When in the 1950s, new executive director Melvin S. Zaret attended his first meeting of the executive committee of what was then the Milwaukee Jewish Welfare Fund, he overheard someone whisper, “He’s so young.”
To which one committee member, attorney Benjamin Saltzstein, replied loudly, “Don’t worry; we’ll age him.”
It has been many years since then, and Polish-born Zaret, who retired in 1984 from his position as Milwaukee Jewish Federation executive vice president, has accumulated a stock of speeches, essays, articles and anecdotes from his six decades of service to not just Milwaukee’s Jewish community, but to communities all over the world.
On Aug. 8, the Jewish Community Foundation, the endowment development program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, presented to Zaret its fourth Legacy Leadership Award. Zaret helped to create the foundation program in 1973.
In conjunction with that honor, JCF leaders encouraged Zaret to select and edit some of those written and spoken thoughts, and put them into a book.
And so he produced — with the help of editor Gail Naron Chalew — “Community, Heritage, Legacy: In Pursuit of Progress: Selected Speeches, Papers, Essays,” a 228-page book published recently by Printstar Books.
Moreover, the book boasts a forward by Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation.
Zaret said he told Greenberg about the project when Greenberg came to Milwaukee this past May to speak at a Helen Bader Foundation board meeting (see Chronicle, May 26); and Greenberg immediately offered to write the forward.
“This volume proves — as does Mel Zaret’s life — that as long as Jews care, as long as people of skill and commitment and Jewish spirit are prepared to step up and take responsibility for their time, their place, and their community, the promise of the eternal life of the Jewish people will be fulfilled,” Greenberg wrote.
However, this is not a book for general sale. Zaret said that just 400 copies were printed, and they will be distributed to volunteers and professionals in Milwaukee and to the “major federations and agencies I’ve worked with.”
“I could have sold it, but I didn’t want to be in that position,” Zaret told The Chronicle in a recent interview. “I am not commercially-minded.”
Indeed, Zaret said that because he put in the first section, titled “Fundamentals of Community Organization,” items about federation campaigning and social planning, “maybe the beginning is the most dull part.” But he started with that material because “it seemed logical” to do so.
The second section, titled “The Jewish World,” includes writings about Jews in Brazil, Europe and Iraq, plus an essay on “The Catholic Church and the Jewish People.”
Other sections include “Leading the Community,” which includes eulogies he gave of Milwaukee Jewish community leaders Ann Agulnick, Max Karl and Ruth Orenstein; “Federation-Synagogue Relations,” “The Urban Crisis and the Jewish Community.”
Zaret devoted three essays to “Retirement: Continuing a Meaningful Life,” a subject very close to his heart as he still has an office in the MJF and continues working on various projects.
“The idea that at 65 one goes off and plays golf dismays me,” Zaret said. With people today living as much as 30 years after they retire, “that’s an awful lot of golf.”
And in a speech he gave in 1996 when he received the Distinguished Retiree Award from the Association of Jewish Community Organization Professionals, Zaret said, “Retired people are frequently described as outliving their usefulness, and yet, how can a person live without being useful?”
Zaret concludes the book with a section called “Looking Back,” which contains two speeches, one given at the time of his retirement; plus a handful of anecdotes written for the book mostly about remarkable Jews he knew who are now deceased, including Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle founder Irving Rhodes and great violinist Isaac Stern.
In fact, the book’s last words describe how when he was in Paris in 1970, helping to restructure the Jewish Agency for Israel, he met a leader of Spanish Jews and a leader of Finnish Jews, and discovered that all three of them were born in the same area of eastern Poland and could converse most enjoyably in Yiddish.
“Jews live all over the world,” Zaret concludes. “Though dispersed, we are all on the same journey.”
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