At about age 22, I was drafted into the Russian Army and sent to Officers School and graduated as a lieutenant.  I was in hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and shrapnel.  There were lots of Jews in the Russian Army then.  I was severely wounded in the left side of my chest.  It wasn’t healing properly, and I was sent to a hospital in Uzbekistan for treatment.  My future wife (who was from Lithuania) had gone with her sister to visit someone who was hospitalized in that same hospital and met me there.  We knew each other for a few months and close to the end of the war we got married (March 9, 1943).  We were married for 39 years when my wife passed away.  Our son, Joseph Solomon, was born in 1946 in Beuthen (pron. Boyton), Poland.   

After the war, we went to Poland. On the holiday of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing of the Law), I was in the shul (synagogue), but there were no sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls), so in place of the Torah I carried a little boy. (I told the story for years, and 65 years later, there was a call from Betsy Kellman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League here in Michigan, to say that the little boy whom I had carried was none other than Abraham Foxman, National Director of the A.D.L.  We had a reunion when Mr. Foxman came to see me in 2010. There is also a song by Abe Rottenberg about me which can be heard on YouTube).  

 

My wife and I left Poland to go to Vilna. I worked as a rabbi then, and in 1946 or 1947, I obtained a position as the Chief Rabbi of Norway. I was also a shoichet (Jewish ritual slaughterer) and had had to learn poultry shechita (Kosher slaughter) and mila (Jewish ritual circumcision) for the job. My father was in the hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, and my wife traveled back and forth to visit him. We also had to travel to the Arctic Circle so I could supervise the kashrut (kosher processing) of the herring for the fish industry. Another time in Oslo, an observant woman working at the U.S. Embassy called to ask if she could come for Seder (Jewish ritual feast marking the beginning of the Passover holiday).  As she was leaving, she asked what she could do for the family.  It had been so long since we had had meat, my wife asked for salami. I wanted a Jewish newspaper.  The package arrived.  I said, “The meat was green, and the news was old,” but there was a job advertised by a refugee agency in Detroit looking to sponsor a Lithuanian refugee.  My wife contacted the agency, and I got the job.  Rabbi Leizer Levine was instrumental in helping, and Mr. Louis Berry paid for my family’s travel here.  

 

We arrived in Detroit in 1948.  Our older daughter Vivian was born in 1949.  I worked at the “Tyler Shul,” also a shul on Linwood, and others and also taught Yeshivah Beth Yehuda.  By the 1950s I became the spiritual leader of Young Israel Northwest, near Wyoming in Detroit, where I was employed for five years and also worked as a mohel (Jewish ritual circumciser).  My daughter Rose was born in 1956.  In 1959, I decided to build my own shul.  I had a building on Ten Mile Road, in Oak Park, starting in 1960 with daily and Shabbat (Sabbath) minyanim (quorum for prayer services) and have had a Shabbat minyan ever since that time.  After the building closed down, I moved to the Jewish Community Center on Ten Mile Road for weekday and Shabbat services, then only for Shabbat at my home on Victoria, in Oak Park.  After my wife passed away after 39 years of marriage, I saw a need for chaplaincy and started volunteering as a chaplain at Providence Hospital and at Beaumont Hospital which later hired me to fill that role.  I stayed in that position until February of 2010.                                   

Don't give up!