used to go there. I know my mother taught sewing classes. The women conducted cooking classes so that they would know how to handle American fruits and vegetables and things like that which they weren’t familiar with. They had classes on how to select meat, how a butcher cut the meat and what the good cuts were, and so forth. There was a lot done. My mother used to boast about the fact that she had Sam Weinstein, who later became a very brilliant attorney — unfortunately, he died at a relatively early age — as one of the boys in the sewing class. She used to talk about that. But the Jewish Community Center started as the B’nai B’rith Lodge Building. 

Many of us who were of German-Jewish descent went to the old Turnverein [local chapter of the German American Athletic Association]. At that time it was a physical education building. They had a gymnasium and gym classes and a swimming pool and so forth. It was primarily athletics; it wasn’t a social club of any kind. Those of us who went there were given the idea by our parents that this was a little better. 

It wasn’t until I went to high school — I went to Couch Grade School and then later to Lincoln High School — and when I really got going to Lincoln, I met Jewish kids of other than German backgrounds, and I found that they were just swell guys. When they got punched in the nose they bled the same red blood that I did. I made many, many friends up there. Alex Tempkin was one of the outstanding ones. I met the Director boys. There was a bunch of us. We joined clubs like the Old Sphinx Club. The AZA, of course, came later on. Mel Blanc was one of the notorious graduates of the Jewish Community Center. We had developed a very, very good relationship, and I began to appreciate that there were other people. 

I didn’t give you anything of my background yet, and our neighborhood. That, I think, contributes very much to my interests today. I was born on the corner of NW 18th and Hoyt. There were lots of Jewish families living in the area. The Senders family lived across the street. The Mays lived a half a block down. Alex Miller, of the Miller’s For Men store, lived practically across the street from the Mays. There was a family by the name of Franklin. There were at least two more Jewish families on the same side of the street in the same block, but none of them had children my age. The kids that I played with were of either Swedish or German background, so they were either Lutheran or Catholic. We had the Catholic, St. Pat’s Cathedral down on 19th and Savier, and we had St. Mary’s up on 17th and Davis, so there was a lot of influence from the Catholic church. Catty-corner from my house was a German Lutheran church, where the services were preached in German. Catty-corner through the block, in what is now the Longshoreman’s hiring hall, there was a Swedish Lutheran Church, and Mr. Ladeen [sp?] was the minister. Eric Ladeen was my closest friend, and I think I grew up really knowing more about Christianity than I did about Judaism. It was very confusing. 

I think the other great influence in my life, besides the neighborhood and my parents, was the fact that I joined a Boy Scout troop. There was a mixture of everything. I’II get you a picture of that troop; there were quite a few Jewish kids in it. Most of them were older than I, but Leo Samuel, whose grandfather had started the insurance company that I told you about, talked me into joining the Scout troop. I had joined another troop but didn’t have a good experience, but in the troop we had kids of every race and nationality. 

In fact, the area was becoming more of a melting pot. From 16th Street east it was almost all Oriental. There was a fringe along 16th and 17th, and down to 15th, in which there were a few Negroes, Filipinos, some Japanese, but most of the people east of there were Chinese. There was a Chinese school — I say Chinese school, the old Atkinson School which stood where Blitz-Weinhard’s wash racks stand today — it was a school that was 100% non-white. It was all Oriental. I would say that 85%, 90% of the Orientals were Chinese; the balance were Japanese. The fringe group went to Couch School. 

When I started Couch School it was down from 17th to 18th, from Kearney to Lovejoy, or Kearney to Johnson, I don’t remember which. There was another school, so that you can get an idea what the neighborhood was like — there was Davis School, which was down about Upshur, Wilson, someplace in there, around 21st, and the old Chapman School. It was where American Can Company stands today. When they had baseball games at Vaughan Street, the home runs used to break the windows of Chapman School. The neighborhood has changed a lot and the people have changed. Another thing that happened, the Croatians started moving in along Thurman and Vaughan and that whole little area around St. Patrick’s Church, so that I had another group to kind of adjust to as I grew up. I began to go with those kids about the time I was playing baseball and going to Vaughan Street to watch the games. 

I met a lot of kids. I became interested in why people worshipped differently and why the Jew was discriminated against. I never knew discrimination in a hard way. It wasn’t mean or dirty. Once in a while you would be called a “kike” or a “dirty Jew” or something like that, and there’d be a fight. It wasn’t a particularly vicious or widespread thing, but when I went to high school, then discrimination began to show. Jewish kids were not accepted in the clubs, or in very few of them. You began to feel it when you went out for sports or anything else. I remember my junior year I ran for editor of the Cardinal, and all of a sudden there was a slogan on all the blackboards, “Vote for the Irish ticket,” and all the Jewish kids were listed there. So we began to feel it. 

But even then things were breaking down. Before my time, Ted Baum and Joe Lipschitz and some of the others made Hi-Y. They were the first Jewish kids to make it. Later on I was voted into Hi-Y because I was pretty active in athletics and other things, but generally speaking they weren’t accepted. When we went to the cafeteria for lunch or anything else, we began to socialize together and to feel the difference. Then I made friends with several other people who, of course, were not Jews. We openly discussed a lot of these things, and I started going to church with a different point of view than I did as a little kid, curiosity. I was infatuated by the pomp and ceremony, particularly in the Catholic Church, and I began to read and study a little bit about religions. 

When I went to college, I lived for five semesters in the International House, and that really whetted my appetite for some knowledge of the Eastern religions. I became highly conscious of discrimination against Blacks because we had five black athletes living in the house on scholarships. I saw how they were mistreated, not so much on the Oregon campus and not so much in their relationships with other members of the team, but when Oregon played Oregon State, particularly, or Southern California, the Black athletes used to take just a hell of a physical beating. It was just uncalled for. I could go into detail, but you don’t need that either. I came to the conclusion then, that if my skin were black I would hate everything that had a white complexion, I really would. 

So I began working in the peace movement — that was long before it became popular — and such things as Urban League, and generally working for causes of social justice. So I was a natural when I came back from college for Mr. Robinson, who was then the professional with the Anti-Defamation League, to pick me up and more or less put me to work. I went to meetings with David Robinson, and I got to the point where I knew Arthur Eppstein and many of the other leaders in the Anti-Defamation League very, very well. During the war my wife was involved. Her sister was a secretary for David Robinson.

Tape 1 – Side 2

MARKEWITZ: My wife’s sister was a secretary to David Robinson, and my wife was blonde and didn’t look particularly Jewish. She has Slavic features. She used to go to the Bund meetings and keep minutes. She went there disguised as a newspaper reporter. 

Glazer: To what meetings? 
MARKEWITZ: The German Bund. They were the Nazi group here in town. This area, Portland and Oregon generally, was very strongly German. Towns like Aurora were founded by Germans, and German Catholic families and so on, so it was a natural breeding spot. They would keep notes. It can be told now, I suppose, maybe everybody knows it, that the police department had special sections, and the Anti-Defamation League worked directly with the police. We gave them information that we picked up, and they in turn would share with us. We had a pretty good idea of who the Nazis were and what they were up to and what was going on. It was really quite effective. 

Then the ADL moved into some areas that I think were extremely interesting, particularly in light of what’s happening now with the Third World. Fellows like David Robinson were spearheading it, and then younger men like George Freid came along. The Jewish Community gave the Urban League, when it started in Portland, pretty much its financial base and a tremendous amount of moral support and membership too, so it was really worthwhile. 

Then David Robinson appointed me as a member of a housing committee, and I served under Father Tom Tobin, who later became Monsignor Tobin. It was the forerunner of fair housing and the development of urban renewal for areas that were run down. Not to bulldoze them out, but to help these people refurbish and insulate as we would do today, and do a lot of things, paint up and clean up and reach the point where they could take some pride. As you know, this whole group — I’m not an attorney, but those who were moved on into the American Civil Liberties Union. Jews were generally of a liberal stripe. 

There were other things that were Jewish that were interesting. I don’t think they were of any importance. At least, I would belittle them because they never meant too much to me. There was a Jewish high school fraternity here in Portland called Pi Tau Pi, and most of the Jewish fellows belonged to it. Not many of the Russian and Eastern European background Jews, but gradually they came in too, like Ted Swett and Bud Swett. I can’t think of any of the others. Anyway, it thrived as long as there were high school fraternities, and it was in competition. 

Then fraternities were started in the universities. There was no Jewish fraternity at the University of Oregon or at Oregon State for many years, but there was a ZBT house at the University of Washington, and the SMU house came there, and eventually Jewish sororities started coming into the schools, although I don’t think there’s a Jewish sorority in Oregon today. The Sammy House [Sigma Alpha Mu] is dissolved at Oregon because the Jews kids are now being accepted into what were basically gentile fraternities. 

But that end of the prejudice, I think, was pretty well dissipated, particularly in World War II. It was a great equalizer and had a lot of influence. There was a common cause, everybody worked shoulder to shoulder, and the so-called “five o’clock shadow” [the situation where Jews were accepted into business but not socially, not after 5:00 PM] was pretty well dissipated. I don’t know what else to tell you. If you have some more questions, or anything else, I would be perfectly willing to answer them. 

Glazer: When did the Jewish sororities flourish? 
MARKEWITZ: The sororities I don’t think ever gained much foothold in this state, but at the University of Washington they have. I can’t give you much background on that. There are a lot of the girls here in town who were in the sororities up there. I can’t remember her name — little Hy Popick’s daughter — has been very active up there. Linda Popick, I think. There were just a lot of Jewish girls. 

In the days of the old ZBT house, practically all the Portland Jewish boys who went up there were ZBTs. My brother was. Burnett from Burnett Jewelry. I’m trying to think of some of the others. As I say, there were a lot of them. I went into the ZBT house at Cal when I went there to school in ’26, but when I transferred to Oregon, I couldn’t go; it was in the Sammy House, and I pretty much had given up on fraternities. I didn’t like the idea of cliquishness and snobbishness, and of my own accord I moved into the International House in my second semester and stayed there. 

Incidentally, that was the forerunner of the — what do they call it, Dick Neuberger was given the credit for establishing — it was more like a commune in which fellows lived together in a house and shared expenses and whatnot, and that is exactly what we did in the International House. For example, and this will really interest you today, we paid $18.50 a month for board and $32.50 for room and board if we had the less desirable rooms, and some of the real good rooms in which you still froze to death were $35.00 a month. That was room and board. I was made house manager the second year and had to pull the house out of debt, which I did. 

We prospered pretty well, but as I say, the Sammy House developed on the Oregon campus, and it was pretty well accepted because they developed a lot of good athletes. Howard Silver was one of them. Is it Howard? Anyway, one of the Silver boys was a basketball player. The Rotenbergs, of course, both went down there, and Harry Glickman was a member of the house. Those fellows all followed me. Morrie Rotenberg was my contemporary, but Sam and his younger brothers came later. It developed into an excellent house. Scholastically, it was always tops on the campus. It was one of their goals. You went on study table if you didn’t get your grades. It was a matter of honor with them. They had to do it. That was the one place they could excel and they did. They turned out some pretty fine boys. Are there any more questions? 

Glazer: You said that your mother was aware of German aristocracy? 
MARKEWITZ: I said “aristocracy” in quotes, yes. The German Jews were all pretty snobbish. I’ll give you an example. Years afterwards there was a battle going on over a rabbi at Beth Israel. Aaron Frank, who had not been particularly active — I don’t think he ever came, except on High Holy days or maybe a yahrzeit — was against keeping this rabbi here. The thing divided into factions and it was really quite a row. I was one of those who was quite active in support of this Rabbi Applebaum who was here as an interim rabbi when Rabbi Berkowitz was very sick, so they decided that they were going to have a temple meeting, and they also decided in our meeting that it shouldn’t be a thing that was railroaded. It was a really of great concern to the synagogue, that both sides should be heard and so on, but everybody was timid about inviting Aaron Frank. 

So I said, “I’ll call Aaron. I’ve known him since I was a little boy.” He lived right across the street and I really liked Aaron. He had a lot of very fine qualities, which I’ll mention later. So I called him up, and boy, he jumped all over me. He told me — and I was a man pretty close to 40 at that time — he said, “You’re not dry behind the ears yet.” I have forgotten all the expressions that he used, but he really tore me apart. I said to him, “I’m sorry that you feel that way about it, Bud, but I want you to know that I respect you and respect your judgment, and those of us who are opposition feel that your side should be represented and should be well expressed. I think you can do it whereas some of the self-elected group wouldn’t carry the prestige that you would.” “Well, I don’t give a God damn,” he said. I hung up and let it go at that. But this was the way that they pretty much ran things. There were some very brilliant and some very fine members of that old German Jewish group, the Langs and the Sellers and the Wurzweilers. Go back into the Temple Beth Israel history and you’ll pick up most of those names. They were officers. 

Glazer: What do you mean by the “self-elected group”? 
MARKEWITZ: Any time you get a political movement, and you should be aware of it if you watched your own family, there are a group who decide that they know better than anyone else, and they get out and they say a lot of the things, but they may not be as nearly qualified as some of those who stay in the background and are quiet. 

For example, I don’t know whether it has any bearing on what I’m telling you, but it’s a very interesting thing. When Henry Berkowitz came back from the service and he’d been a chaplain in the South Pacific, he picked up a relatively rare disease of the throat, which eventually became fatal. When he lost his voice and was so weakened that he couldn’t carry on his duties, they decided that they would bring in an interim rabbi to carry on. They brought in a man by the name of Saul Applebaum. He had been an assistant to Rabbi Jonah Wise at the Free Synagogue in New York City. Jonah, of course, had been here in Portland and married a Portland girl who was related some way to the Franks. He apparently wrote a letter. Now I don’t remember whether it was to Mason Ehrman or to whom it was. That, incidentally, is another great family. The letter stated that this man was a second-rate rabbi, that he would never really rise to the heights that the pulpit of Beth Israel deserved. This was big stuff. So the curse of the so-called “aristocracy” was upon the man. 

When it became definite that Berkowitz’s case was terminal — I don’t know whether it was before he actually passed away or even while he was still living and just couldn’t ever be expected to return to the pulpit — it was a question of giving this man another year’s contract, and the movement was against it. The majority prevailed in that case, and we did give him a year’s contract, which might be considered on a trial basis. 

At the end of that year, that’s when the storm really broke. The other forces had organized, and they were definitely going to dump him. But in the meantime — the same thing goes on in Israel today, between the Arabs and the Jews — those who were the most emotional about it and the most vocal were the ones who were forcing leadership. But we had, our group who were in favor of giving Applebaum a chance — Applebaum was an interesting guy. He was not a pulpit man. He didn’t give a really fine sermon. He was very much like Rabbi Stampfer. He was quiet. He loved his congregation. He loved children. He was “a parish priest” in that he would care for his flock, and I liked that kind of a man. I think it has a lot more to do. I don’t give a damn whether he is an ambassador to the gentiles or not. So some of the vocal group, who were opposed to him, just dumped him. 

We did have some outstanding leadership, including Arthur Eppstein, who were backing Applebaum. Arthur Eppstein and a few of us who felt that Aaron Frank and the group — who apparently had something very much against this guy, but they would never come out and say what it was or really get up and speak — we felt that they should come to a meeting and express themselves and give us their reasoning, that it shouldn’t continue to be a gut issue. It should be determined on the basis of the man’s ability and what he had to offer in terms of what we wanted and all the rest of it. But it never resolved that way. 

It finally came to this meeting, and there was a match between this Sam Weinstein that I mentioned earlier and Dr. J. J. Rosenberg, who was like a man who was a dueler, with a fine rapier. He was slashing Sam to pieces. I’ve known Sam since I was a little boy, too, and I respected him. I didn’t like the man particularly, but I felt that he was sincere in his way, and I hate to see anything — it was like watching a dog fight in which one dog was just being torn apart. Some of us finally broke the thing up before there was a real casualty, but this thing goes on. 

This is another aside that often recurs to me. We walked away from a board meeting in which the board had voted about 17 to 5 to not renew Applebaum’s contract. Dr. J. J. Rosenberg, who was about 15-20 years my senior, walked across the parking lot with me and put his arm around me. He wasn’t a big man, but compared to me he was. He said, “Arthur, when are you going to wake up? People are bastards.” I’ve often thought of that. Jews were crucifying another rabbi. That’s that. Now what else would you like to know? 

Glazer: How active was your father in Jewish organizations? 
MARKEWITZ: Extremely active. They had a little group here that had no title or anything else, and yet it was interesting. I can remember meetings at my home when Roscoe Nelson and my dad, later on Moe Tonkon, as a rising young man, would sometimes come. It was a group that was interesting because these men recognized young material and introduced it. They kept the activity there. 

But if a Jewish kid were in trouble, without any formalities or anything else, they would go to his assistance. I won’t mention any names now because the family is still active around here, but there was a Jewish boy who got into some difficulty, and I don’t even know what it was, over in eastern or central Oregon. I remember the meeting in my home. It looked like this kid was going to go to the penitentiary, which would have been a very black mark on the Jewish community, and by golly they got him an attorney and took care of him and got him straightened out. Things changed and the family became very respectable, but he had to learn a lesson. There was this type of philanthropy going on all the time. 

Dad was a member of the First Hebrew Benevolent Society, which in the beginning was primarily to supply funds to transient Jews who might come through town and didn’t have any money, who otherwise would have been stranded here. Another thing that they did, if a Jewish pauper were to die, or if the family means were very low, they’d take care of the burial services and see that he received proper ritual burial. I don’t think there was ever a Jewish boy that went up for bar mitzvah who didn’t have a new blue serge suit. There were always some that were in there. Ben Selling was another member of this group that just gave so much of himself. Ben was older. Ben died when I was probably in high school. Men like Roscoe Nelson, Sidney Teiser, and even Dick Neuberger’s dad. He didn’t have the stature among the rest of these men. Most of them were much bigger. Arthur Eppstein. They were always the core group that carried this thing on. Sam Weinstein became a member of it. Max Hirsch was very active in it. 

Then, on the other side — and I said I would bring it up later — Aaron Frank gained the enmity of a lot people in this town, but Aaron Frank did a tremendous amount of very quiet philanthropy. I know of one boy, not a Jewish boy, who he heard of — and incidentally, J. J. Rosenberg brought this thing about — he was going to Reed College. He was in pre-med. He was working in the beginning of Fred Meyer’s business in the warehouse. He worked from 4:00 PM in the afternoon until 12:00 AM midnight and then do his studying. Aaron Frank saw that he got a scholarship. There were lots of things like that. Aaron Frank gave anonymously to many, many things in the Boy Scouts that no one ever heard about. Julius Meier did a lot of good things on the side, too. Julius Meier was a tremendous force in this town. On the moral standards in those days he was a rascal, but as a public citizen he was a big man. 

Glazer: What other organizations was your father involved in? 
MARKEWITZ: B’nai B’rith, and I have forgotten which Masonic Lodge it was — it was predominantly Jewish. He was a 32nd-degree Mason and a Shriner. He was in all kinds of Jewish philanthropies. He was at the beginning of the organization of the first Jewish welfare organization, and out of that he and others served as an echelon to the formation of what at that time was the Community Chest. In other words, the gentiles didn’t have anything like this. They came to the Jewish community because we had organized charities. They picked up a lot of their organizational ideas and material, their constitution and bylaws, and all that kind of stuff from the Jewish group. 

Glazer: This was the Jewish Welfare Federation? 
MARKEWITZ: It later became the Jewish Welfare Federation. I can’t remember what it was called at that time. It’s changed its name at least twice in my lifetime. I remember once it was changed, and Arthur Goldsmith led the movement for the change of name. There was another giant of a man in the time that he was active here. I don’t know whether anybody has ever interviewed Gerson Goldsmith about his dad, but Gerson is a great guy. He does a great deal of work now with the geriatrics program. In fact, he has been chairman of the governor’s committee on the aging. Very, very able young fellow. Gerson must be around 53-55 years of age now. 

Glazer: What organizations have you been involved in with regards to the Jewish community? 
MARKEWITZ: I have been a member of the Lodge for many, many years. I was out for a while. That’s an interesting personal aside. I dropped out of the lodge at one time when Klutznick was President. This was in the ’30s or early ’40s. I was angry because the lodge went in and backed the Zionist movement in favor of Israel. I felt there was nothing wrong in what they did, except that instead of polling their membership, the national board — not even the locals were involved in it — the national board went ahead and did all these things. I felt that they didn’t have the right to do them without the consent of the membership. I remember I went to a meeting at the Multnomah Hotel at the insistence of Milton Goldsmith, who at that time was Executive of the Federation, like Moe Stein today. I expressed myself, and then I left the room and I wasn’t active in the Lodge for quite a while. 

The Anti-Defamation League has been my primary interest. Again, I say it started with David Robinson and Arthur Eppstein and several of the others. I was regional chairman for about four years. And I’ve always done a lot of work in the ecumenical movement, representing the Jews and explaining Judaism. I was extremely active at Beth Israel for 30 years. Berkowitz drew me in there to be chairman of the religious school committee and I became involved in teaching. I was there for 30 years until I disagreed with some of the policies, and then I left and taught out at Neveh Shalom for three years. I am extremely interested in youth. I don’t care what it is. I was chairman of the youth committee at the Jewish Community Center for years and served on their Board, and I was on the board at Beth Israel for eight or ten years. 

I was on the Federation board for many years and treasurer for two years. That’s an interesting thing, too, on how the Federation operates. These are personal opinions and maybe they’re not worth a tinker’s damn, but I didn’t like the way Cliff Josephson was operating as Executive Secretary. He wanted to be the kingpin and receive all the glory. When Moe Stein came here I liked Moe very much. I was with the ADL, and then I became chairman of the Community Relations Committee for the Federation, in fact had been and was the chairman when Moe came here. 

The way we operated was quite different than the way it is today. We took each group — in other words, if the Anti-Defamation League was interested in things that were defaming to Jews and other minority groups, we called in representatives of ADL and said, “Here, this is down your alley.” If something came in, American Jewish Congress, we’d call in what’s his name from Portland State and get him active. We had the equivalent to what is now the Near East Task Force. If things came up with problems with Portland State and their Near East study group, that committee would handle that. We allowed each group within the community to pretty well maintain its identify and not meld it together and not build an empire for the Jewish Welfare Federation. I can’t help but feel that under Moe it has been changing and under Shenker it’s changing, but on the other hand they’ve done some great things. 

As I said, I’ve always been interested in youth. SCORE was one of my dreams for years. The Federation brought that about. That’s the synagogue youth group; in other words, they have joint training sessions for the teachers from all the synagogues. They meet at least twice a year in the high school department, and they exchange faculty and have discussions. I remember one year I participated when they were discussing the aftermath of the Holocaust. I think it is extremely important for Jewish kids of all denominations, of all sects of Judaism, and Jews of all different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities to know one another because first of all we’re Jewish, and secondly [inaudible — I could go on?]. The Jewish Education Association has become an integral part. The Hillel Academy has grown under the support from the Federation. All of these things have grown under Moe, and generally speaking, he’s been a giant of a man. He really has. I have the highest admiration for him. He’s quiet and soft-spoken. The publication has developed under him. It has some problems today, but that’s something I can’t get involved in. 

Glazer: Do you feel that the Federation is less effective now as a melting pot than it was before? 
MARKEWITZ: In many ways it’s stronger. Moe has been a good, strong leader. Arden Shenker is an outstanding president for them. They’ve had real good men in it. Moe has given it far more leadership and direction. I’ve worked with the Federation — let’s see, Milton Goldsmith was the first one that I remember real well. There were a couple of others who preceded him — I can’t think of their names even — but Moe has been the outstanding leader as far as the development of cohesion in the Jewish community goes. The Jewish Community Center has grown. In fact, I sat here last night reading and studying the program that came in yesterday’s mail, and I was commenting on the growth. Kronick, the activities director, I don’t know him very well, but he is certainly doing a great job. My hat’s off to him. I feel that it’s extremely important, and maybe this will encapsulate my feelings. Years ago when …

Tape 2- SIDE 1

MARKEWITZ: What’s his name, the famous Nazi prosecutor, the Jews kidnapped in South America and took him back to Israel? I can’t think of his name [Eichmann?]. Anyway, I came into the City Club a day or two after this had taken place and we were meeting in the Crystal Room at little tables, about eight or ten to a circle. Mel Friendly and I walked in together and sat down, and there was a Hindu from the dental school — I can’t think of his name — he said, in a kind of sarcastic, biting way, “What are you Jews going to do now that you’ve caught him?” and so on. 

Mel started to make the stock story, and I said, “Just a minute, let me see if I can get this man to understand what’s going on here.” I said, “First you have to understand my position. Number one, I am a citizen of the world. Number two, I am an American. And number three, I am a Jew by religion and by choice. What goes on in the State of Israel is of interest to me because my people are there and ethnically a part of it. When a man of this caliber is taken prisoner — and I don’t like the term ‘kidnapped’ that you used — if the State of Israel handles this in an open trial, exposed to the world, and gives it complete coverage by all the electronic media, the people can see what was the Holocaust, what kind of men these Nazis were, then Israel has done the world a favor. If they rush him into a prison, no attorney trial, and he is executed, then they have lost everything that could have been gained.” 

This is the way I feel about Judaism. In fact, I was opposed to the establishment of the State of Israel in Israel. I wanted a Jewish state, I never denied that, but I felt that it was a very dangerous place to start it. After all, it’s the crossroads of the world and has been for years. Today it’s the meeting place of religions, it’s the meeting place of the great economic problem in oil, and it’s a meeting place of the two ideologies of the east and the west. Russia and the United States is struggling for its control in that area, so Israel was going to get walked on just as they were in the years of history. Therefore I felt it was a very dangerous place to establish the State of Israel. 

But once it was established and I saw what these people were doing, the struggle that they have, I was actually ashamed that I had been opposed to it, and the world has made me definitely a Zionist. So if I were to categorize myself today, I would say, number one, I am still a citizen of the world. Two, I’m a Jew, because it’s awfully important. Number three, I’m an American citizen and I have duties there because I have rights, and if you have rights you should protect them and work for them. This is awfully important, and I tried to give this to my kids. I know with my younger one who is teaching in Korea, this definitely has had its effect. I’m about talked out. What else do you want to know? 

Glazer: I have a lot of questions about specific organizations. 
MARKEWITZ: All right. I probably don’t even think of them, so you ask me about them and if I know anything, I’ll tell you. 

Glazer: Let’s start with the B’nai B’rith because you were very active in that. What year did you become involved with it? 
MARKEWITZ: I actually got in the back door. I came in through the Anti-Defamation League and started acting and working with David Robinson and Arthur Eppstein and the ADL committee, and then I became a member of the Lodge. It must have been around 1933-34, right after I came back to Portland from studying in California and Chicago. I have always kept up my interest in the ADL; I feel that it is vitally important. And I have tremendous respect for the American Jewish Congress. I don’t feel that they are competitors like so many people do. Is there anything else? 

Glazer: So you are still involved with them? 
MARKEWITZ: Yes, sure.

Glazer: Did you know when you first joined that you would be involved in it so long? 
MARKEWITZ: No, you never know that. I’m not basically a joiner, but I do have a weakness in that I’m loyal. If I feel that there is something to be done, I’ll stick to it and try to keep it up. 

Glazer: You sort of answered this next question. What were your reasons for joining the organization? 
MARKEWITZ: I saw defamation of peoples, not just Jews, but all kinds of people. For example, when I was in San Francisco as a youngster. I went there for two and a half years and went to school in Berkeley one year. I had some contacts in San Francisco, and I could see the struggle even within the Catholic faith of Irish vs. Italian. The Irish had the upper hand. The Italian was kept in a ghetto situation. I certainly became very much aware of the Blacks when I was at school, and their need. 

I think the most important thing in Judaism is tzedakah. If we don’t work for that, if we don’t work for fairness and justice, we’re never going to bring about any form of peace in this world. Sure, there will always be discord and there will always be greed and there will always be hatred through ignorance, but you can alleviate a lot of these things and educate people and that’s really what I have been after all my life. To get people to just be decent and follow the Golden Rule. I’ve got a little book over there and on the back of the cover it lists the Golden Rule of all the great faiths in the world. Everyone has a Golden Rule stated just a little bit differently, but it’s the same thing. That goes for Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all the rest of them. They all say treat your neighbors as you would like to be treated yourself, but a little differently. 

Glazer: What were the duties of your position on the Anti-Defamation League? 
MARKEWITZ: Primarily to conduct the board meetings and do all the formal things, but I also received complaints and letters and defaming material that might be sent to people about the Jews, articles that were in the paper that were inflammatory and so forth. I would collect these and would send them to Sy Kaplan in Seattle and he would try to get some action on it. As I said, at one time we actually had had contacts with the police department in which we followed the extreme left and the extreme right because we felt there was danger to personal freedoms and threats, so a lot of it was indirect and yet it was a lot of fun. I kind of enjoyed it. 

Glazer: How was it a lot of fun? 
MARKEWITZ:  Because it kept you alert and you were always learning about things that you never dreamed would be taking place. Take today. I am not in it deeply, Ted Runstein has been chairman now, but golly, with the rise of such things as the German­American Bund again and the Nazi Party. The Third World to me is the most fascinating thing and the most dangerous thing that the Jews have to face today, and it was brought out clearly when the B’nai B’rith headquarters was included in this taking of hostages in Washington. Why in the hell the Jews were involved, I don’t know. I still don’t understand why they took the B’nai B’rith. 

We are going to be the scapegoats of the world. 4,000 years and 2,000 years of intense history, the Jews have always been the scapegoat, and I guess we can’t get away from it. 

Glazer: Why do you think that is? 
MARKEWITZ: Because it is just as natural in human animals as it is in all the other animals. It’s a pecking order. There is something down there lower that can be pecked on, and he is an easy one to pick on, he’s going to be the one. It’s noticeable when you go into the south. The Negro has always been the abject one. The Negro looks down on the poor white, and the Negro will look down on the Jew, and that’s something you can pick on. It’s psychology, instinct or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know. I’m not a student of psychology to really understand it. 

For example, I was outside working in the yard this spring, late spring it was. I heard all these crows and jays making a whale of a lot of racket. I kept looking around and I watched them. Here fluttered down a dove, and it had been crippled a little bit. Here they were all after it, and so I stood up there with my rake and I shooed them away until the poor thing got back into the brush and had a chance to escape and heal itself. This is the way it is with animals. It is the law of the jungle. It applies to men. We have these minds that God gave us, and maybe we have the soul and the spark of God within it — call it the Holy Ghost if you want to — but we just don’t give ourselves a chance to meet and to talk with him to get the guidance that is there, and it is there if you want to look for it. I’m basically a very religious person, but I’m not ritualistic. 

Glazer: How do you mean that?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t particularly care whether I go to a synagogue or a church to worship. I do almost every morning. I’ll wake up and have a minute of solitude when I just think of what I have to face and how I can face it. Sometimes as you grow older, it isn’t as easy. It isn’t continual optimism. When your family has grown you haven’t got the motivation. I think we are here for some purpose. I’m willing to accept the challenge of Judaism, that we have to hit that mark each day to improve and to help, but it becomes more and more confounding as time goes on when you see what is happening in this world. 

This is one of the reasons that I am so profoundly interested in Judaism because, you get away from all the folderol and the Hassidic and the whatnot, get right down to the skeleton, and it’s a religion which permits you a tremendous amount of freedom of thought, of action. You’re invited to challenge God. You can talk with him and you can feel something that is bigger than you. Y ou can find answers. I don’t mean just an answer to a math problem. I’ve done that, too. But you can find answers if you will just resort to letting that mind run by itself. 

This is another thing that I think is basically wrong with our society. We are getting to the point where we program our kids to the point that they never use their God-given imagination, which is the most marvelous thing that youngsters have. They can just sit and read and work things out for themselves. They don’t have to be in Little League and doing something intensely every minute of their waking hours. OK. What other organization? 

Glazer: Were you ever disillusioned with anything that the Anti-Defamation League did? 
MARKEWITZ: Yes, sure. 

Glazer: What was your reaction? 
MARKEWITZ: In this affirmative action program, I’m in the minority but I’ll say this much. Fred Rosenbaum was with me, and Fred and I disagree on many other things. I think if you are ever going to bring these people who have been oppressed, cheated, you have to give them more than just compensatory education. You’ve got to give them opportunity. I saw this in my own family. This David that I told you about, my youngest son, definitely has my feeling. When he was applying for a job at Jefferson High School, Dr. [name?] — he was the principal — he said, “Dave, I like your qualifications, you’ve got what I want. But I’ll be honest with you, if a black boy with anywhere near the qualifications you have comes along, we’ll have to take him.” And David accepted it and I accepted it. I wouldn’t fight about it. I don’t like quota systems, but at least they are beginning. 

There’s just a lot that we have to do besides fight for the Jews. In other words, we can’t always be there with a chip on our shoulders. “The Jews are always right.” It’s true in Israel. I wrote in my diary, the third day we were in Tel Aviv, “I have never seen such a stratification of people.” Equality, yes. De facto, no. It’s there. You see it in the streets. You feel it. When you get out into the smaller towns and you look up. How would you like to be there waking up in the morning and come out and see a Jewish boy with an automatic standing on the rooftop across from your home? You wouldn’t like it. You’ve got to find empathy for other people. It’s awfully important. They will take advantage of it. They’ll rub your nose in it. I’ve had it done. I’ve seen it. 

But this is the one place where I’ve taken exception to the work of ADL. Any time you find one group, and I don’t care whether it is Jews or Catholics or Protestants and the British and Ireland, they think they have the right idea and they have certain doctrines in which they really have been steeped and indoctrinated. They’re going to make mistakes. You can’t be God. We have that weakness of being small. We’re human beings. Last night there was a marvelous program on Channel 10 on Milton. There you saw the conflict of his Christian principles that actually set back the great liberalism and the fine purposes that man had in him. Just an outstanding mind. He was overwhelmed by — you saw it in Roots. Look at these men who hid behind the Bible and then mistreated their fellow men. You see that all the time. So ADL can do that. You can become a witch hunter in ADL. OK. What else? 

Glazer: What were some of the common bonds between the ADL members? 
MARKEWITZ: I think ethnic Judaism. We wanted the Jew to have a break, and we felt the same way. I think the Jew basically has empathy towards all other minorities when he sees what they’re going through and realizes what he has gone through. I’ve heard Jews say it, but not nearly as many Jews say it as gentiles say, “We’ve done it. Let the nigger do it.” Not too many Jews take that position. We shouldn’t. We were in that spot. We were the slaves once. 

Glazer: Were there bonds in terms of age or what synagogue a person went to? 
MARKEWITZ: No. That’s one place where you had a common cause. Jews do have common causes. It’s an old thing with them. We work for many things together. When my Dad died, for example — and this is interesting, I never knew what it was all about — they took the hearse and they drove in front of every synagogue in town. The funeral was from Beth Israel, but they went to the old Shaarie Torah down on First Street, they went to Neveh Zedek — which was Ahavai Sholom — they went to Shaarie Torah, and the doors of the synagogue were open and the doors of the ark were open in honor of him. I don’t expect anything like that for me, but I want to feel that I worked for and have the respect of the Jews regardless of whether they are Sephardim, Russian, Polish, or whatever they are. We have that common bond. 

Glazer: Would that have been the case 100 years ago or so? 
MARKEWITZ: With some men. Even today, it’s not a general feeling I don’t think. I think my dad’s influence on me has just been tremendous. I know it has. The fact that I married a Russian Orthodox Jewish girl, even my dad came to me when I told him I wanted to marry Sophie, and he said, “East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet, but you’re going to have to live with her, I’m not. It’s your decision.” He was good enough to accept it. Inside of six months she was a favorite. 

Glazer: By what methods were funds raised for the Anti-Defamation League? 
MARKEWITZ: The same as they are now, no different. 

Glazer: How was that? 
MARKEWITZ: Put on drives. You had dinners. You honored people and charged fees, and you asked people for support. There was no fundraising in the intensity that there is today. The coming of the State of Israel and the Holocaust made all the difference in the world in the intensity with which Jews could raise funds. I think there were other instances. I wasn’t a party to them, so I don’t know offhand, but I’m sure that when the Jews became extremely active in the labor movement under men like Gompers and so on, there, when they had a cause, Jews knew how to give. This is something that I think most of us were taught as little kids. You can be as penurious as you want to in your own life, but you still have to give to charity. Tzedakah is very important. 

Glazer: What kind of activities? Did everybody come? Who came? 
MARKEWITZ: It’s the same old story. If you have 20 members in a club, five people are going to support it. It doesn’t change that much. I think that the Holocaust and the old Jewry, like no other flame in this world, in the history of our generation and the needs of Israel today are carrying on the same way. Israel has made all the difference in the world in Jewish point of view. 

Let me give you an outstanding case. When this Applebaum incident was going on that I mentioned, he came down to the office one day and said, “Arthur, go up and take the seventh grade.” I went up, but I knew that I had to turn that class around. They were hellions. They scared two teachers away. So the second day I walked in and I said to the kids, “How many of you kids live in a neighborhood where there are O’Briens or Swansons or Nelsons or Olsens or Millers or Muellers, or somebody who is very proud of being Irish or German or Scandinavian or Swedish or whatever it is?” They all raised their hands. I said, “How many of you are as proud of being Jews as they are of their national background?” Three out of a class of 26 put their hands up. I’ve asked that question, or did ask it for 30 years that I was teaching, and since the formation of the State of Israel, I get 100% putting up their hands. That’s the difference. It’s very important. Very important. 

Glazer: Was there grassroots support for the Anti-Defamation League? 
MARKEWITZ: Yes, there was reason for that because there was a hell of a lot more of outward antisemitism in those days than there is today. The Jews were subject to slurs, cracks from the vaudeville stage, and vaudeville was the primary form of entertainment. In those days you ran into it quite a bit, in business particularly, if you were in the field of blue-collar work. 

I had an experience when I went to Chicago. I went to work in this place on the north side. I had been there two or three weeks. Something came up during the noon hour and somebody said something about the Jews. I said, “Why do you feel that way about it ? I’m Jewish and I don’t understand it.” They looked at me and said, “You can’t be Jewish.” It’s the same old story. 

That was another thing that I did as the ADL chairman. I used to go out and speak a lot on Brotherhood Week and other times on fellowship, and I would go to church camps and speak on Judaism or Jewish-Christian relations and so on. The average Christian doesn’t know the Jew, doesn’t know a Jew. I had a very gratifying experience here a couple of months ago. I went down to Scappoose and spoke to the Men’s Club of the Congregational Church at 7:30 AM on a Sunday morning. Practically none of them ever knew a Jew. They were open enough; they wanted to know. And it is an interesting thing. The fellow who called and asked me to come down there works for Schnitzer. He was disturbed by the antisemitism among the employees, and he wanted to know more about Judaism. He got to talking to this church group and they said, “Let’s have a Jew come down here and explain their religion to us.”

Glazer: Do you think there is more interest in Judaism by gentiles now? 
MARKEWITZ: Not necessarily in Judaism with an idea of accepting it. There is a lot more interest in Jews, and there is a lot more respect for Jews than there used to be. You see, the myth of the Jew is being lazy, as not being a fighter. Always being the weaseling little money man who would cheat. All those myths have been pretty well destroyed by the stature of the Jew in Israel. 

The war like the ’67 war and then like in Entebe can do more for the gentile community to raise the prestige of the Jews in their sight than anything you or I could say. They admire the Jew today. He’s got guts. He gets out and fights. He’ll do things that a big country like the United States wouldn’t do. You know darned well, I’ve heard people talking on the streets when Amin was speaking of holding the Americans there as possible hostages, “We ought to send for the Jews and they would go over there and take them out. We would never do it.” I heard people say that, not just because I was a Jew, because I overheard it in a conversation in which I wasn’t involved. 

Glazer: You said there were a lot of snide remarks, antisemitic remarks in “those days.” What were “those days”? 
MARKEWITZ: In the period when the Anti-Defamation League really got started, in the early days when they first came, in the early ’30s, middle ’30s, and so forth. Each war, I think, has done something to enhance the prestige of the Jew, where a Jew has been a soldier alongside of the gentile. They get to know you. You know that song in The King and I? Very important. 

Glazer: How has the birth of the State of Israel changed the character of the Anti-Defamation League? 
MARKEWITZ: It became extremely pro-Zionist, the defense of Zionism. The great movement of the Anti-Defamation League right now is to fight the boycott, and they are leading in that. Moe can tell you that. When things like that come up, he turns it over to the ADL. They publish more material on it, and we brought court cases and we are really doing an active job. The Near East Report is published by the group who you might say are the lobbyists in Washington for people of Jewish identity. This comes out weekly, and they give the ADL credit for the job they’re doing. That’s their primary work right now. It’s tied in directly with Israel.

END OF SESSION

SECOND SESSION
May 10, 1977 

Glazer: Mr. Markewitz, you said your maternal grandfather told you stories about Jacksonville and the Gold Rush and vigilante groups. Can you recall some of those stories?
MARKEWITZ: The only one that I recall with any clarity was the time that they were attacked by Indians. He told me that the rooftops were flat and that they were covered with sod, from which grass even grew. That was for fire prevention. That is the only thing that I can remember, except that the people were rowdy and everything was wide and open. But apparently it wasn’t anything like what they depict in the movies, with all kinds of stagecoach holdups and so forth, and there weren’t too many Indian attacks.

Glazer: What happened with the women? Were they rowdy as well?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t think he mentioned women. You didn’t mention women many times in those days [laughs].

Glazer: Because there weren’t any? Or why not?
MARKEWITZ: They were a minority. They were either wives or they were pretty much the prostitutes and so forth that you found in saloons and gambling halls and places like that. Of course, that was rampant in those days. Just like being in Alaska during this pipeline deal.

Glazer: You couldn’t recall your paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Did you happen to remember what that was?
MARKEWITZ: Goldstein.

Glazer: You also said that your father lived in Sacramento and San Francisco before coming here, and that he lived in the Jewish section.
MARKEWITZ: The old home was on McAllister Street in San Francisco, but that came after my family moved back to San Francisco. My father had come up here, and my grandmother and her husband and my uncle Louis and the two daughters moved back to San Francisco and had this house on McAllister that I remember. Later on, my uncle had his dental office in the old house, so it’s still quite vivid to me. 

I lost one aunt in the flu epidemic of 1918. The other one was married but childless, and her husband — which was quite adventurous in those times — was in the moving picture business. He owned theaters and had a chain of them, which is rather interesting now. I don’t remember his name.

Glazer: Do you have any idea what the Jewish section of San Francisco was like?
MARKEWITZ: Yes. There was still evidence when I was a young man going to school in Berkeley. There were several kosher restaurants, and I mean they were truly kosher. Then there were those who served kosher-style foods. There was a mikveh, everything that you would expect in the Jewish ghetto.

Glazer: Was there anything comparable to what occurred in Portland? Like in Old South Portland?
MARKEWITZ: I wouldn’t really be able to tell too much. I would say it was probably more like an eastern ghetto because South Portland wasn’t particularly a typical eastern ghetto with pushcarts and all those things, and a garment industry. But they had definite industries in San Francisco. They were subject to some ridicule, but at least as they told me, there was no abuse of the Jewish people there.

Glazer: Is it still in existence?
MARKEWITZ: No, no more than it is here in Portland. In fact, it is all light industry and apartment houses and things like that now. But a few of the old signs, when I was there in the late ’20s, were in Hebrew. The old California Street shul was a typical Orthodox shul.

Glazer: You said that you were told about the formation of Beth Israel synagogue here.
MARKEWITZ: Actually, I read more about it. My dad was a very, very early member of it. Later on he was president of the synagogue. My mother was confirmed there. They spoke of Rabbi Mayer, who was a predecessor of Stephen S. Wise. They knew Stephen S. Wise and were very friendly with him, and they were extremely close to Jonah Wise. There was a rabbi who was an interim rabbi here by the name of Rabbi Merritt. He later went into Hillel and was at the University of California, I believe. Then I heard of his demise. I don’t remember where he was at that time, but I think he was still in the California area.

Glazer: Did your parents talk about Stephen Wise?
MARKEWITZ: He was a real prophet to them. He was a very, very big man. He did a great deal for Reform Judaism here in Portland. Actually, the earliest so-called Reform synagogue was typical of the German. It would be what you would call Conservative today. They broke away. 

It is an interesting thing to me at my age to look back and see the evolution of Reform Judaism. As it broke away from the Conservative influence, or the Orthodox influence, because the Conservative was the aftermath of the break between Reform and those who found it too reformed — as I grew up I saw the influx of children from the Orthodox and the Conservative synagogues going to the Beth Israel Sunday school and then joining as members. Then the influence of that group swinging back so that the use of the tallis on the pulpit became commonplace. The yarmulke was introduced again. The bar mitzvah became a very common thing. As my children grew up, they even introduced the bas mitzvah, which was unknown in the earlier days. These were all Reform things.

Glazer: How did the parents of these children feel about that?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t want to sound like I am prejudiced, but the story is that they all sent their children to Beth Israel because they had a better-organized religious school and it wasn’t as strict. It was more appealing to the kids. It was an easier way, of course, but they were able to learn in English and they still went to Hebrew school on their own and they were usually bar mitzvah in their own synagogue by their own rabbi. So we had quite a crossing, and it’s evident today. You see it in the Director girls and how active they’ve been in Beth Israel. I think they are outstanding examples. It just continued. But there is more and more interest in fundamental Judaism and Conservative Judaism today in Beth Israel than there ever was before. I think this is all stimulated by the intensity of the interest in Palestine and the development of Israel.

Glazer: Wouldn’t parents from the Conservative synagogues be reluctant to send their children to a Reform religious school because they’d feel that the children would then switch?
MARKEWITZ: There was undoubtedly a great deal of feeling about it. This is purely an observation, and I do want to be fair about it, but I think that a lot of it was social prestige. In fact, I know it was.

Glazer: What was the relationship between the different religious schools in terms of cooperation?
MARKEWITZ: None. We didn’t have much cooperation until SCORE was developed, and Moe Stein deserves a lot of the credit for that. Then it was the work of Rabbis Stampfer and Geller. Geller is the first what I would say is a liberal Orthodox rabbi that we have had here in town. He is just an outstanding man, a wonderful man.

Glazer: What does SCORE stand for?
MARKEWITZ: Synagogue …

Glazer: You can think about that. Anyway, was it developed here in Portland or is it national?
MARKEWITZ: It is a movement that is national, but it was done here. I think it was pretty well led by Moe Stein and the Jewish Welfare Federation, but it was the idea of getting the synagogues to cooperate, and frankly, it was an ideal that I’d had for years and years. I preached it and used to take my religious school classes to visit the other synagogues, including the Sephardic, so that they could see the evolution and changes in Judaism. We’re looking for our roots, too.

Glazer: When did SCORE come about?
MARKEWITZ: To the best of my knowledge it must have been about four to six years ago, somewhere in there. It is very recent. You can check that at the Federation office.

Glazer: If the religious schools didn’t cooperate, were they competitive?
MARKEWITZ: Not outwardly, but I think in a sense they were. I was told, for example, that the Jews of Beth Israel were referred to as the “Jewnitarians” by the other synagogues, and it’s possible. We are very much like the Unitarians in our ideas and our approach to worship.

Glazer: What do you think precipitated this move to unify or engage in some cooperation?
MARKEWITZ: The real stimulus has been the cohesiveness of support for Israel, whether you call it Zionism or finding ourselves and our roots, to a degree, in the establishment of the State. It is beyond the belief of anybody who isn’t Jewish. I have tried to explain this to gentile friends, and it is very difficult.

Glazer: But the movement towards Zionism, I saw [inaudible word] in the papers in the mid-1920s, and now 50 years later they are getting around to …?
MARKEWITZ: Yes. The Holocaust contributed so much to that. Zionism was basically a European movement, and it was political. The Jews of Europe, who were subject to pogroms and all types of persecution and limitations of movement, they were not second-class. They were about fourth-class citizens, or worse. Consequently, they were always struggling to have the dignity of living with their own people, and as they wanted to live. It wasn’t until I got to talking to my in-laws and with Dr. Max Simon and others who came out of Europe that I could understand this. 

I think this was the great difficulty of the German Jew, who established the so-called Reform Movement here, was that the Germans who were of Jewish descent hadn’t known this persecution in Germany and ghettoization for quite a while. That broke down pretty well after Napoleon. But it still persisted in Eastern Europe and in Russia, particularly in Poland. Max Simon was telling me about when he was a little boy standing on a balcony watching the Cossacks ride down the streets of this village where they lived, bayoneting and slashing Jews with their swords and so forth. I got a pretty good idea and very horrible picture of what went on. 

But until we can see this picture — and then, as I say, the Holocaust just brought everything to a head. I think it is true — I know it is true of myself — that all of us who were here in America, who didn’t recognize what Hitler was doing and let the thing go as long as we did, have always had a guilty conscience for it. It is an awful mark on your soul. It really is.

Glazer: Ignored? Personally [inaudible words]?
MARKEWITZ: Not really. I can’t say that some people didn’t ignore it. It’s like ignoring the poor and shoving it under the rug. But I think in many instances it was just beyond our comprehension that such things could go on. I know when my brother-in-law came back from the service — and he went into Auschwitz on the second day — he told us the things. Then of course we saw the movies, the so-called travelogues in those days, newsreels, of ovens and stacked bodies and bones and people who were nothing but skeletons still with the spark of life in them. It was pretty hard to really understand this, but as the message sunk home I think the American Jews rallied pretty well.

Glazer: So Zionism and the war were unifying factors in terms of the Jewish community in Portland. Were there other factors?
MARKEWITZ: Sure, just the normal, healthy ones that would take place. For example, I explained to you in our first conversation my experience when I went up to Lincoln High School and I found out these Jewish kids had some marvelous qualities. A lot of them were a hell of a lot smarter than I am. They were excellent students. I can still remember kids like David Naimark and Milt Schatz who sat in front of me in math class, and just any number of kids.

Glazer: Are you saying yours was a common experience?
MARKEWITZ: I think so. If a person had any sensitivity and empathy, they would have to recognize the values in these kids. Alec Tempkin, I can remember we were in art classes together, and he had a marvelous sense of feeling for art and art values. He not only went into painting and dyeing and so forth, but he went into music with his brother, whom I didn’t know. They wrote the opera The Dibbuk. It is one of the products of Portland we can be proud of. I think I mentioned when I went into the fraternity we read so many books of Lewis Browne, and I began to realize that Lewis Browne had come out of Old South Portland.

Glazer: You said that your mother didn’t like German Jews because they were — and you put this in quotes — “aristocratic and arrogant.” Can you explain that? How was this manifested?
MARKEWITZ: She just said so out loud.

Glazer: I mean how was their arrogance manifested.
MARKEWITZ: I think I mentioned that. Subconsciously I was raised to feel that I was better than the other Jews from other countries, and it was only after I got to high school and really learned to know these kids and went to the Jewish Community Center. I don’t know whether I mentioned before that the German families sent their kids to the old Turnverein, which was a German-operated thing. That is an interesting side story. The professor — we all called him “Prof” — who was the gym master and the coach, was of German background. But no one ever knew anything about it. When the Nazi party really developed strongly here and they found out that he was a Jew, they dismissed him. And it broke him; he had a stroke and he died. It was a terrible thing to him because he was German through and through.

Glazer: Did the Jews have certain organizations that were exclusive of other Jews? The German Jews? So that their arrogance was manifested that way?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, there were even two B’nai B’rith lodges. I think I mentioned that. And there was a club called the Concordia Club. Where they got that name from, I don’t know, but that was exclusively German Jews. And Beth Israel for a long, long time was basically German Jewish. The founders, of course, were all Germans, and it pretty well stayed that way. With World War I began gradual, gradual change.

Glazer: Your father was a secretary of the Concordia Club, or a vice president?
MARKEWITZ: He could have been. I don’t remember what titles he held there. Maybe my brother would remember those things, but I don’t. 

MARKEWITZ: He was very, very active in Welfare Federation, which is what it is now. And he was with the Chamber of Commerce, and he was on the Board of Directors of the Chamber. Did I tell you that story about him? That is an interesting story. When I was about a junior in high school, he completed his first term on the Board of Directors, and they asked him to run again, accept another term. He declined, and I was amazed. So I point blank asked him why. He made this statement then that shaping the city was entirely in the hands of the traction company — which later became Rose City Transit, the power company — which was Portland General Electric because Pacific Power and Light wasn’t in existence at that time, and several families. The names that I remember him mentioning were the Ladds, the Failings, the Corbetts, and even Bud Frank — Aaron Frank of Meier & Frank — had a tremendous influence in this city. If you want to get an idea of the background of that get hold of Kimbark MacColl’s book The Shaping of a City, because it is all there, and it is very true, very faithful.

Glazer: So he declined the offer because he didn’t think he [inaudible phrase]?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, he said it was too frustrating. He couldn’t get his ideas over. And yet, in so many ways he was liberal, but I recall at the time that Roosevelt was promoting the Bonneville Dam and the development of the Columbia Basin, he said, “My boy, in a hundred years they’ll never be able to use all that power.” You can see how far wrong he was there. The power companies opposed it. They fought it tooth and nail because this was “socialization.”

Glazer: What were the reasons that the Turnverein was considered superior to Neighborhood House?
MARKEWITZ: They had a much more structured program, and it was strictly a physical education plan. They had some social life for the adults, but we, as kids, it was all gymnastics and swimming and horizontal bar work — the type of thing, though it didn’t go near as far, as you find in the gymnastics of the Olympic Games today. We worked a great deal on the horizontal bar, the parallel bars, and the cross buck, but they didn’t have uneven parallel bars and they didn’t stress rings like they do today. They had them. We had rope climbs and pole climbs and lots of things. To me it was a wonderful experience. It was a fun place. The gym day before Easter they always had an Easter egg hunt, and boy they would hide those Easter eggs and they were tough to find and they were hard to reach. As kids, we always looked forward to that. That wasn’t nice for little Jewish boys, but we still had a lot of fun. There were quite a few Jewish kids who went there, but they were of German background.

Now you mentioned Neighborhood House. That was founded like Friendly House and so forth, as a settlement house. They had classes in English, in reading and writing, and citizenship. They had lessons in sewing and cooking [coughs] and preparation of American foods, to which a lot of these women had never been exposed before. It just wasn’t the social level the Turnverein was. People there were primarily there from established families, although good heavens, the German-American kids — I say that as a hyphenated word because most of these kids who were there were first-generation Americans — didn’t come from a high social status or anything like that. Their parents ran restaurants and had tailor shops and everything else, just like the Jewish kids did.

Glazer: Where was the Turnverein located?
MARKEWITZ: The Turnverein was on 13th Street. It would have been exactly where Madison went through, but it didn’t go through. The block was continuous there.

Glazer: It had its own building?
MARKEWITZ: It had its own building with a swimming pool and big gym and an assembly hall. They used to have big, big Christmas parties there. I remember every Christmas we kids would receive our awards for our achievements in gym work. It was tough. If you got an award there, you really worked for it and earned it.

Glazer: I have noticed from reading that describes it that people were really competitive. They were always going for awards and prizes.
MARKEWITZ: Yes, it was a very competitive society. Achievement was very important. But this seemed to come with Jewish people no matter from what station in life they arrived here or what country they came from. It was a struggle for existence. I never sensed this as much as when we made our trip to Israel. The land there is so sparse, and it is so difficult to eke out a living. You could have tremendous empathy for the Palestinian Arabs who are still living there and the fact that all of those people in the Mediterranean area, particularly in the North African area, are such bargainers and hagglers and so forth. It is just the way of life; if you don’t haggle you’re not respected. You are just a sucker.

Glazer: Was this something that was peculiar to the Jews, or was it something that you think is …?
MARKEWITZ: No. It was true of all the people who came here. I saw it in the neighborhood where I was raised where the people, at least the kids — who were mostly Lutheran or Catholic, and from German or Scandinavian stock — I think possibly there wasn’t quite the competitiveness there that I find among the South Portland Jewish kids for one reason. That is that those kids who came from Europe didn’t have to struggle in the ghetto in the first place, and secondly, their parents had been taught to accept a certain station in life under the autocratic control of a monarch of some kind. It made a lot of difference.

Glazer: Who established the Turnverein?
MARKEWITZ: I haven’t any idea. It was here as I grew up. It was undoubtedly established by Germans who came here and wanted it. The word Turnverein doesn’t mean gymnasium. There is a gymnasium in Germany, but the word is the equivalent of our high school or upper-level schools, and where they got it here for the gym I don’t know. Generally, it was a social club and a physical education club. 

Glazer: Was there a connection between Turnverein and the B’nai B’rith?
MARKEWITZ: No.

Glazer: Did the people who had gone to the Turnverein then go to the B’nai B’rith afterwards?
MARKEWITZ: Later, yes. In my own experience, I asked my folks to let me go to what is now the Jewish Community Center because I found many of my friends there. When we got into high school there was enough prejudice to be felt that we were much more comfortable among Jewish kids regardless of what your background was, German or otherwise.

Glazer: Do you think that accounts for the propensity for people to form Jewish clubs and organizations?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, they were copied after the gentile groups. For example, I mentioned that there was a fraternity here in town called Pi Tau Pi that was in competition with the high school fraternities that were basically gentile. When I was taken into Hi-Y, I was one of very few Jewish kids that were taken in there. It was sponsored by the YMCA, and there were certain things and ceremonies and whatnot that were basically Christian, but I wasn’t particularly conscious of it at that time. It would be very much like going into Masonry, where you find so much that’s Christian and idealism and preachment. In fact, you have lodges in Masonry that don’t take Jews and you have some who do. I never went into Masonry. I was just too busy with other things, and I never felt that too many people really practiced what they preached in Masonry. The idealism in Masonry is beautiful. It is basically a religious organization, and a great deal of it is founded not only in Christianity and Judaism, but in Islam. It is all pretty interesting.

[Continuation of Second Session. Tape is marked, “Tape 1, side 2”]

Glazer: I’ve noticed in reading the Scribe, that there were dozens and dozens of Jewish social and athletic organizations and I wonder how you might account for this.
MARKEWITZ: I think, and I am not too familiar with them, but I think it would only be logical that ethnic in that, in other words, Jews of German descent first went to the Turn Verein organized the Concordia Club. There were card playing groups and they all had thei too.

Glazer: I wondered if it might have to do with discrimination from the outside which pushed into forming a lot of social groups?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, there was a definite social stigma attached to being Jewish. No Jews, for example, were allowed in the Arlington Club, the University Club or most of the golf clubs and consequently, the Jews organized Tualatin Country Club. Multnomah Club when it first organized, took in some of the very wealthy Jews who were high in social status here in town. Then there was a policy, I don’t think it was ever written, but it was almost impossible to get into the Multnomah Club if you were a Jew, who didn’t have great social prestige and wealth. Then as they expanded and they grew and they needed the money, they were less discriminating. But this is an old story and there is nothing you can do about it. You take today, we have token Jews in the Arlington Club and we don’t have them in the University Club yet. We have them in Waverley. Moe Tonkon is very often referred to as the token Jew. What’s his name from Evans Products, I think has shown more pride than Moe in that he wouldn’t accept some of the memberships that were offered him. Even as a kid, I was about sixteen, I was offered a wrestling scholarship to go to the Multnomah Club. I even told my folks about it. I said, no, I wouldn’t be seen in the Multnomah Club and I have a prejudice against the Multnomah Club which still exists to this day. I felt it when I was handling kids in the baseball program and stuff like that. They were the elitists. Nothing made me feel better than to beat the Multnomah Club.

Glazer: How did you feel baying a Mother from the East European background? Did that make you feel different from the other German Jews?
MARKEWITZ: No, my mother actually wasn’t. She was Alsatian. Her parents were from Alsace-Lorraine, but I think Mother felt, although she never said so in so many words, but her other expressions, now, for example, her closest friends were people like Mrs. Gerson and her cousins, nieces, nephews, they were largely German Jewish women, but there were certain ones who went out into the social strata, with whom she didn’t feel comfortable. I think that was it.

Glazer: How was the gap between the German Jews and the other Jews resolved, I mean through the years?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t think it has disappeared completely yet today among some people. It’s definitely diminishing as we’ve said, with the establishing of such things as cooperation between the religious schools, or among the religious schools. Something occurs to me now. I can remember a tremendous respect by the German Jews of the Sephardics, that they didn’t have. I don’t know.

Glazer: Because they were so early?
MARKEWITZ: I think because they were so early and they had a core of purity. LI me put it that way, that they respected.

Glazer: Why do you say that you don’t think that the gap has disappeared?
MARKEWITZ: Oh, just things that I hear and see going on.

Glazer: Can you give me an example, in terms of organizations or anything else?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, sure. You know of Jews, even people who have been active on the Jewish Welfare Federation, who will carry a membership in the Multnomah Club and not in the Jewish Community

Glazer: So you are saying that there are still….? Are these German Jews?
MARKEWITZ: Yes.

Glazer: Does it manifest in terms of organizations to which German Jews have the greatest number, or are the officers of the group, whereas the other Jews are not the officers of the same
MARKEWITZ: I don’t know. I don’t follow that question too well, but no, I think it’s a matter of prestige yet. There will be people, for example, who, because they are Jews and express pride in it, and so forth, will carry a membership in the Jewish Community Center, but they won’t be active in the Jewish Community Center, whereas they will be in the Multnomah Cub and the YMCA.

Glazer: Are there organizations now who are top-heavy with German Jews?
Arthur: Not that I know of.

Glazer: Or exclusive?
MARKEWITZ: No, Not that I know of.

Glazer: You said that the Jews were basically a west-side oriented group.
MARKEWITZ: Yes, it was in my youth.

Glazer: I can see how this would develop after it had begun, but do you have any explanation of why the first Jews settled on the west?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, because of the low rental areas, sure. They just didn’t have any money and these old houses in southwest Portland, the older houses and people were moving into so-called better neighborhoods.

Glazer: Were other ethnic groups doing the same thing?
MARKEWITZ: Oh yes, sure. The Jews were succeeded by Italians and later by Blacks.

Glazer: Getting to now, to the B’nai B’rith Lodges. I think you said there were two and I assumed they were Oregon lodges.
MARKEWITZ: I can’t remember them by names

Glazer: 314 and 416?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, Yes.

Glazer: And you said they were competitive. How was that manifested?
MARKEWITZ: That would be hard to say except there were all kinds of scores that you would work for in national competition and they would work for that and they would work in support of say, AZA or B’nai B’rith Boys and Girls and so forth and they would try to do more for their youngsters than the other group and so forth. There was a competition, conscious or unconscious, written or unwritten in trying to achieve positions in the Jewish community of leadership and I can still remember when I went on the Federation Board, there was a constant struggle to keep balance there, so there wouldn’t be any feelings.

Glazer: When was this?
MARKEWITZ: Late ’30s or early ’40s.

Glazer: Has it changed now?
MARKEWITZ: Oh yes.

Glazer: Because there is only one lodge?
MARKEWITZ: Oh sure, yes. In fact, most of the German Jews are not active in B’nai B’rith any more, that is people of basically German Jewish stock.

Glazer: Why do you think that is?
MARKEWITZ: Oh, they don’t need that type of socialization or social life. They are too much part of the community today. They are accepted outside. They don’t have to have their own organization. In fact, it’s a struggle to keep a good B’nai Prith Lodge running. It went through many throws. I can remember Abe English Rosenberg calling me one time and wanting me to take the presidency of the lodge. I hadn’t been active and 1 said, no Abe, I wouldn’t consider it. It’s not fair to those who had been working in the lodge. I said, “I’ll do this.” I got out of it, became inactive. I didn’t actually get out, but I became inactive in disgust because they weren’t doing enough, I’ll go through the chairs and I did. I took the position of warden. It appeals to me and I can see a future in it, but I won’t go through, go on up, but I wouldn’t think of taking the presidency, you know, out of the blue and I experienced the same struggle then, a little group who wanted to keep themselves perpetuated. Oh, we have that. We had a meeting the other day with the ADL, and I won’t mention any names, but it was brought up, certain people to be nominated for “man of the year” for their annual dinner. And it was generally voiced and because none of those people were there. I was, by far, the oldest person there. They just don’t want anybody out of the old clique. Get some new people.

Glazer: What was the role of the warden?
MARKEWITZ: This is as ridiculous as any other type of secret society. You stood by the door and you let members in. They had to give the password and that kind of nonsense.

Glazer: What was the password?
MARKEWITZ: Oh, I don’t remember.

Glazer: What else did you do in that capacity?
MARKEWITZ: You were sergeant-of-arms, but there was never any need for one. We didn’t have any problems that way.

Glazer: That’s funny. What kind of activities did the B’nai B’rith undertake?
MARKEWITZ: They had their charities and a good welfare committee and they called on the sick and they sent flowers and they always had a delegation at a funeral, sent a wreath and so forth. They raised and they gave to various charities such as the Old People’s Home, that is, before it was called the Robison Home and they supported fhb building which later became the Jewish Community Center and all the activities there. That was their big charity. They just did a lot of things. I still remember, it seems to me, that we had a float in the Rose Festival Parade, but they tried to do everything in the world to become Americanized and to meld into the community, but I will say this much, they fought for Jewish identify and they developed the Anti-Defamation League, which was really their core of work as time went on.

Glazer: How have their activities changed through the years in experience?
MARKEWITZ: Well, the ADL particularly became more and more, not just a support and protection of the Jew, but of all minorities. We took an interest in the American Indian movement. We certainly backed the Urban League and the black movements to the hilt. We helped them financially. We were members. I think it led to the liberal Jewish attitude to a large degree, without ever coming out and making it a religious thing, we tried to practice Tzedakah and this, to me, is the most important thing in being a Jew. I am going to have to run pretty soon.

Glazer: One more. Would you say that it has caused the Jewish people consciousness to expand outwardly to include other groups?
MARKEWITZ: It helped a lot. We carried on our empathy for other immigrants as they came to Portland. I think there was very, very good feeling for the most part, between the Italians who came here and the Jews. They lived together. They inter-mingled and although the Italians were primarily Catholics, I always felt that the feeling was really excellent.

Glazer: It sounds like the B’nai B’rith was involved in all different kinds of Jewish organizations rather than being a social club, a particular group that was isolated and it did cooperate with different….
MARKEWITZ: Oh, it cooperated. They had big card parties and fund-raising of all different kinds, dances, and they put on – I can remember the Lodge sponsored the Dybbuk, which I mentioned, as an operetta and they sponsored many plays. There is one that I remember so very plainly was Disraeli. It was a great organization and it manifested itself largely in the activities of the building and becoming a Jewish Community Center and the ADL.

END OF SECOND SESSION

THIRD SESSION – September 19, 1977
Tape 1 – SIDE 1

Glazer: You told me that you were in the Junior Rose Festival Parade. You started to talk about that, and I think something had happened.
MARKEWITZ: It was quite a highlight for a youngster. I must have been in the 3rd or 4th grade at Couch School. During the war they decided that they would not have a regular Rose Festival court, which they’ve always had, so someone had the idea of having a junior court. At that time it was almost a duplication of the senior court, with the princesses elected and the selection of the queen from the princesses, but they also had a male court with a prime minister. I don’t know what all the boys had to do, except that I somehow got to be the prime minister for it. It was an interesting experience for a little kid because we had to go to luncheons and stuff like that, and the Chamber of Commerce and Rotary and those types of things, and we appeared at other schools. During the Rose Festival, of course, we had a special float that we rode on. It was quite an honor. Another thing that they did, like they sell Rose Festival buttons now, they sold votes, and the Mothers from the PTA or whatever was equivalent to PTA at that time, worked like dogs to get the representatives from their school elected to the different memberships in the court and whatnot.

Glazer: What do you mean they sold votes?
MARKEWITZ: In other words, you bought like a ticket or a chance; it could have been a chance on a raffle or lottery of some kind. I don’t remember the details of it because I wasn’t involved directly in that at all, but I remember one of my buddies, a kid by the name of Ford Smith, his Mother got all excited about it. She went out. My mother didn’t do any work on the thing, but Mrs. Smith really worked like the dickens on it. For a school the size of Couch, which was still one of the smaller grade schools, it was quite a thing to have one of their kids elected.

Glazer: Do you mean you bought a raffle ticket and then you got to vote who …?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, that ticket voted for Markewitz or Jones or Smith or somebody else.

Glazer: How old were you?
MARKEWITZ: I must have been about eight or nine, just a year before we moved from 18th and Hoyt up to 25th and Northrup.

Glazer: As prime minister, were you the equivalent of the girl’s queen? Or were you a princess?
MARKEWITZ: I would have been equivalent to a king, if they had such a thing.

Glazer: You were the head of the parliament?
MARKEWITZ: Yes, I was the head of it.

Glazer: Do you remember what you thought when you went to the Rotary meetings?
MARKEWITZ: No, I don’t recall any of that particularly. I remember my mother was very proud and she kept clippings. All of those things are gone now. I don’t have anything of it.

Glazer: What happened to them?
MARKEWITZ: I suppose in the process of moving and whatnot, mother gave it away with all of the other “dust catchers” [laughs].

Glazer: Do you think they were dust catchers, too?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t know why, but I’ve never, in any time of my life, been a collector of memorabilia or keeping a notebook or clippings of anything of myself. I had a few things on the Scout troop years ago, because I was awfully proud of that too, but as an individual, something I think that I got from my dad — he was a self-effacing person. Somehow or other he passed it on to me. I couldn’t tell you what it was.

Glazer: Was the prime minister thing just for that one year?
MARKEWITZ: Just the one year, yes.

Glazer: What did the war have to do with that?
Markowitz: Practically all of the young men and a lot of the women either were in the service or service-related things such as Red Cross, shipyards, stuff like that.

Glazer: Getting on to other things. You said that the B’nai B’rith Building was competitive with Neighborhood House?
MARKEWITZ: Yes. They were competitive with each other. Neighborhood House was founded as a settlement house, in the sense that settlement houses are still called settlement houses. For example, the Friendly House down here in the northwest end considers themselves a settlement house. The Jewish Community Center, which at that time started out as the B’nai B’rith Building, was built primarily to give Jewish kids activity, and it was competitive with the Neighborhood House in the fact that there was quite a distinct difference in the social and economic positions in the families whose children attended both places. It was supposed to be more prestigious to go to the Jewish Community Center. They had dues and all those things. A settlement house was much more economical. and consequently it was not quite so prestigious to go to it. I don’t think things have changed. People are just as asinine today as they were then.

Glazer: How so?
MARKEWITZ: They attach the importance to social position and what it means to belong to this club or that club. I went through that. I can remember in high school when I made Hi-Y and I was one of the first Jewish kids. I think I told you before that Ted Baum and Joe Lipschitz had made Hi-Y before I ever entered high school, and to my knowledge, I guess I was the third Jew that ever made it. I thought that was pretty good. As time went on, of course, more and more were voted in, but we used to think about that. 

I can remember, too, as I mentioned before, the kids of German-Jewish families who went to the Turnverein were supposed to look down their noses at the kids who went to Neighborhood House and the Jewish Community Center, but I went to the Jewish Community Center on my own. My parents had kept me in the Turnverein for either nine or 11 years, and I was very devoted to it. But as I got busy in high school and I recognized that I did have Jewish roots and I liked the Jewish kids, I took myself to the B’nai B’rith Building and developed friendships there. I went into — there was a club before the AZA even; it was called the Sphinx Club. The Director boys and a whole bunch of us were in that.

Glazer: You said that your parents kept you in the Turnverein?
MARKEWITZ: I mean that they paid for my membership there, and I probably would have gone on for more years except that I began to feel that I would be more comfortable and I had a lot to learn from Jewish kids that I hadn’t picked up. Judaism to me was more of a social thing. I went to Sunday school, and I had friends there and whatnot, but for the most part they were kids of German-Jewish background. 

When I got to Lincoln I started going with the Feves kids and just a lot of them, the Rotenbergs, they were all in school with me. We made friends, and I started going to the Center. They had a pretty good program there. It was more diversified than the Turnverein. The Turnverein was very, very strict. It was the old German autocratic domination, and Prof as we called him — incidentally, I think I told you, he turned out to be a German Jew, and when the Nazis developed he really suffered from it. But we had more basketball. We had competitive swimming. We had a lot of games, not near so much gymnastic work and muscle building. But I wrestled for the Jewish Community Center, and I really enjoyed it there, and I began to develop roots that I hadn’t had before.

Glazer: Did your parents encourage that?
MARKEWITZ: Dad never discouraged it. In some ways dad was very paradoxical. To him it was very important that his sons marry Jewish girls. Though he never outwardly pushed it, I found out afterwards from things that he said. And yet again, as I told you, when I selected a girl of Orthodox and Russian background, that wasn’t so hot. It was a real paradox to try to face the things. But he enjoyed my friends, and he was very proud when I went to college and went into the International House. I would bring kids of different races and nationalities home, and he used to tell his folks about it, and he was extremely proud of the record that I made in Scouting. 

And there again, in Scouting, there were a lot of Jewish kids in the Scout troop, as it developed. Some of the kids of Russian and Polish background, their families, at least, started moving northwest, and some of those kids came into the Scout troop. There was Al Goldblatt and Sonny what’s-his-last-name. I can see him; he played football and he swam. He swam far the University of Oregon afterwards, and he is in business in Eugene now, and I can’t think of it. Oh, Nemerovsky! The Nemerovskys lived right down here on Johnson Street, and before I even left Couch, a family by the name of Kugel, or Kuegal [pronounces Cue-gal] moved in. They were Orthodox, and I really had my eyes opened with that. Then my first really, really close friends of Russian extraction were the Tonkon kids. Moe was my brother’s contemporary, but Harry and Jack and I were very, very close friends, and Harry is still one of my closest friends.

Glazer: You said your eyes were really opened by your Orthodox friends?
MARKEWITZ: Yes.

Glazer: How so?
MARKEWITZ: I found out something about my faith, and I found that it wasn’t nearly as close to Christianity as I had begun to believe in the Reform Movement. The Reform Movement at that time was a movement which really encouraged assimilation.

Glazer: When would this have been?
MARKEWITZ: Actually, this started when I was first in religious school, which would have been about 1914 or ’15, and it continued pretty much until the State of Israel really began to struggle for later existence. Jonah Wise, who had been the rabbi here, then went to the Free Synagogue in New York, became an ardent Zionist. Stephen Wise, who was one of our earliest rabbis, of course had been strongly involved in the Zionist movement before that, and he began to have some influence here. But there was a split in the congregation over it. 

A man by the name of Milton Kahn, one of the founders of the Oregon Automobile Insurance Company along with Arthur Eppstein, was one of the leaders for what later became the American Council for Judaism. Max Hirsch was very active in it. My dad passed away before it really became a strong, active movement. They approached me, and I thought maybe this was the right idea, and I went to two meetings. I never went after that. Then later on they tried to get me involved after Israel was a state. They said they had changed their position and they were only going to work for Reform Judaism as a matter of religious education. By that time I was active in the religious school at Beth Israel, and I thought, “That sounds good.” 

So I remember, I asked Celia Lesman to be my guest, and we went to one of their opening lectures at Henry Thiele’s. I listened just so long, and then I got up and I expressed myself and said, “I’m sorry, I think all your thoughts are extremely negative. I can’t accept them.” I said, “Our people have to have a haven. They fought for it. They’re going to fight more for it. And I think as far as the United States goes, in the long run it will be very, very difficult, but I think we are better off to be there because they will be allies of the United States.” That was the last I ever had to do with the American Council.

Glazer: So they were anti-Zionist?
MARKEWITZ: Definitely. They still are. This Rabbi Berger, maybe you’ll hear of him once in a while. He was coming into their movement at that time, and he was strongly against it. The funny part of it was that some of the leaders in the movement — one of them was I. Edward Tonkon, Moe and Harry’s brother — he was in the millinery business in a big department store, I think it was in Dallas — he was very strongly anti-Zionist.

Glazer: Why?
MARKEWITZ: There were a lot of reasons for it. I have always felt, and maybe this is a prejudice on my part, I have always had a distinct feeling that many of these Jewish people who were in the American Council were like the Negroes, crossed over and didn’t want to be identified particularly. They had made it, and they didn’t want this stigma attached to them. There were a lot of good, logical arguments. I think I told you that I was definitely opposed to Israel being established in the Palestinian area, and I think the arguments I gave you at that time existed, but for the most part the best way to express it is one of my mother’s phrases, “They were just so gross-hartig [sp?] they didn’t want to be a party to it.” It’s a German word which means big-headed or pig-headed.

Glazer: How much of that is there today?
MARKEWITZ: It’s still a movement, but it’s awfully weak. Every once in a while things will come out and there will be an embarrassment. For example, the Arab League very often will quote Rabbi Berger or some of the leaders of that group. Some of them, of course, are very wealthy Jews, prominent Jews.

Glazer: Where is Rabbi Berger from?
MARKEWITZ: I’m not sure, but I think it’s Brooklyn, New York [Rabbi Elmer Berger, originally from Ohio].

Glazer: You were talking about elitism. How much of that is there now in different clubs?
MARKEWITZ: I think it’s just as strong today as it ever was. There are token Jews in different groups. Moe Tonkon has been accepted as the token Jew for Portland to a large degree. Mon Orloff, I think, was elected to membership in the University Club, but he turned it down. I admire him for it. Of course, there was just as much the other side too. In other words, when the movement started to allow Jews to enter private clubs and country clubs and what not, Tualatin was approached, and there was a lot of opposition by the members of Tualatin to letting gentiles in there.

Glazer: How did you feel about that?
MARKEWITZ: I wasn’t a member of Tualatin, so I had no say. I just don’t believe in that type of elitism. I don’t feel it’s right. It’s like discrimination of any kind. In other words, if they want to keep me out, and they want to keep the black person out, and they want to keep the Hispanic person out, and then they turn around and say, “OK, you Jews. You come in. You’re a step better.” Am I? I don’t think so.

Glazer: What about elitism among the Jews?
MARKEWITZ: I think I feel a definite breaking down of that. It definitely has occurred here in Portland. I think having a rabbinical council is really functioning much better now. Your Jewish education, the cooperation of the religious schools is far better than it ever was. I think men like Stampfer and what’s-his-name from Shaarie Torah, they’ve done a great job for their groups, and they’ve helped the integration of it. The Jewish Community Center, and above everything else, the Federation. 

The Federation under Moe Stein did some things I didn’t like, but then if he didn’t do anything, I wouldn’t have liked that either. He did a lot more good than he did harm. He moved to bring people together, and he brought a lot of people in, particularly from Neveh Shalom. They weren’t active in the Federation. When he started his young leadership groups, they came primarily from Neveh Shalom and some from Shaarie Torah, whereas prior to that, most of your leadership and prominent members of the Federation were from Temple, so it swung a long, long way.

Glazer: What about Kesser Israel and Ahavath Achim?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t hear much about it, but I think both Kesser Israel and the Sephardic shul have kept themselves separate, very much like the Hassidim have done in Jerusalem. In other words, they are the ones who are the elitists in their own thinking. I think maybe they have some right to it too. At least they have retained all of the old flavor and customs and whatnot. 

Again, I think I told you about my experience in Jerusalem. I just got fed up with religion, both Judaism and Christianity, Orthodox and Roman — gross extravagance in the name of religion. Taking the food out of people’s mouths to erect all of these magnificent edifices and to keep all these fat priests waddling around. It’s not a very good mark for religion. My own feeling is that religion wasn’t made to be that way. Religion should be a relationship of you, or me, or anyone else with their God, and it doesn’t have to have all the structure and the formality, the superstition, and the domination of a person’s freedom of thought even, that it manifests.

Glazer: Do you think that your way of looking at religion is becoming easier to do than it was before?
MARKEWITZ: Yes. I found it very interesting. I probably mentioned to you that before Temple had an assistant Rabbi and so on that as a teacher of comparative religion I very often met with the visiting groups. I explained our service, and I explained the artifacts in the temple and so on, and then we would get into discussions of the basic religion. I gave it far more time than these so-called guides do now. Very often, as we would be walking out of the temple — I usually followed them out and checked the lights — people would drop back and say to me, “You know, Mr. Markewitz, I think I feel more like you Jews do than the things that I have been taught as a Christian. I can’t believe in the Immaculate Conception. I can’t believe in Heaven and Hell and so on.” 

So it is really interesting to see how people are reacting. And I think that the priesthoods, the ministerial groups, to some degree rabbis have brought this about, because number one, you find out that they are only human beings, and number two, if they try to impress you in your thinking processes and in your relations with other people and so forth, they lose by it. 

This goes back to the time, again I think I told you about it, when my two older ones were in the religious school and David was in either the first grade or equivalent to the kindergarten group, pre-school, and Rabbi Nodel came out here. He gave them an awful harangue about Jewish families that had Christmas trees and how wrong it was. We had decided that we weren’t going to have Christmas trees anymore. We came home that Sunday, and the two older ones said that David was not going to be denied the pleasure and the dreaming of what comes with the idea of Santa Claus and all the rest of it. So if we get too dictatorial in our religions, people are bound to rebel against it just like they will against a totalitarian government.

Glazer: What is this rabbinical council that you mentioned? How does that function?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t know how often they meet. I assume that they probably meet once a month. They discuss their common problems. They work to have their SCORE, for example, their religious education, drawn together. If a good religious educator is coming to town, if he’s a member of one synagogue or another, they have a general meeting and share him. They have training courses each year, usually twice a year, in the fall and again in mid-season. They have a lot of inter-congregational activities as a result of it.

Glazer: Is it national?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t know. It could be, but as far as I know it’s just a local one.

Glazer: When did it begin?
MARKEWITZ: I think the thing was on paper a long time ago when Henry Berkowitz was here. I’m not positive of this. But it didn’t really jell until probably eight to ten years ago. I think Rabbi Geller had a lot to do with it. I don’t think anybody can work with that man without developing tremendous respect. He is just a great person. And when you get to know Rabbi Stampfer, he’s not a puppeteer but he’s a real man. Just a grand person. I don’t know of anyone who is the peacemaker that he is. He can bring people together who are ready to cut each other’s throats. He’s really quite a guy.

Glazer: Why did it take so long to get it together if it was on paper?
MARKEWITZ: I don’t think they got the congregational backing for one thing, and I am positive that a lot of it was just a matter of jealousy. I can remember accusations made by one congregation against another that they were trying to take their memberships away. I was told this by Eddie Weinbaum who — did you ever interview Eddie?

Glazer: I don’t think so.
MARKEWITZ: lf he ever comes to town, you should definitely interview him. He is living in Chico, California now, but he was chairman of the religious school at Beth Israel many years ago, in fact, when my dad was president. He told me that he put through a ruling at that time that children of non-members, unless they were from families who couldn’t afford it, that they should pay tuition fees and whatnot to go to the Beth Israel Religious School. That was a source of a lot of friction. A lot of the Orthodox Jews wanted their kids to go to Beth Israel because, number one, we have a much more rounded religious school.

Glazer: How do you mean?
MARKEWITZ: They use a lot of English. We didn’t stress the use of Hebrew. It was easier for their kids to accept this form of Judaism. Secondly, they looked at it as a matter of prestige, getting their kids out to move around and so forth. It “crossed the color line.”

Glazer: I had some questions just on that subject and I was looking for them. I’ll find them later. Getting back to B’nai B’rith, how did the people of Neighborhood House feel when the B’nai B’rith Building became the Jewish Community Center and just sort of took over?

MARKEWITZ: It didn’t happen that way. It didn’t cut them off at the shoestrings or anything like that. It was becoming more and more a settlement house. Many of the Jews were moving west from the river up onto Portland Heights, some onto Westover, a lot of them here in North Portland. There were a very, very large number of Jewish families that moved into North Portland, and they were almost all of German-Jewish background. In fact, I think I told you when we started that although there were many Jews living in our neighborhood, I was so young that I didn’t have any playmates of my age. Most of the kids were my brother’s age or older, and so he had grown up with a lot of Jewish friends but I didn’t have them. Leo Samuel and this little Kugel kid that I mentioned were about the only ones that I knew in the area, so it was difficult. 

But what happened, and this is what I was getting at, as the Jews moved west from the river and then started moving over into Irvington and so on, the Italian families and later some Blacks, a few Orientals and whatnot, started moving in because it was cheaper housing and their kids started going to the Neighborhood House. Consequently, the Jews felt they were a little better, so they started going to the Jewish Community Center or B’nai B’rith.

Tape 1 – SIDE 2
AUDIO IS OF VERY POOR QUALITY.

MARKEWITZ: I didn’t realize it until Dr. Stone talked to us last Saturday afternoon that there were two B’nai B’rith lodges in existence before I ever realized it, one No. 65, and I forgot what the other one was. They were the two that I remember. The large, strongest B’nai B’rith lodge had an extremely strong core of German Jews, and the second lodge, of course, was mostly from Eastern Europe. They did not mix

. Rabbi Wise was president of the lodge at one time and Roscoe Nelson and Alex Miller, who was Alan Miller’s father — founder of the Miller Clothing Store. Unfortunately, when those men passed out of the picture we lost their leadership and the lodge began to falter. It became a struggle, but on the other hand, you had people come up like Turtledove, English Rosenberg, and a lot of people who were really interested in B’nai B’rith. And of course, all of us as Jews, felt that the work of ADL …

END OF TRANSCRIPT [Ends mid-sentence. Remainder is of very poor audio quality and not transcribed]