(bright music) - [Narrator] Major funding for "Detroit Remember When" the Jewish Community has been provided by The Bruce H. and Rosalie N. Rosen Family Foundation.

Additional funding has been provided by The DeRoy Testamentary Foundation, The Mandell L. and Madeleine H. Berman Foundation, Dale and Bruce Frankel, and by the following.

(bright music) Support for this program has also been provided by The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, celebrating its 50th anniversary.

- [Speaker 1] The big Saturday activity was to go either to the Dexter show on Dexter and Burlingame, or to the the high end Avalon Theater.

- [Speaker 2] Of course, we did all of our shopping on 12th Street.

We ate at Boesky and shopped at Oxman's - [Speaker 3] Sunday mornings, my father would go to the House of Foods or Dexter Davidson, and he would buy everything he needed to make brunch.

- [Speaker 4] For those of us who loved Mumford, It was this magical place that we look back at and there's a connection between people who went to Mumford that's really very hard to explain.

- [Speaker 5] I think being Jewish meant a sense of community, a sense that everybody counted.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - Jews came to Detroit for a chance, for an opportunity.

They knew that Henry Ford had brought prosperity to the city of Detroit, and they could come and they could get jobs.

My grandfathers came to this country.

One became a tailor, and one was a delivery, drove a delivery wagon, that was the best that they could do, but they were happy to be here and hoped that their children would amount to something else because of the opportunities for a free education, which didn't really exist in Europe.

- The Detroit Jewish community begins in 1762 with one guy, he's a fur trader.

You don't have a community until 1850 when enough German Jews were here to form Temple Beth El.

- It was at the home of Sarah and Isaac Cozens, and Sarah Cozens had five daughters, and some say she wanted to see the eligible men in town so she advertised for a minion which started in Rosh Hashanah in 1850, which gave birth to the Beth El Society, and that girl eventually grew into Temple Beth El.

- [Gerald] They hire a Rabbi Liebman Adler, and every Saturday morning at the Sabbath service, the odds are he's sermonizing about abolition of slavery.

- [Rabbi Liebman] Each human being has its hour and each thing its place.

Let us esteem everyone in our republic and grant every human being equal rights, not more, not less, and let us hold nothing as impossible.

- What can they do about it, these 50 people?

The Heineman's, were German Jews, who employed 350 people manufacturing and retailing men's and women's clothing.

That put them in a perfect position to provide a new soup to every fugitive slave before they would emerge from hiding.

We have a Jewish fellow named Mark Sloman, who is a volunteer policeman with the Detroit Police Force.

And takes a stroll with his new African American friends down to the river as if they were friends for years, and they're in there, good clothing that's been given to them by the Heineman's, and he watches out to make sure there's no bounty hunter around before they get into the boats and cross the river to Canada.

- My parents were Russian immigrants.

They met in night school in 1922 at the Dwyer School on Caniff.

My parents were deeply involved in Jewish communal life.

All of their friends were immigrants and therefore my friends were the children of immigrants.

And they worked very, very hard.

These people were the eggman and the butterman, and the fisherman and the laundry man.

I didn't know at the time that we were poor.

My father made a living in a series of small businesses.

There was always ample food in the house.

It wasn't exotic by any means.

My wife still teases me that I didn't know the difference between, you know, broccoli and brussels sprouts until I married her.

Things green were string beans and things brown were everything else, you know.

And nobody got E. coli because you know, the food was cooked to destruction.

- My grandfather rented one stall in the grass at Central Market.

Inside the market, each merchant has his own stall, and there were people of every ethnic group in the market, including many Jewish families.

Jews were merchants in Europe because the Jews own land, they couldn't get into colleges to learn professions, so Jews were merchants by nature, that's what they knew.

My grandfather didn't ride home for five years because in Europe they thought the streets were paved with gold here, and he couldn't admit how poor he was and he couldn't be sending any money for them.

- The history in Detroit of the grocery business is a history of Jewish people.

And there were... Oh my goodness, there had to be 20 families or more.

As my father was born in 1912, he began working in the late '20s and '30s in selling cheese and ultimately working in in a slaughterhouse.

And my father opened a small grocery store in the Polish section of Detroit that he opened in 1940.

- The family business began in 1894 and it was started by Louis Loewenstein in Cadillac Square.

In those days, in 1894, everybody lived in Detroit beyond Eight Mile Road, it was probably just all farmland.

And then, my father-in-law bought the company from his uncle and he started the poultry business and moved to the Broadway Market, which was on the corner of Grand River and Broadway.

- My great-grandfather was the chief rabbi of Detroit.

His name was Juda Levin.

And at the turn of the century, he was the rabbi who went around to all the little shuls that at that time were east of Woodward in the old, old neighborhood.

- He raised money and he made a parade in around World War I area by Ripped to Save the Sick, and this led to the building of the Hebrew Hospital Association and eventual building of Sinai Hospital.

- [Irwin] Ossip Gabrilowitsch, which was a conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and this was after World War I, and he was instrumental in getting Orchestra Hall built in 1919.

His wife was Clara Clemens, a daughter of Mark Twain.

- So the history of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is very much intertwined with a Jewish conductor who conducted then until his death in 1936.

(bright music) The Detroit School system was an excellent school system, and these schools were jewels in the Detroit school system network.

So Old Central was old Maine.

That's the first high school I know of that had a Jewish concentration.

Next came Northern High School built in 1915 on Woodward and Claremont.

The Jewish teens needed clubs and they wanted to play basketball and so on.

So this Jewish Center was built in '33 during The Depression.

The high school students then could go to the JCC after school.

If they were going to afternoon school at, or wanted to stop by their temple, they could.

The Central High School is one school out of three that were on a campus together.

And this neighborhood became the main Jewish neighborhood during the 1940s and '50s.

They moved to this new neighborhood when this, around the time that this new high school was built.

One census during the '40s and '50s found that in the 36 square block area, 90% of the people were Jewish.

- Central High School was quite a unique place.

I graduated in the class of January 1955, and you look at that yearbook now, and you see how many members of our community came out of Central High School in the mid '50s.

- In 1944, we moved into Detroit and I went to Central High School.

Well, I never saw Jewish kids in quantity.

I never saw kids like that in my life, but these Jewish kids are most of 'em poor, most of 'em from immigrant parents.

Amazing, amazing, articulate, bright, focused.

Frankly then I was really proud to be a Jew.

- For those of us who loved Mumford, it was this magical place that we look back at and there's a connection between people who went to Mumford that's really very hard to explain.

- My particular interest in politics began was at, when I was a senior at Mumford High School.

I took a class called Contemporary Affairs with Aaron Gornbein, who was the high school teacher.

The class was about contemporary affairs.

There were no books, but we were required to read everything we could read in the newspaper.

And every Friday there was a quiz at 8:00 in the morning, it was a class that truly changed my life.

- My father said I could go to any college I wanted to as long as I could get there on the Dexter bus.

We had limited means.

My older brother and sister had gone to Wayne.

It never occurred to me to go any place else.

It was a great school then.

It's an even greater school now.

The demographic study done in the Jewish community a couple of years ago pointed out that more members of our community are graduates of Wayne State University than any other university in the state.

So Wayne has been an extraordinarily important source of higher education for the Jewish community, and our people are pretty good at paying back.

(bright music) - When I was growing up in Detroit in the '50s, there were lots of small synagogues along Linwood and Dexter and 12th Street, some of which were even in storefronts, that people couldn't afford to buy anything larger.

Generally, they were called bennet something or best something, but you, they were known as a Hungarian shul or the Romanian Shul, or they were called by the street they were on.

- I think it's interesting in my parents' lifetime, the temple was at the core of their life that was their social life, that was their friends, this was their major networking.

- [Phyllis] 'cause the temples had basketball courts, the kids after school, they would take the streetcar down Woodward to Beth El.

And that they would have boy scout meetings and clubs.

And you are right, Rick, that's true.

- Growing up in Detroit was an awful lot of fun.

The streets were filled with people.

Walking out on, you know, Dexter in the summertime and going to Zukin's for an ice cream soda for 15 cents.

The streets were teaming with people and life was on the streets, whether it was on the side street where you played ball in the afternoon after school, or on the shopping streets at night, going out for an ice cream soda in the warm weather.

The big Saturday activity was to go either to the Dexter show on Dexter and Burlingame, or to the high-end Avalon Theater on Linwood and Davison.

And my mother would carefully doll out a quarter to me for that venture.

The ticket was 12 cents, popcorn was 10 cents, and what was called penny candy was 3 cents.

So the quarter covered a full afternoon of entertainment.

- We sat on the front porch for entertainment.

That was our den, that was our family room during nice weather.

And the people upstairs sat on their front porch right above us, and we would just look across the street watching people on their front porch and they would do the same.

- Of course, we did all of our shopping on 12th Street, which was Boesky, and we went to... I mean, we ate at Boesky and shopped at the... What was the name of the market?

Not just the Boxman's, but it was the- - Yeah, there's Smith but also the Grunts.

- Yeah, the Grunts had wonderful pickles and so forth, so yeah, great pickles and barrels.

It wouldn't be allowed now, I think the health authorities would say, you're not allowed to eat pickles from Grunts anymore.

It's a real loss in that case.

Everybody should have a Grunts pickle in their life and it'd be a lot easier to maintain those traditions if they're raised on Grunt pickles.

- [Eugene] In the fall, we played football in the street, and if you were a clever quarterback, you waited till a car came by and you ran the play right after the car, which ran interference for you and you could score a touchdown behind a Buick that was rumbling down the street.

- People generally stayed in their neighborhoods when they wanted to shop or eat.

There were a number of theaters.

There was even a Yiddish theater on 12th Street.

- Littman's People Theater, where the old grandmother would always come two hours early and take eight seats for their children and the grandchildren.

You know, I never saw Yiddish show.

First of all, I don't speak Yiddish.

Wish I did.

It's a great language.

My dad said, there's a place for theater, there's a place for theater in our lives.

When theaters were closing, he was opening theaters.

But it's my dad was always amazed, sell a piece of cardboard for 20 bucks.

Can't eat it, can't wear it.

It's got a date on, it's no good.

Doesn't even make a good bookmark.

He was the one that when Zero Mostel was in Fiddler, they were looking for a place to open.

He was the only one would take it so we opened it to Detroit.

"Hello, Dolly" with Carol Channing.

I mean, these are two of the longest running hits ever.

That was my dad's sense of what people wanted and what they'd go for.

- [Mike] Mt.

Clemens was sort of the Borscht Belt for Detroiters.

People would go for mineral baths.

I remember my grandparents, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law would come here and many times they would go to a hotel for a Passover and they would have big name stars.

Eddie Cantor would be there around 1949, 1950, but you can smell the bass or something, so you can smell something in Mt.

Clemens.

- My grandpa Joe, lived next door to Hank Greenberg in the Leland Hotel, and we used to bring him a lot of food.

My mother would make food, so he would take my brother and Freddie and I to the ball game.

Maybe two times a week.

He was a wonderful man.

- [Gerald] Hank Greenberg broke in as a regular Tigers first baseman in 1933 and hit over 300.

In 1934, he led the Tigers in three important categories, batting average, home runs, and runs batted in.

Yom Kippur in 1934, Greenberg did not play, and it was a tremendous sacrifice on his part because he played in every single game of that year, so that would've been a tremendous record.

But Hank Greenberg did not play Yom Kippur.

(bright music) (audio beeps) - Baseball, and you know, kids today don't even carry ball gloves.

In those days, everybody, every boy had a ball glove with a ball in it.

And recess or whatever, the baseball game would break out.

Today, with computers and toy games, that doesn't happen anymore.

- My family is actually an immigrant story.

We came right after the war, 1947 to Detroit, because my father had four uncles here.

My mother had really lost all of her relatives in the war, but my father had these four Pearlman uncles who sponsored us, but my family came here because they really had nowhere else to go.

After the war, there was nothing called home anymore.

My memory is a little girl is spending an awful lot of time with other survivors and their children, and that wasn't, you know, as we called it, the Country Club set.

That was a group of people who spent their Saturdays and Sundays going to Bell Isle and to Palmer Park and hanging out at the fountains and cooking and being together.

And part of the reason it was a community is because many of us didn't have other relatives.

Those who survived had no one else here, in many cases.

So in essence, we became each other's relatives.

- The Mumford area was really the first neighborhood where the majority of Jews were able to afford single family homes.

And it was an area where most of the Jewish community was concentrated.

- If you didn't know someone at school at Mumford or at Hampton, you knew 'em because you were in the Sunday school class with them, whether it was Sharshetic or Temple Israel or Temple Beth El, or one of the smaller congregations.

- We lived in a neighborhood where everybody walked everywhere and where everybody frequented stores that were owned by people who also lived in the neighborhood.

So that sense of community was reinforced all the time.

- [Barbara] But the fun part about growing up then was our community really basically lived in a few different areas, and we would almost go down the street and you'd know everyone who lived in every house.

You'd ride your bike wherever you went, and there were the times when we would take the streetcar all the way downtown.

- It was a bustling, Washington Boulevard was a beautiful street, and the hotel, the book Cadillac, and the Statler Hotel with doormen, it was like the most beautiful place to be.

(bright music) - I grew up at a time when it was common to see rental ads in the newspaper saying, no colored are Jews or language, that was even worse.

My father was fired from Michigan Bell before I was born because they realized he had taken off the Jewish holidays.

His brother was fired from a public school's job teaching because they found out he was Jewish.

- Albert Kahn was not only probably the most influential architect in the city of Detroit, but he was also one of the crowning people who built the whole arsenal democracy.

I think one interesting story is that he was the designer of the Detroit Athletic Club.

They asked him to become a member and he refused to be a member because they would not admit other Jews as members.

- Exclusion.

Another word for discrimination was practiced in many of the professions.

Probably less problematic if you're talking about dentists who for the most part were solo practitioners opened their own offices.

Medicine was different because in order to practice, fully practice your craft, you needed a hospital affiliation, exclusion was practiced very, very openly.

You're not welcome.

- The old North End Clinic, which was the forerunner of Sinai Hospital, was the institution that the Jewish community sponsored to give Jewish medical students and access to a healthcare facility.

- So that is the main reason why Sinai Hospital was developed, because they were Jews who were doctors, but they had no hospitals to work out of.

- By the time I graduated the Wayne Law School in 1961, the glass ceiling for Jewish lawyers in what I would call mainline largely gentile firms, was cracking and it came apart quite rapidly.

- One of my favorite stories of how the Jewish community could become so tight is the fact that at one time we had Father Coughlin on the East side and we had Henry Ford, the first, and "The Dearborn Independent" on the other side of town, so were kind of stuck in the middle.

- [Operator] No matter then, what ties of blood and common parentage bind the God fearing Jews in New York with the atheistic Jews in Moscow, those ties must be severed for God, for country, and for the preservation of the beaming masses of Jews in America who have been victimized by the silence of their leaders.

(gentle music) - To talk about Jewish life in Detroit, when I ran for treasurer at Central High School, in my class he was the president of his, I was the treasurer of mine.

But we used to have these signboards to kind of advertise the campaigns that people would wear.

And my signboard had a piece of matza on it and it said, "This is what happens to bread without lemon."

(Sanders laughs) It worked.

- In so many ways, the Jews of Detroit have made an enormous contribution.

If you look at our federal bench, and I say so politely because my father was a federal judge and the first Jewish federal judge, that was a story.

But if you look at the federal bench now, the proportion of Jews on the Detroit federal bench is just amazing.

And it is a sign of what the Jewish community has built in itself through these years of commitment to this community as well as to the values.

I believe of Judaism.

- The Jews bring to the justice system a kind of sensitivity and an insight, and a background that is unique.

It makes an important contribution.

I think that my Jewishness helps me to be a better judge more than my being a judge helps me to be a good Jew.

- [Eugene] The Jewish community in Detroit has always had close links to the black community in Detroit and to the Civil Rights movement.

There were lots of Jews in organized labor here.

- Many of them were already involved in the rights of workers in Europe.

And when they came to America, they continued to be involved because they were the workers.

They were working in the factories, they were working in the shops, they were poor, and they were laborers, and they wanted to make sure that laborers could feed their families and could live in some degree of dignity.

- The Workmen's Circle is a labor Zionist organization that grew out of the close attachment to the immigrant population and not particularly strong on the theological component of Judaism, much more so the cultural component, what we call Yiddish Kite, who Jews are as a people rather than what their theology is.

Detroit had a very famous Jewish labor leader, Myra Wolfgang.

Myra Wolfgang was the daughter of one of my mother's good friends.

And she was, I think the secretary treasurer of the Hotel in Restaurant Workers Union, who always took the workers out on New Year's Eve.

You know, when all the hotels and clubs were ready to serve the biggest meal of the year, she would lead a strike at 5:00 on New Year's Eve and she was quite a feisty labor leader.

- My family always also had a tradition of going to Pablo.

We often went for my father's birthday in 1967 on July 23rd, we were coming back from Pablo and saw these wisps of smoke in the air and drove home on the expressway not knowing what was going on in terms of the riots.

The shock of witnessing that on my dad's birthday is something I will never forget.

And the feeling of hopelessness and fear in our community was just devastating.

But we learned that Max Fisher and Alan Schwartz, and Al Taubman and Stanley Winkleman immediately went to meet with Joe Hudson Jr.

and other city leaders to figure out what could be done.

They were the true visionaries.

They started New Detroit and then Detroit Renaissance, and together they created so many significant programs to help rebuild and heal our community.

(gentle music) - The most important thing that I hear in the synagogue every year during the holidays is L'Dor Va-Dor from generation to generation.

(singer singing in foreign language) - [Barbara] To me, it is very important that my children and my grandchildren leave balanced lives.

A life that encompasses more things than just this sacred Jewish community, but a life where they're grounded within the Jewish community and they too will pass on traditions and philosophies and ways of life of the Jewish people.

(singer singing in foreign language) - I think the Jewish traditions growing up was certainly focused around the holiday, not just high holiday services, but I always remember going down to Temple Beth El on Woodward and Gladstone, and for some reason every year it seemed hot and there was no air conditioning and it was just brutally hot and packed.

- We celebrated holidays.

We were not, I wouldn't say particularly observant in terms of Shavuot, but holidays we did observe and Sharshetic was just about four blocks away on Chicago Boulevard and- - [Sander] Do you remember how we used to walk to Sharshetic?

- I remember how you used to- - I know.

I can't do this on camera, I don't think.

- No, no, 'cause it was abuse, it was child abuse.

He abused me walking.

- I would go.

- Yeah, you can show 'em, you can show 'em.

- Like that.

- That's why my posture's not so good.

- That made us very close.

(both laughing) And we had so much fun and we ran around, I guess I should not confess this, if the sermon was boring, we'd go to this, up to the balcony of Sharshetic the old Sharshetic in Chicago, kind of run around in the balcony.

- Imagine what a wild life my brother has led, what he just described as a confession is probably the wildest thing that would either one of us ever did.

- And I used to go to Sunday school at Temple Israel and then at Letterly, and I remember throwing temper tantrums about not wanting to go to Sunday school.

So when we moved out to Farmington Hills, my mom said, "Fine, you don't have to go to Sunday school or Hebrew school any longer, now you're gonna go to Hillel Day School.

So I went to Hillel Day School and I think there was a little more of a Jewish seed planted in me at that point, because then of course, everybody's Jewish in the school.

You're learning about Israel, you're learning about Judaism, you're learning about, you know, all the traditions.

- I think that the holiday that has been the highlight of the family over many, many years has been the Passover Seder.

And I remember growing up and going to my grandmother's house and how late it would last, and all the singing, and the carrying on and you know, the table being crowded.

- Friday nights were very important.

We generally ate our meals in what we would call the breakfast room but on Friday night, we would eat in the dining room.

We had very special dinners on Friday night, and my mother always used her lovely things.

- I am orthodox.

I go to the synagogue twice a day and right every morning, every evening, we observe Shabbat where we do not answer the phone, the lights are fixed before we do not drive, Orthodox Jews live within the area that they pray in.

That's why you see so many of us walking to and from shul.

- We had people regularly over the house for a Saturday night, kind of a proletariat dinner, herring and black bread and a shot of whiskey and sour cream, and comfort food from the old country.

And they would all sing Yiddish songs.

And I would sit there and kind of take it all in.

- [Lisa] Sunday mornings, my father would go to the House of Foods or Dexter Davidson and he would buy everything he needed to make brunch.

- [Operator] Storm, one of the most thrilling adventures in the war happened today when an American destroyer dashed to within 25 miles of Tokyo to rescue two American flyers.

- [Sander] Sunday we would have dinner again together, and we would listen to Walter Renshaw at 6:00, and Drew Pearson at 6:15.

And then we would have a discussion.

- [Operator] The final proballein, merely for the sake of glory.

- And also our father loved to talk to our friends who came over to play basketball.

And he would talk to them about current events and I think he taught all of us the importance of being interested in the world about us and we never talked about one of us running for public office.

The important thing was being interested.

(gentle music) - We grew up in the tradition of Tzedakah.

We knew that we would choose things to do in our lives that would try to help make the world a better place, that we would help other people beyond our selves.

- And so you have in the Detroit Jewish history, a story of people arriving in poverty from abroad, becoming educated, being able to rise up in the world and improve their situation, and then giving back out of a sense of gratitude, out of a sense of the pride of citizenship.

They helped build a settlement house in 1903.

The Hannah Schloss building, the Hebrew Free Loan Society was formed in 1895 to provide interest free loans to poor people so that they could get started in life.

- You know, I'm president of Hebrew Free Loan.

And Hebrew Free Loan, which is the oldest federation agency.

It was started 115 years ago, by a group of men in the back of a shoe store who decided they wanted to help the peddlers who were just coming to the United States.

- [Gerald] The refugees after World War II got their loans from Hebrew Free Loan and it continues in the current economic of morass.

- And people come up to me all the time and say, "Thank you so much.

I would never have been able to go to college without a Hebrew Free Loan.

Or I never would've been able to go to medical school."

- All of us came home in '45 or '46, and there were obviously thousands of us.

We started a junior division at Federation and I became its associate chairman.

But the thing that was, I think the most fun for those two years where, which brought about 1200, 1000 or 1200 of us together, was something called Youth JDC.

We put out 12,000 bags for canned goods.

We had over a thousand volunteers, 300 trucks.

We packed perhaps seven freight cars.

And in the process, a lot of boys met a lot of girls, and a lot of marriages of my generation took place during those, that first year.

- I'm conscious of the fact that my mother, my mother's family came here with absolutely nothing.

My father's father came here with nothing from Russia and escaped the pogroms and operated a fruit cart on the streets.

And so to go from that, to within a generation or two, living in a comfortable environment in the suburbs and going to private school, I think that I'm extraordinarily blessed and lucky.

So it's a sense of wanting to give back.

- You know, we do believe in Tikkun olam and repairing the world in any way that you can and each of us in our own way has done that.

And this is Rick's path.

- Now I'm the CEO of JARC, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary of working with people that have developmental disabilities in southeast Michigan.

In 1969, JARC was founded as the Jewish Association for Retarded Citizens, which later became the Jewish Association for Residential Care.

But the idea that people should have the right to live in a community regardless of a disability or not, was a tremendous statement at the time.

And now, 40 years later, inclusion in the community for people with disabilities is almost commonplace.

- The Detroit Jewish Community is a unique community.

It's one of the most philanthropic Jewish communities in North America.

Despite all the challenges, it's one of the most close knit Jewish communities, the institutional embodiment of the Jewish community is probably stronger here than almost anywhere else.

- All you have to do is go around to our major cultural institutions in this community, whether it's the symphony or the DIA and look at the names on the walls, in a relative to the population, extremely disproportionate number or Jewish names.

- Why is this the case?

Perhaps it's from people who were raised like I was, where it was part of your life.

But I think that we also realize the strong need to support our cultural institutions because what's our city going to be if we don't have strong cultural institutions?

- I don't know if there's any city in the United States or anywhere else that's roots and ties are as deep as Detroit and Israel's.

What our community managed to do is create missions that were not based on crisis.

- Our very first mission to Israel in, I think 1993 that David Hermelin led, I think there were 1200 people, it was the largest mission ever from any community going to Israel.

And since that time, we've been going to Israel repeatedly.

- [Gerald] We have kids coming to our camps, we have kids getting involved with each other both ways across the ocean.

And then we're building ties in personal relationships that has done so much for our community.

- Whether people are Jewish or not, taking the value of caring, of community, of being aware that as Carl put so well, that everybody really... There's goodness in us all.

That's what we got from our parents.

Goodness in everybody.

(gentle music) - I suppose that there are just a few of us around now that can think back to the leadership that I knew, both as a child and as a young man growing up in Detroit.

When you start with any of this, you start with Fred Butzel.

I hardly knew him.

Well, I remember there's a picture on my office wall of Fred presenting me with a essay award when I was a student at the Hebrew Schools for an essay about the Allied Jewish campaign in 1934 and he presented me with that award at the Statler Hotel.

I remember, even though I was 16 years old, with what enormous pride I felt because Fred Butzel himself presented that award to me.

- He was one of the creators of a forerunner of the United Way.

It had a different name back then.

Fred was the one who brought the Boy Scouts to Detroit.

He was so involved in programs for youth that the Detroit school system has named an elementary school for him.

- When you think back over the Butzel Award winners, that names, all you gotta do is look at and you'll see it.

I remember so many of 'em because I've made the awards to so many of 'em, really people of real dedication and real inspirational leadership.

I've seen leadership develop.

They've been very devoted, very dedicated.

And then the leadership that you do have also inspires other peoples to follow.

This I've seen many communities, I've spoken to so many up throughout the country, I haven't seen anywhere where you have the dedication and where you have the unity of the people in the particular causes you see here in Detroit.

- I think it's really important, and you and I say this, that the next generation really understand their roots and the legacy because it's an immensely rich legacy, not in money, but more importantly in terms of the values that were inculcated.

- You know, I'm the next generation, but the science of this community, the Max Fishers and the Al Taubman's and the Avron Cohen's, you know, have been so instrumental in building the fabric of Detroit.

And although I think that there is still dedication within this community, I think we're going to have to not depend on a few people, but have a larger collective and be more of a team, more people at probably lesser roles to make things happen.

My aunt, Judith Levin Cantor, is a brilliant archivist, who has really been instrumental in bringing Jewish history in Michigan to all of our consciousness because that's what makes us who we are.

(chuckles) And we're all connected to what's happened in our past.

And I think that to understand yourself, you really have to understand what happened in your past.

- Detroit's Jewish Community and its leaders are singular in terms of the number of national leaders that have been produced out of this community.

It is absolutely amazing.

- We're aging.

We're the oldest Jewish community outside, retire the Sunbelt in Florida.

And you know, the challenge to reverse that trend is a big challenge.

- [Phyllis] And I think the goal for people like me, and for people who have raised children in this area, really has been something that I said at a meeting years ago, which is, how do we keep our children here?

- Many have fled, but many have stayed, and I think the ones that have stayed have this deep passion that say, "You know what, this is a place to be.

It's a wonderful place to be."

And there's so much hope here all the time that it's really gonna get better, and it's really gonna get better.

- As a Jew, you can never lose hope for anything.

- This incredible sense of togetherness that you see in the Jewish Community here, the way that people coalesce if there's a tragedy or to share in joys or other celebrations, that was something that when you go to another town, even a town that has a sizable Jewish community, you realize the dynamics are not the same as they are in Detroit.

What we have here is pretty special.

- The concept of Tikkun olam, of healing the world and making a better world, and that that is a pervasive part of your Neshama, part of your soul.

And it's our responsibility as Jews and as humans and you know, we have to step up and we have to raise our hand, and we have to anticipate what the future's going to be and how we can improve that future and play a role that's going to be meaningful.

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