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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/33743/full/33743/soldiering-on/ Soldiering on Friday, November 9, 2007 | by joe eskenazi Harry Sugarman took two shots in the back and a third across the cheek that left his ear in tatters before killing the German sniper. He then crumpled into a ditch and wallowed in his own blood and filth for three agonizing days on the World War I battlefield before he was picked up by an ambulance — which promptly exploded, leaving him sprawling in the muck for another day. “He was my hero,” mutters his son, Bert Sugarman, 86, glancing up at a portrait of his youthful, uniformed father (photographed, tactfully, from the side that still bore an ear). When Harry saw Bert off to World War II, he didn’t make a big speech. In fact, as Bert remembers it, Harry’s advice topped out at three words: “Watch your back.” A few years later, the younger Sugarman may have been thinking of his father bleeding into the scorched French soil as the B-24 Liberator’s four massive engines roared to life and the unwieldy bomber lurched down the runway. Or he may have been thinking of his young wife, Ruth, or so many other things. But that was back in 1944, and today he just can’t remember it all. Although Bert Sugarman putters around his San Francisco apartment these days with a walker, he still emits the self-assured toughness of a Bronx boy who grew up during meaner days and had to fight for everything he got. He chuckles when he recalls the day he and fellow members of the Jewish War Veterans walked into a meeting of German American Nazi sympathizers in Brooklyn, slipped on their JWV caps and dared the audience to do something about it. Sugarman’s eyes twinkle. He’ll put it this way: He and his buddies were gone by the time the police showed up. On May 30, 1944, 42 B-24s left Colchester, England en route to Nazi Germany. Sixteen returned. As a result, Sugarman, a bespectacled air traffic controller with no flight training, soon found himself pressed into manning a radio and heavy machine gun in the belly of a B-24. Twenty-nine times Sugarman’s plane took off for Germany. And it never got any easier. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “I crapped my pants every time we went up.” Last month, nearly 20 men and women filled the social room at Congregation Beth Israel-Judea near Lake Merced in San Francisco. Several in the group carried walkers or canes, and most of the men wore brightly colored windbreakers and field hats emblazoned with dozens of tiny medals and the Jewish War Veterans logo. “After this, I’m going to the Jewish Home to see my sick people,” one man said. “All of mine died,” his friend replied. Sugarman, the commander of San Francisco’s Post No. 688, exchanged a stiff salute with Richard Brown, a former Army pilot who flew in Korea and Vietnam, who proceeded to unfurl a red, white and blue banner, symbolically inaugurating the meeting. “All right,” Sugarman barked in his earthy Bronx accent, “We’ve got Veterans’ Night here on Nov. 9 — and I want to see as many people as possible here wearing your caps.” That the JWV meeting was scheduled for 10 a.m. on a workday said a lot about the membership. The vast majority of the men and women remember where they were on the stock market’s Black Tuesday — in 1929. Others recall Dec. 8, 1941 — the day after the day that shall live in infamy — as the day they lined up to join the military. Several of the men have been members of Jewish War Veterans since they returned home from Europe in 1945 — including the group’s chaplain, 87-year-old San Franciscan John Levin. When Levin joined the JWV, his fellow members were young veterans, mostly in their 20s. Over the years, as World War I vets have died, more have become Levin’s contemporaries. Now it’s nearly uniform: They’re old veterans. At 61, Al Herpe was the youngest in the room by a decade. The 20-year veteran of both the Navy and Army spent much of his life in the boiler rooms of ships and has, by his estimation, inhaled “lungfuls” of asbestos. “Don’t worry,” the Daly City Vietnam vet said after a nasty bout of his periodic hacking cough. “I’m not contagious. You can’t catch what I’ve got.” Herpe, a big man with a stylish salt-and-pepper beard, glances around the room at his elders. “I haven’t got much in common with these guys other than my military service, but I like them,” he said. “They mean well. They do things to help other veterans, and I’ve always tried to help vets, Jewish or not Jewish.” Other than the opening prayer and Yiddish-inflected conversation, the meetings have no specific Jewish or war-related agendas to adhere to (though, with Veterans’ Day approaching Nov. 11, the group is busy planning its annual event). “A lot of people figure when we hold our meetings we tell war stories. I don’t think that ever came to pass,” Sugarman said. “We discuss the post, the synagogue and the community, have our nosh and go home.” The Jewish War Veterans organization was created by a charter of the Congress in 1896, and the first meeting was held March 15 of that year at the Lexington Opera House in New York City. Typical of the time, the group called itself the Hebrew Union Veterans, and 63 Civil War vets shouted “aye” during the roll call. In 1919 the group changed its name to the unwieldy Hebrew Veterans of the Wars of the Republic. Finally, in 1929, the organization adopted the name Jewish War Veterans. Structurally, the organization is highly centralized, with state and overall commanders (Sugarman is a former California state commander). The Bay Area has three posts two in San Francisco and one in Palo Alto/San Jose. Oakland’s post dissolved “some time ago,” according to past State Commander Stephen Rosmarin. Nationally, tens of thousands of vets belong to hundreds of posts. When retired podiatrist Dr. Jack Geffner joined JWV Post No. 50 in Brooklyn, the fife and drum regiment of its Hebrew Union Veterans days was long gone. But it was still well stocked with World War I vets. A JWV member since 1946, Geffner found himself without a home post when he moved from Brooklyn to Sunnyvale in the 1990s. So he moved to relocate the nearly dormant San Jose Post No. 60 to the Albert L. Schultz JCC in Palo Alto. Meetings now boast 20 members. But it has been a struggle. “One Friday evening I asked Rabbi Ari Cartun at Etz Chayim if he had any Jewish veterans. And he turned around three times and looked around and said, ‘There he is,’” Geffner recalled, laughing. The reasons JWV can’t easily replace its departing members — departing to the great beyond, that is — with new recruits vary. But the bottom line is that younger veterans simply aren’t joining. Richard Brown of Post 688 noted that he’s often referred to as “the young guy” — and he’s 71. Stewart Levin, a 56-year-old member of the Palo Alto post, notes that his contemporaries stay away because “they don’t want to join any organization — they just want to forget Vietnam. They don’t want to associate or deal with other veterans.” But Post 688 does have one youngish member, 30-something Matt Gabe. The lawyer recently was called back into service and is serving as a judge advocate general in Afghanistan. Brown recently brought up a motion to write a proclamation thanking Gabe for his service and awarding him a $150 gift certificate when he returns. It passed unanimously. By and large, however, elderly JWV members lament that baby boomers are not “joiners” — something the folks at the Lions Club, Kiwanis or Rotary can attest to as well. And the anti-war sentiment pervading the Bay Area may have something to do with it. “There’s a Berkeley mentality in the area,” Geffner said. “People want no part of anything to do with the military.” But the old vets are quick to admit that life is more frenetic today than in the past. With husbands and wives working long hours, who has time to join JWV? Who has time to join anything? “The younger guys don’t have time anymore. It used to be that people looked forward to going to these meetings once or twice a month,” said Herpe. “Now people have a whole bunch of other things they want to do — or just sit at home and watch TV.” “You’d be surprised by how many young people play video games,” Brown chimed in. Then, with sadness, he adds, “The Jewish War Veterans will be gone just like the World War I vets are gone.” But if the Jewish War Vets are going away, they’re not doing it without a fight. Individually and in groups, JWV members volunteer thousands of hours every year at local veterans hospitals — which are quite full thanks to the ongoing war in Iraq. Miriam White recently logged 10,000 volunteer hours at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. Many of the soldiers mistake her for a nun and call her Sister Miriam. She prefers a different nickname: Wing 4C’s Own Jewish Mother. In the old days “the last thing the mother of a boy going off to the army would say is to make sure he called the JWV and he could find a place for Shabbos dinner,” White said. “For years, I would call the hospital and ask if they had anyone who needed a place for Passover,” she added. Essentially, the view from JWV members is that as long as they can still salute the flag, they will still head to meetings. “There’s a pride in being Jewish and proving that Jews did participate in the war,” Levin says. “The old [myth] is that the Jews never lifted a finger and just sat behind their desks.” And Levin knows all too well, that is simply not the case. For years he would wake up in a cold sweat with shrieks from long ago echoing in his ears. “The screaming,” he says. “The screaming of men who were half-dead but could still scream. My wife said, ‘You can’t do this the rest of your life.’ And my son would want to talk about it, but I’d always say, ‘Don’t ask.’” But that roomful of old men with JWV hats? “They understand,” he said. “They get it.”

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