Eddy Shuldman

Feldman:  Let’s start with the basics just to get them out of the way. Could you please tell us your full name and where and when you were born? 
SHULDMAN: My legal name is Ethel Helen Shuldman, and I was born in Dayton, Ohio. 

Feldman:  When did you come to Portland? 
SHULDMAN: We moved to Portland when I was two years old. 1956. 

Feldman:  So you were born in ’54. 
SHULDMAN: Yes.

Feldman:  And what’s the family story about why you came to Portland? 
SHULDMAN: My parents were survivors of the Holocaust. They met in Dayton, which was a receiving city for survivor Jews. And so there was a great story about how they met. My father had no one who survived along with him. He had a wife and a child, eight brothers and sisters, parents, and they were all killed. My mother’s family went into hiding and lived illegally in the forests of Berlin. They emigrated to Dayton, Ohio, first, and my father came to Dayton when other attempts to go to Israel and other places failed.

So they met in Ohio. My mother’s mother—my grandma—was not a healthy woman, and the doctor told her she needed to live in a more moderate climate. My uncle took a vacation with his family, and they drove to the West Coast. They went to San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. He called them long distance (which was a big deal) and said, “They are all very nice cities, but I think we should move to Portland. They have Jews and they got jobs.” So without question the whole family came out west, because they were not going to be split apart ever again. So we moved to Portland.

Feldman:  And where did you settle in Portland? What was your neighborhood? 
SHULDMAN: I remember growing up in the Laurelhurst neighborhood. I started at Laurelhurst Elementary School. I believe there was a home we lived in before that, but I have no memory of it. In fifth grade, I started at Hillel Academy, which was a Jewish Day School, and my parents started to build a house out in southwest so that they could be close to Neveh Shalom, which was relocating to the southwest from downtown. I continued at Hillel through eighth grade and then I went to Wilson High School. I had my freshman year [of college] at Portland State, went to the University of Oregon for the last three years of my BA, and then moved back to Portland.

Feldman:  In what field did you major? 
SHULDMAN: My area was special education and I earned a bachelors in elementary ed. At that time you could only get a masters degree, but I completed all the requirements as an undergrad, so they had to give me the license. So I was certified as a special ed teacher, as well as elementary. 

Feldman:  Let’s go back to the school days when you attended Hillel. Could you tell me a little bit about what that was like?
SHULDMAN: It was a very different kind of school than the Portland Jewish Academy is today, although it was the foundation. It was small. It was very small. And I desperately wanted to go there. We had a family seder and some people came who were new to Portland. The little boy was reading Hebrew at the seder. And afterward I was just fascinated. I just kept bothering them, “Where did he learn how to do that? How come I don’t know how to do that?” And they explained that there are Jewish schools. “Well, why am I not going to that school? You should take me to that school.”

It took me years to talk them into it. It was expensive, but the folks at Hillel, people like Harry Nemer, Marvin Schnitzer, and a number of folks, worked very hard to make it possible for kids like me, who came from very modest homes, to be able to attend. I started in fifth grade and I was the only kid in my class who couldn’t read Hebrew. The school was run usually by a rabbi and a rabbi’s wife. The first year the rabbi was Rabbi Carmi who was an Israeli. He was a very interesting soul. Classes were small. Fifth grade probably had eight or ten kids. It was not unusual for classes to be mixed: fifth-sixth, seventh-eighth. The Hebrew program was [also] run by a rabbi, and back then there was a gentleman named Dr. Fowler [?], who was a retired math teacher and ran the secular part of the school. We had just regular teachers for the secular. The day was split in half. In the morning, we started the day with tefilah [prayers] and then we would roll right into Hebrew study for half the day. The other half of the day was traditional secular studies. The whole school had maybe 35 kids. It was a very small thing. By the time I hit eighth grade, it had whittled down to three kids. There were two boys and myself in eighth grade. David Bateman went on to be a rabbi. He left Hillel and went on to yeshiva, yeshiva high school. And Abie Brown, who also went on to yeshiva. I don’t believe he became a rabbi, but certainly continued in the Orthodox movement. So there were just the three of us. I then went to Wilson High School and went from three kids in the class, 35 kids in the school, to, I think Wilson was in its heyday, probably about 1,700 students in the building, and five or six hundred freshmen, and I was just swallowed up. It was the most remarkable shift [laughs]. 

Feldman:  A hard shift? 
SHULDMAN: It was very hard. I was very shy, very introverted. I talk about high school as walking down the halls and blending in with the lockers. It was hard. It was very hard.

Feldman:  I understand. Someone told me that you had a bat mitzvah. You were one of the earliest ones. Could you expand on that, how you decided to do that and what was involved? 
SHULDMAN: The bat mitzvah was actually very common in Portland. We had a lot of them, and it was not exceptional in our synagogue, Neveh Shalom. What was different about my bat mitzvah was that until roughly 1965-66, bat mitzvahs were Friday night affairs, and you simply led a Friday night service and you offered some commentary on the Torah. Gail Branfeld came before me; she was the first I believe at our synagogue to have a bat mitzvah where she would be called to the Torah to take an aliyah, not read from the Torah. I can’t remember if she read a haftorah or not. My cantor, my beloved cantor, was Chaim Feifel and Rabbi Stampfer was my rabbi. I was called to the Torah but was not allowed to read from it. I was allowed to chant a haftorah. But that was it. So it was a lot of sitting on Saturday with just doing that, and of course, it’s evolved tremendously. 

I credit Rabbi Stampfer for really taking up the cause and supporting young women. I grew up always coming home from Hillel and saying, “Yeah, the rabbi said women can’t do x, y, z. Why?” And my dad would say things like, “Actually nowhere in Torah does it say a woman can’t…. And in Talmud it says…” and he would give an explanation. And the next day I would go—I was kind of a feisty feminist—I felt like I had to push these things. So when it was time to at look at having a bat mitzvah, I couldn’t think of a reason why I shouldn’t be able to do what the boys were doing.

Rabbi Stampfer was gracious and said, “I agree with you.” But there were forces within the synagogue. I remember saying to my dad, “You know when I get called up to the Torah, Mr. So-and-so and Mr. So-and-so are probably going to get up and leave.” And my dad would laugh and he would say, “Good, that’s okay. Some people have a hard time learning.” And that was it. Sure enough when he was sitting on the bimah with me, they called me up, and I watched a couple men get up and walk out, and after I was done I walked back and I said, “They did; they got up and walked out.” And he said, “Good. It’s okay.”

Feldman:  So did your folks come from a learned Jewish family, Jewish background? Explain some of your home life. 
SHULDMAN: Yes, my father was very knowledgeable. He grew up in a very small poor town, a little village, Radom, in Poland, I think it was, and he basically had memorized most of Torah, if not all of it, and Talmud. I remember a young woman from our congregation who studying to become a rabbi was home visiting, and my dad took her aside and said, “So what are you studying? What are you doing in Talmud?” And she told him which tractate she was wrestling with, and he just recited a whole paragraph. I remember her eyes just going wide. Because they didn’t have books, they memorized everything. He was a very knowledgeable man, and certainly after surviving the Holocaust he had broken faith, I think. He was angry with God, but he never really stopped having a Jewish heart or soul. When I went to Hillel and I would come home and say, “How come we are not keeping kosher?” We never had pork in the house; we never did mix milk and meat, but as I learned the laws of kashrut at school I would come home and say, “How come we don’t do this?” And little by little it started coming back into our home. 

My mom, I think, was more of a Conservative Jew; she couldn’t read Hebrew but she had a real Jewish soul. Her Jewishness was baking challah, making meals. She was the classic Jewish mother with not as much guilt as what I saw most people have. I am in total admiration of my parents. I think they were just spectacular people. They worked very hard to create a Jewish home. My mom became very, very knowledgeable about running a kosher home, and was very active in the synagogue, doing things like cooking meals for seniors. And she often made the challah there.

Feldman:  Did you speak Yiddish at home at all? 
SHULDMAN: A bissel.

Feldman:  Mameleh? 
SHULDMAN: A bissel Yiddish in the home. We spoke a lot of Yinglish. My father was from Poland but learned German in the camps. German was in essence my first language and my wonderful Opa, my grandfather, would speak only German to me. One day my father just proclaimed, “We’re in America now, we need to speak English. I don’t want her going to school and not knowing how to speak well.” But my grandfather always spoke German privately to me, and Yiddish, it was a good mixture.

Feldman:  So tell me again, which of your relatives came to Portland, just so I can clarify it. Did they all kind of live in the same area? 
SHULDMAN: We never lived all that far away from each other. My grandparents—my mother’s parents—were Herman and Eva Lack, and my mother’s sister [Lucie- but pronounced Lutsie], Lucie Unger, married in Dayton, Ohio, and her husband was also a survivor, and he only lived for a year and then he passed away after they were married. So my Aunt Lucie lived with my grandparents, in essence was their primary caregiver. My mother had another sister, Erna Graetz,who was married to, I think officially in America, he was Robert Graetz, Rudolph was his German name, and they had two daughters, Renate and Anita. [Raynee was her nickname] She became Renate Riback and Anita married Leo Greenstein. They were children who lived in hiding and their story has been told I think here as well. So those were the ones who came over. My uncle by marriage, Robert or Rudolph, had a brother [his formal name was Amends] Manny Graetz, and his wife was Inga Graetz, and they were also survivors of that time.

Feldman:  Let’s talk a little bit about what your neighborhood was like, Jewishly, economically, however.
SHULDMAN: We lived on 43rd just off of Glisan near Laurelhurst, and our next door neighbors were the Perkels, Esther and Stanley, a Jewish family. That’s just a coincidence, and then around the corner a block away, the Sylvan family lived there, also Jews. And, let’s see, there were a few other Jewish families—I’m not remembering their names right now. My grandfather, grandmother, and Aunt Lucie, lived just off of Sandy Boulevard and they also had Jewish neighbors. I think Mary Gintz was the one that I remember most. And then—I called him Uncle Bob—Robert and Erna lived in a couple of places in northeast and then eventually moved into outer southeast just off of Holgate. I don’t think that’s outer southeast anymore, comparatively. And then when Anita married, she lived near the Kennedy School, which is now a brew pub. And when Renate married Fred Riback they moved to Tigard, which was considered “Oh, my god, they’ve moved to another country!” because Tigard seemed like it was so far away.

When Neveh Shalom was built, my parents moved first, and they built a house just a few blocks from the shul. By then my grandfather still lived in northeast until he became very ill, and he passed away in 1971. Then my aunt moved to an apartment in Raleigh Hills. Robert and Erna moved to an apartment—the same apartment complex, different building—and Inga and Mandus moved to the same apartment building. So my parents, and my mother’s sisters and brother- in-law all lived within two miles of each other again, and then Anita moved also to the southwest to the Bridlemile neighborhood. So we were all together again.

Feldman:  Why did your folks choose that shul? Was there any kind of connection? 
SHULDMAN: I think that it was a Conservative synagogue that felt like the best fit. Why they stayed there was because I think my father had great admiration for Rabbi Stampfer. They would have remarkable conversations, particularly as my father became more and more involved. My father became, in his retirement, a daily minyan goer. And he was a gabbai, he was someone who would witness conversions, and he always loved having deep conversations with Rabbi Stampfer.

Feldman:  And speaking of the, I guess it’s called the “downstairs minyan”? 
SHULDMAN: Yes.

Feldman:  You’ve been very active in that as well. Could you tell me some of the history of that, when it got started? 
SHULDMAN: Sure. I think it was probably 18, 19 years ago, and Noam Stampfer and Mark Sherman, and Leonard Shapiro (and I’m sure I’m leaving out some important names) were very interested in replicating something that Noam had seen when he was in Boston. There were these kind of break-off minyans. They weren’t created in terms of rebellion, rather to empower folks in the community, in the congregation, to take on leading services and apply their knowledge, and be more active in services. A congregation was typically passive. You sat, you listened, you said “Amen.” So the downstairs minyan was born. I was invited to participate because I some leadership skills; I could read Torah; I could read Haftorah; I knew the service. I’d been teaching students for bar and bat mitzvah for a very long time, and so I got involved. And over time I just became more and more and more involved. 

So now I’m considered the nudge mayven. I send out emails and I nudge people to volunteer, and we have services two to three times a month, the second, fourth, and if we have a fifth, we have a service. If the regular congregation does not have a bar or bat mitzvah on a Shabbat when the downstairs minyan meets, we combine. We take on the leadership role, and it allows the clergy to be part of the congregation and just daven, just to go deep [in their own prayer], because they’re not “on.” We’ve been able to empower a number of women to take their very first aliyahs; we have empowered a lot of people to start learning how to read Torah and Haftorah. It’s a very haimische, warm… I’m a shtibele Jew, because I’m actually very introverted. Small groups are easier than large groups. And to be in a small community where everybody is there because they want to lift their voices with others rather than sit and gossip and talk and schmooze… so it’s become a very lovely community that welcomes a lot of folks.

Feldman:  That sounds great. I also heard there was something called the “egalitarian minyan.”
SHULDMAN: The E-shul. It’s no longer active. 

Feldman: So if you could tell us a little bit about what it was, how it got started, and why it ended… 
SHULDMAN: Sure. Dina Feuer and a couple other folks (I apologize that I don’t remember who else) were motivated. They were at a Shabbat service, maybe several. I believe it was at the Meade Street Shul, which is Kesser Israel now. It was an old building down on Meade Street. A very knowledgeable woman, who would not want me to mention her name, with a beautiful voice, was singing. And of course they have the mechitza, the separation of men and women, and she was told the kol isha thing, which is that it is not okay for a man to hear a woman’s voice. It’s distracting; it’s seductive. 

And these other women who were present were appalled. They thought, “This is a knowledgeable woman who knows at least as much as you if not more, and her voice should be heard.” They wanted to create an “orthodox-ish” space for women to feel as though they could lift up their voices in the presence of men and sing. Ironically, the individual that they started this for said, “No, I don’t want to be a part of it.” 

Sometimes we met outside on the patio of the Jewish Community Center. I remember some summer day morning services. I remember one of the first women to take an aliyah, and it was her very first, was Sarah Berman. She was just in tears—we all were—because it was just such a magnificent thing to be a witness to. I was invited to join in, again, because I was a woman and I had some knowledge and I had some skill. They wanted to have somebody who would embrace helping other people. Dina Feuer and Yaac Feuer were absolutely the organizing forces there. They grew the e-shul minyan into something that eventually met at Rose Schnitzer Manor and held once-a-month services for the residents there. 

For a number of years prior to e-shul, I had led a breakaway Yom Kippur, Kol Nidre service. My father had passed away and going back to shul, particularly on Kol Nidre, was painful. I was surrounded by people with perfume and fancy clothing, and I didn’t have that centering and grounding that my father seemed to bring, and my mother, with all of her preparations, with her cooking, things like that. It just didn’t feel good to go. At Neveh Shalom we had split services and the downstairs service just didn’t fill me. I invited people like Judy Margles and Steve Wasserstrom, and Steve would give a big High Holiday speech. We rented space at the Jewish Community Center—the PJA chapel—and invited a variety of people who had knowledge and skill. Actually it was just Kol Nidre. We didn’t do Yom Kippur day. I somehow gutted through that. And so e-shul sort of took that over and turned it into a pot luck prior to Kol Nidre. Dinner would end, everything would get cleaned up, and we’d just roll into Kol Nidre service. Sometimes we had a guest rabbi or a guest cantor. Aaron Vitells often did the singing. It was just a beautiful, very small community. Everybody wore white. Everybody came with that notion of we’re not coming to see people we see only once a year, but we’re really coming to open our hearts and dive in. There were a variety of rabbis that were brought in. They did casual fundraising to pay for that. We acquired a Torah; the Torah’s still here; it’s stored at Sara Harwin’s house. I access it when I lead independent bar and bat mitzvah services for families who for a variety of reasons have chosen not to be a part of a synagogue. We access that Torah, and I think a few other tutors in town do that as well. The Torah also now gets used by a local women’s group, the spiritual group that goes on retreat several times a year; they borrow the Torah and go to the beach. It’s pretty beautiful.

Feldman:  Give me some dates. When did the e-shul minyan start? Sort of, kind of, approximately? 
SHULDMAN: I really don’t know.

Feldman:  Okay. 
SHULDMAN: Really, I’m horrible at dates. I’m horrible. I don’t remember.

Feldman:  Let’s go to some more painful dates, which is when your mom and dad passed away. 
SHULDMAN: Sure. It was long time ago. Mom died when Ari, my son, was five years old; he was born in 1986. And my father moved in with us and lived with us until he passed away three years later. We were all very close. 

Feldman:  So tell me…obviously you have a son, so you had a husband. 
SHULDMAN: I have a husband [laughter].

Feldman:  And you still have a husband. Let’s go back a little bit, going from your high school years until you met your husband and what happened.
SHULDMAN: I went to Wilson High School. I graduated from there. I think I mentioned I went to Portland State and then the University of Oregon. I became a special ed teacher for Portland Public Schools. I was hired, bizarrely, as an educational consultant and diagnostician. I possessed a certificate for a specialty in extreme learning problems. It’s a certificate that became obsolete about two years later, but learning disabilities was a new field. Individual education plans (IEPs) were brand new, and the district had had a hiring freeze of some sort. There weren’t a lot of new people hired and I was one of the few people in the district who knew how to write an IEP. So at that time they were hand written rather than the computer-generated things that happen now. Instead of putting me in a classroom, at the ripe old age of 22, I became a consultant and a diagnostician and was sent into classrooms to assist teachers who were having trouble, never having had my own classroom. I was sent to work with young children who were really struggling and to try to find ways to help teachers do a better job. I was even better at working individually with kids, but they also had me assessing kindergarteners for, like, 30 days of nothing but meeting one-on-one with kindergarteners and assessing if they were ready for school or not. I hated it. I had a meeting with my supervisor and asked him to fire me, because this was just not my vision of changing the world through teaching. 

And he smiled and said, “Actually I wanted to meet with you because we want to start an alternative school, and we want you to consult with that.” And I said, “Wow, an alternative school. What’s that?” It turned out that the district had one program in a high school, and it was to address the needs of students they saw falling between the cracks, kids who were at risk of not staying in school, and they wanted to create a program for young children, like fourth, fifth, sixth grade. That excited the heck out of me and I said yes without batting an eyelash. I was part of starting a program called Woodmere Alternative School. We were a small program in southeast Portland, 78th and Duke, I think it is. And it was a traditional elementary school on one side; I’d been there numerous times consulting about some children who were really struggling. And we created this program for fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. A year later we added high school and created this program that I was so excited and enthused about that after a couple of years I left the consulting job and became the fourth-fifth-sixth grade teacher. But we also had the ability to teach other grades as well. I basically, over my career, worked with kindergarten through high school for Portland Public, and then I eventually took over running the school. I was with Woodmere for nine years, and then an administrator decided that high schoolers belonged in a high school (that was really tragic) and middle school kids belonged in a middle school. The middle school movement came into being, and I couldn’t bear to watch a program I had thrown my blood, sweat, and tears into dissolve; like a little chicken, I ran and I took a sixth-grade position in a nearby school where they gave me nothing but at-risk kids, only now I had double the number and no aides, nothing like that. 

It was at my job at Woodmere that I met my husband-to-be. Jeff Edmundson came along. I needed an instructional aide and I had a theory that, because I was working with very low-income kids who came from families who were deeply struggling…. I had nothing but respect for them. Many of the parents had multiple jobs; it was not that they were purposefully ignoring their children but it was because their lifestyles of trying to make ends meet, trying to do work…. It was challenging. They were living in poverty neighborhoods where there is a higher degree of crime. So my belief was if I could create a classroom that was more like a family, then my kids would do better. My mom would come in and make challah with the kids and we had a family. So although it wasn’t legal to say that I wanted a man as an instructional assistant, that’s really what I wanted. 

The gentleman that I really wanted to hire didn’t want the job. He took an easier job. One of the questions always in the interview was, “What would you do if a kid picked up a chair and threw it at you?” That usually sent a lot of applicants running. My second choice was Jeff. And Jeff and I—neither of us married, neither of us having experience raising children—created a classroom environment that was based on how families run in terms of each other, taking care of younger children, taking care of older children. In the whole school, we tried to create that kind of a model. And that continued with me after my sixth grade job, where life was just unpleasant. After a year, I moved to Madison High School and joined the Focus Program, which was an alternative high school program. I joined the staff and two years later took over as the director. I was there for 23 years; I retired from there. The first period of the day, from Woodmere through Madison Focus, was called “Family.” Kids had a family leader, and that was always a staff member. And I still believe that the family model is the way we should go.

I think when you start raising a family…. [laughter] It became clear that Jeff and I had something going there. The challenge for me was that Jeff was not Jewish. He had a Jewish soul—a real neshamah—but he wasn’t Jewish. So it is with embarrassment I admit that we kept our relationship secret and quiet for a very long time. Then, when it felt so dishonest, I told my parents that I was dating a goy. And they were very upset and I said, “Well, you just have to meet him.” And they were pretty convinced after meeting him that he had a Jewish heart and a Jewish soul. I told Jeff, “I can be with you forever, but I won’t marry you because you’re not Jewish and I can’t ask you to become Jewish, but I can’t raise children and not have a Jewish home.” And one day he just said, “You know, I do Shabbos every week, I go to seder with you. I’m ready. I’ll do it. I’ll do it because I want to have a Jewish family; that’s fine.” So we went to my parents, who lived blocks from me. I bought a house when I was a first year teacher and I lived right across the street from Bridlemile School, about half a mile from my parents, of course. We went over and Jeff said, “I want to marry her and I’m prepared to convert; can you help me do that?” 

I taught Jeff Hebrew. And my dad went to Rabbi Stampfer and said, “They want to get married, and he’s a smart boy, and you should find a way to help him convert where he doesn’t have to do this whole year-long process. He knows more than you know.” And at that point Jeff had actually already started picking up Hebrew. He went in and met with Rabbi Stampfer who did the usual trying to discourage him. And Stampfer said, “Well, here’s a stack of books,” and it was many feet high. He said, “Take these home and read them, and when you’re done, come back and we’ll discuss.” 

Well, my husband is a scholar. “Books. I can do books. I can do history.” He devoured the books, went back and talked with Rabbi Stampfer. Stampfer grilled him and was satisfied that he’d absorbed it all so he said, “Well, here’s another stack of books. Go read these and we’ll talk.” It was a shorter stack. So they did all of that. Jeff did the mikveh, converted, and we got married in 1984. 

Feldman:  And clearly, you’ve raised a Jewish… 
SHULDMAN: We’ve raised a Jewish boychik. Yes, he went to PJA [Portland Jewish Academy]. Similar story. We were slated to have him go to Sabin Elementary School on the east side of town, because we wanted him to be in a multicultural setting. We felt like we had a good Jewish foundation at home. We went to a Yom HaShoah observance when he was maybe five, and the PJA choir was singing in Hebrew, and he turned around, and he said, “How did they learn to do that?” It was like my words came back. How does that happen, right? And “I want to go there.” And we said that we’d already set things in motion, you’re going to go to Sabin, you’re going to make new friends. “I don’t care about that” [he said]. We lied. “You won’t know anybody. Nobody you know is going to PJA.” [He said] “I don’t care. I want to know how to do that. I want to read that.” 

So there we go. He started in kindergarten, graduated from there in eighth grade. [laughter] Children!

Feldman:  Just like his mom. 
SHULDMAN: Pretty much. It was fun. 

Feldman:  Let’s just go back. I think I’ve lost the name of the elementary school where you were the sixth-grade teacher.
SHULDMAN: That was Whitman Elementary School. That was just blocks away from Woodmere, also outer southeast. I basically spent my career on the 82nd Avenue corridor. Madison High School is Northeast 82nd, so I just moved further north, that’s all.

Feldman:  What inspired you to go into special ed to begin with? 
SHULDMAN: I always knew that I wanted to teach. I taught myself to read when I was a child, and my mom had given me a little chalkboard with the letters of the alphabet around the edge. So then I would take the dolls that I didn’t play with and they would become my students, and I would teach them the alphabet. And then I made the neighbor kids suffer, and I would do that as well. My cousin Anita worked at the Jewish Community Center preschool. She was considerably older than me even though we are direct cousins, and she really made history. A family with a Down syndrome child asked if their child could go to the preschool. And the director of the preschool asked her and she said, “Of course.” And I was fascinated with the idea that a child could be excluded from school because of a disability; she was my hero. I would ask her for information. She also taught at Neveh Shalom at Sunday School and I would go down and visit her and look at the little kids and just feel this draw. I knew from a young age that I would teach, and I was very much drawn to special needs kids. 

Then, when I was in high school, I was still going to Sunday school at Neveh Shalom and Betty Brownstein created this program where she wanted to have anybody who was interested in becoming a teacher learn a little bit about teaching and go help Sunday School teachers in the younger grades. So Betty Brownstein became my hero, my goddess. I would go faithfully and help in the classrooms and that just reinforced it. In high school I worked as an outdoor school counselor and went every chance I could, and learned a lot about teaching.

When I was 15, my mom said, “There is this lovely lady who has a boychik. She has three sons– a single mom –and her son got kicked out of Hebrew School. He’s having trouble learning. I think he’s not able to learn well. She’s in tears because now he won’t have a bar mitzvah. Maybe you could help.” So at 15 I took on this boy. In retrospect, he absolutely had learning disabilities; he had an emotional disorder. But one on one…. And those were the kids I adored. In fact, going back to Hillel (this is so illegal and so not okay what happened), but we were at Shaarie Torah; that’s where the school was housed. I think I was in eighth grade. A teacher became ill and had to go home immediately and they couldn’t get a substitute teacher, and it was like the third grade, and in that third-grade class there was a boy—I still remember his name, I’m not going to say it—and he was a little terror. He was really a kid with troubles. Anyway they said, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” and I happened to overhear the conversation. I’d gone to the bathroom and they were talking in the hall. And I just said, “I’ll do it. I’ll take the class.” And they let me. [laughter] Not completely without supervision. Teachers were constantly stepping out of their room and coming in, but I had a relationship with this boy, because I always felt like he was not getting what he needed. I had a relationship, so I just took him aside and said, “I need you to help me. You’re going to be my helper.” I taught half a day of third grade and I was smitten, right? So that took me forward. Other than the diagnostic two years of work, I really never was officially a special ed teacher, and I didn’t want to be because it became a paper pushing thing. But the kids whom I worked with, who were at risk, were really those kids who either had never been officially referred for a diagnosis or they fell between the cracks. They didn’t quite meet special ed standards. But my basic philosophy has always been if somebody is struggling to learn, what we tend to do is talk louder, and we tend to repeat the same directions over and over again. And what I learned, particularly from the boy that I taught Hebrew to was that if they aren’t learning it, talking louder is like talker louder to a deaf person. They can’t hear you. So louder doesn’t matter. Repetition doesn’t matter. You need to find how they learn. 

So that launched me. I ended up teaching his two brothers, who also got kicked out of Hebrew School, and then I suddenly was somebody who worked with kids who didn’t learn traditionally. And that launched my Hebrew tutoring career.

Feldman:  And you still do that, as I recall.
SHULDMAN: I do. And not just special needs kids. You start with a special needs kid and they have a sibling. You get them because the family feels comfortable, and so you move on. I work with a full spectrum of kids. I work with autistic kids, developmentally delayed, emotionally disturbed, Tourette’s, as well as talented and gifted, and everything in between, and they’re all phenomenal.

Feldman:  Let me go just back a little bit because I know I have to fill in some blanks here. You talked about your mom and how she created a home and so forth. Did she work outside the home at all? 
SHULDMAN: She worked outside the home when I started college, in my sophomore year actually. My father had had a heart attack. I think she was worried. She was not a well woman as a result of living in hiding and the stress and all of that, she was not healthy, so it was a big deal for her to go back to work. She, for a short time, ran the kosher meat market in Hillsdale. We had a little kosher meat market, all frozen food, I think Marvin Schnitzer was the orderer and the coordinator, and she managed the store in Hillsdale. And she did that until there was a robbery, and somebody came in with a gun. And having a gun in her face brought everything back, and my father and I just said, “No. You don’t need to do that. No. You’re done. Finished.” 

So with a good bit of reluctance she stepped aside. She was always a volunteer. She always volunteered for stuff. I remember being in Blue Birds. I don’t even think they have those anymore. Blue Birds was the early years of Camp Fire Girls. And I wanted to go to day camp and there was a Camp Fire Girls day camp and they couldn’t afford to send me, but they said, “If you want to be a camp leader…so there was this little Jewish mama. My mother was older; she was 41 when she had me. So you’re looking at somebody who’s almost 50 but really in many ways seemed older than that, and she was the papoose leader. [laughter] And she led all the staff’s children, all the ones who were too young to be in day camp. And what does she know from Native Americans and camping? We never camped. She didn’t know that, but darn if those kids didn’t hang on to her and love her and “can I just leave my group and go hang with her?”

That’s how she was. Wherever she went she went people loved her. She volunteered at the shul a lot. She got me started volunteering at Cedar Sinai before it was Cedar Sinai, it was just Robison. Volunteering. Helping others. She was like a one-woman working greeting committee. Somebody new would come into the synagogue, particularly a young woman, a young mother, and she would just take them under her wing and be a surrogate mom, shvester, whatever they needed. That was my mom.

Feldman:  And what did your dad do professionally?
SHULDMAN: He was a tailor, a schneider. He’s been interviewed; he’s in these archives somewhere. He ended his tailoring career at Rosenblatt’s, which was a fine men’s clothing store, but he did a lot on the side and he worked at some other men’s clothier shops prior to that.

Feldman:  So I’m going to switch ground right now, and go from your tutoring and special ed. and so forth to fused glass and your involvement in ORA. (If you want, we can take a short break now.)
SHULDMAN: I’m fine.

Feldman: So tell me the story, Eddy, of what got you started. Why fused glass? What’s with ORA? I think you were perhaps the founder but I’m not sure. 
SHULDMAN: I’m a co-founder. How I got into fused glass is, I’m afraid, a long story. I’ll try to make it short. It goes back to being a teacher. A couple of years into my work at Woodmere, I was back at school working on a master’s degree. I found myself doing something I’d vowed I’d never do. I started “pathologizing” my students if they weren’t learning, instead of owning that I wasn’t doing a good job. It’s asking, “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they getting this? This is to frustrating.” 

And then I heard myself. Oh, no. And I looked at what I was doing. Being a grad student, I knew how to do that. Was it hard? Sure. But it wasn’t crazy hard. It wasn’t like confronting how to learn something brand new. I made a vow that for the rest of my career, every couple of years I would require myself to take a class that I was certain that I would be terrible at, something I would fail miserably in. So I took classes like Nia Dancing, exercise class, and at the end the teacher would say, “Well, you’ve made some growth. Now when I say go left you actually go left.” I was terrible. And what was awesome about that is that I could go back into my classroom and say, “Oh, you guys should have seen me yesterday.” I would tell tales of my frustration, hoping that those stories would empower them, because I was sticking with it. I’d certainly quit at the end of the class; I didn’t continue my misery. 

My grandfather, my opa, was a glassier in Germany. He didn’t make windows; he installed them. He built aquariums. And he had installed stained glass windows in churches and things like that. When he passed away, I got his tools, and there were these glass cutters and things. It turned out they were not appropriate any longer for cutting. I was a little drawn to the idea that maybe I could use his tools. I’m not a good artist; I’ve never been successful in doing art–I’ll try this. So I got a friend to take a stained glass class with me. And I was atrocious. I burned through so much glass. I broke so much. But I was relentless. I was at the glass store and their studio every day, and my teacher said, “I’ve never seen anybody work so hard and break so much glass.” I was terrible. 

Well, a couple years later, I shifted to the high school and the kids there needed art so I brought my one soldering iron and my scrap glass, and I offered a stained glass class and just tried to stay a couple steps ahead of the kids, who were so gifted with their hands and so artistic. It made sense–they were at risk kids; their brains are wired differently. So we did stained glass and I got better at it. It didn’t ever grab my heart in deep significant ways, but I got good at it. I didn’t let go. 

One day a phone call came and this man said, “I hear you teach stained glass, and I have glass I can donate.” Magic words. “Yes, thank you.” And then he said, “No worries, it’s all compatible.” And I said, “Excuse me, I don’t know what that means. What is compatible?” “Well, you fuse glass, don’t you?” “No, sir, we do stained glass.” “You don’t know about fusion?” “No, sir. I have no concept of that. What are we talking about?” And he said, “Well, you should just come to my studio and I’ll show you.”

And I let him show me. I went over to his place, and the guy was just ADD. He was all over the place, but he had me do a practice little piece. I did it. It was awesome. And I said, “I have to learn this.” I knew I couldn’t learn it from him. I found somebody who said, “If you’re going to be teaching kids, I’ll teach you for free.” And I spent my summer in her studio. And when she started teaching me, I suddenly saw what I could do. It resonated with my heart. I saw Hebrew letters kind of floating in glass. All of the sudden, for the first time in my life. It was something I thought I’d be terrible at and it worked. And I got hooked into glass. I started. 

You can make only so much glass and then it takes over your house. Jeff, my husband said, “You either have to stop or you have to start selling this stuff because we can’t put this anywhere else.” I tried selling in a couple of different venues, and I met Esther Lieberman at a Hadassah Hanukkah fair. She and I went up to Seattle to a synagogue art fair, and tried selling. It wasn’t a very successful art fair, and the two of us started talking and we said, “You know, there has to better way than Hanukkah fairs and synagogue fairs, and why isn’t there Jewish art? And why isn’t…?” 

We started dreaming this up and so ten years ago (ish), we had a meeting in my living room. We called, like, ten women together; we didn’t know any men. They were all artists. Diane Fredgant was one of them and a number of others—Laurie Fendel, Rosana Berdichevsky…. I can’t remember all ten now. And we started talking about what would it be like to start an organization. We started very small. I did a lot of research and I found out that most art collectives collapse within five years. They just don’t have the wherewithal. So we decided we would freeze our membership. I think we were frozen at 12. We wouldn’t grow. We would just try things in small bites, in small pieces. We would learn and we would reflect, and after five years we’d decide what else to do. And at the five-year mark, it was like: “Oh my gosh. We’re still alive! Let’s open it up.” 

We started opening it up to guests to come at a celebration of art that we had instituted. And we realized, no, we could actually have more members. And so, ten years later, I am finally not the president of the organization. Esther has taken it over. I was president for the first nine years. I’m still on the board and my role is: I am a dreamer. I like to imagine what could be, and so I’m trying now to figure out how we can impact the cultural arts awareness of the Jewish community and beyond. How do we help people understand who Jews are through art? And how can we begin doing some interfaith art things that are not a model of parallel play? 

So for example, what we often see is an interfaith art show where five Jews, five Muslims, and five Christians put up their art. They’ve never met; they’ve never spoken, but their art is parallel to each other and that’s it. To me that’s parallel play. We’re not exploring the hard issues. I’m in the process now of creating an opportunity for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to come together to talk about being artists and what does art say about our faiths? And where is the connection? And how can we instill notions of peace and peace making through our art? Let’s not talk about creating art sales; let’s talk about teaching through our art. And let’s teach each other first. That’s going to be one of my next big pushes.

Feldman:  Wow. [laughter] I know I’m not supposed to say that on the tape, but wow. So is there a special name for this organization or is this all under ORA?
SHULDMAN: I think it’s an outgrowth from ORA. I think ORA will be deeply involved in it because when I mentioned it there was so much buy-in. And when I put out an email to a variety of artists, the Jews responded like crazy. But I have made a deep connection, I hope, with a gentleman at Portland State. His name in Kanaan Kanaan. He’s an art professor and he does illuminated letters and Arabic calligraphy, and we’re on the same page. We haven’t begun the conversation beyond, “let’s create a movement,” (those were his words), and so I’m excited.

Feldman:  So, as I recall, you were at a Hadassah group when you were thinking about founding ORA? Or maybe not? Maybe I got it wrong.
SHULDMAN: I was not a member of Hadassah. Hadassah would run a fundraiser, a Hanukkah fair, for several years. I attended that. I’m not a joiner of large groups. I’m an introvert, so big groups of people just don’t fill me. [laughter] My other affiliation with Hadassah was that Hadassah used to sponsor a youth group called Young Judea. When I was in college in Eugene, I taught Sunday school there and I ran Hashachar, which was a Jewish youth group. 

Feldman:  Great. Let’s talk about some politics and social movements that have happened in your lifetime, especially the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Gay Rights Movement. Do you have any experience with or stories you want to share? 
SHULDMAN: I would say that, again, these are large movements, and I struggle with being part of a large crowd. I was involved very much with teachers’ union things and became a union rep and an activist in my building in terms of trying to help teachers who got into trouble. And, unlike what the typical union rep would do, I also would try to help teachers who didn’t really belong in education maybe find a gentle path out, so that we didn’t continue to foster some bad teaching.

In terms of movements, I think my greatest activism was in teaching about those movements to my students and bringing up quality education, role-playing simulations, trying to show the difference between “Dead, White-man history” and reality, looking at progressive texts and comparing them to traditional texts. I was always a supporter of progressive movements; I was a money donator and would wear pins and buttons, but going to rallies and things like that, no. I was a young child when the Civil Rights Movement was going on in the ‘60s, so that was more just learning, learning, learning, as a child. But I was not an activist out in the community. That would have done me in, I’m afraid, so I would have to say I was a passive activist if there’s such a thing. I’m sorry to say that. 

Feldman:  In your family, or among your friends, was there discussion of Israel and Zionism? What role did that play in your life, at least growing up?
SHULDMAN: Certainly. Israel is the Promised Land. My father was supposed to emigrate to Palestine before it became Israel, and a family member there discouraged him, basically said, “I won’t help you.” I didn’t get to Israel for my first time until the end of my freshman year of college, which was my parents’ first time also. And I think it’s safe to say I’ve never been a Zionist. Early on, when I didn’t have a deep understanding of the history and such, I didn’t know why I didn’t have those feelings. Hashachar, the youth group was supposed to be a Zionist youth group, and I felt like that was almost brainwashing kids into some politics that I had no business doing. What I wanted them to do was to understand what the culture, traditions, and things like that of being Jewish were, and to love them and to make their own decisions about what kind of a role Israel would play in their lives. So I didn’t do any kind of Zionist teaching. 

On that first trip to Israel, I’d gone with my parents, got them settled with family, and then my backpack and I wandered around Israel. I had the opportunity to talk with a number of Palestinians and Arabs as well as Jews, and I started to get a real education. I have to say that there’s much that I love about Israel, but human rights are a big deal for me. They’re a very, very, very big deal for me. And I want to support Israel as a place where all human beings can live. So, I am a supporter of things like Yad b’Yad [Hand in Hand], which is a school for Palestinian and Jewish children to come together, study, learn, live together. I think that’s a really incredible social, educational movement, and I can support that. But at this point in my life I won’t be going back to Israel until I see better, clearer policy and law around human rights. My heart can’t allow me to say Israel is right no matter what. I can’t do it.

Feldman:  Have you found that there are folks in Portland who share your views? 
SHULDMAN: Absolutely. There are a number of people who share my views and there are a whole lot of folks who are appalled, absolutely appalled, with me for it. I put human beings together and I can’t say that Jews are more important than any other group. They are my people, they’re my culture, they’re my religion. I agree with many of them. I disagree, just like anybody else. But human rights are human rights, and I can’t… I’ve seen the ugly that comes out and I can’t abide that.

Feldman:  So let’s talk a little bit about how Portland and the Jewish community of Portland might have changed over your lifetime, in the thousands of years [laughter]…I’m only kidding…since the 1950s when you first came here.
SHULDMAN: I think I probably wasn’t aware of the Jewish community until those junior high years. Sixth, seventh, eighth grade. I was a regular shul goer. Friday night services were the big deal, and Shabbos morning was smaller. In our synagogue, I see smaller Friday night attendance and larger Saturday morning, that’s a shift. 

The involvement of women in significant roles is huge. Female cantors. Female rabbis. Wow! Women taking on leadership roles in the Jewish community—that’s really significant. 

[Another change is] the number of synagogues. We used to have just a couple. We had the Alberta Street Shul in northeast Portland. Meade Street Shul. And then you had Temple Beth Israel, Shaarie Torah, Ahavai Sholom, Neveh Zedek that merged, so you had Ahavai Sholom (it became Neveh Shalom), and now we have an abundance. We have so very many opportunities. 

I see more people unaffiliated. We have a lot of Jews who don’t belong to a synagogue. They aren’t members of the Jewish Community Center. In fact, in ORA we have artists who tell me the only Jewish connection they have is through their art, so ORA serves a purpose we had not imagined. The other thing that I would say is incredible progress in Jewish education. The synagogues have gone into much greater depth in how they are educating not just kids but adults, and so I love the movement in that regard. 

We’ve seen care for the elderly go from a kind of convalescent-patient model to allowing elders to age gracefully or more gracefully through all the efforts of Cedar Sinai and Jewish Family and Child Service. The Kehillah housing project, which has created an opportunity for developmentally disabled young adults to have an experience living on their own for the very first time—that’s really huge. 

And then, near and dear to my heart, the fact that special needs kids now are having bar and bat mitzvahs. It used to be kind of a watered-down thing if we did it at all, and now synagogues not only embrace it, but they actively reach out to families who have kids who have very severe disabilities to ask, “How can we embrace your family, your children? How can we bring them into our Sunday School/Shabbat School models? How can we support them in having a bar or bat mitzvah?” And I think that now that we are finally in a place where lesbian and gay families, bisexuals, folks who are struggling with gender identity—most of our movements are open, affirming, welcoming, and those are the kinds of things that if you’d asked me twenty years [ago], I would have been very pessimistic. So I’m ecstatic about these kinds of changes and I can hardly wait to see what happens next. 

Feldman:  That sounds great. I’d also like to go back to one thing I might have missed, which is what happened to the e-shul? I don’t think it still exists. 
SHULDMAN: It doesn’t. I think it ran out of steam and Dina [Feuer] would be the perfect person to grill on this, but it took a lot of effort for her to encourage people to come. Families tended to come from PJA to this because for whatever reason a lot of PJA families don’t affiliate with a synagogue, and so this was a way for a family to come to shul at least once a month and Dina—that Jewish mama’s guilt that she can do so beautifully—certainly inspired people to come. She retired, so I imagine that was a piece of it, that she was no longer accessing a group of people who might have been willing and the attendance sort of just diminished. I think there are enough synagogues too that people who really do want to do this can find a home in one of the synagogues here.

Feldman:  I see. Is there anything else that you would like to add about Jewish Portland, Jewish you, non-Jewish you? Anything you’d like to contribute to the tape?
SHULDMAN: I have a lot of gratitude. I guess that all I would say is I’ve got a lot of gratitude for the people who made it possible for me to get a Jewish education, to live Jewishly, to develop an identity of pride–that it wasn’t just family. You have to have a community that is supportive of that. So from Jewish camping—Camp Solomon Schechter, B’nai B’rith Camp—the community centers, all the shuls, I just feel an incredible gratitude. Oregon Jewish Museum has to be one of the most phenomenal…. I didn’t mention that as a change, but to have witnessed the growth from this tiny little office space at Montgomery Park to where we are now: looking into moving into a building downtown that will allow us to grow. I go back to thinking about what my uncle said about Portland. “They got Jews and they got jobs.” We really do have a Jewish community, and it is a growing community. We have a presence, we have diversity, and mostly we are able to do quite well with each other, being respectful and working together, so that’s it.

Feldman:  Thank you very much.