Peter Gilbert, 65, is a six foot ex-Britisher who often spends more hours per week in his volunteer activities than many people spend on their paying jobs.
Though he isn’t an American military veteran, he spends much of this time helping Jewish veteran associations and individual veterans.
Gilbert came to Milwaukee via Israel. He had volunteered there for the Israeli army, where he became a battalion medic in the Sinai Peninsula campaign during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He was 22 at the time.
Having grown up in Manchester, England, before he moved to Israel, he said that his training in the Sea Cadets in the town of Sunderland, when he was a teenager, put him “into the mindset of a volunteer.”
In England he had also worked as a typographer and graphic designer. When he arrived in Milwaukee in 1976, he “studied the American method of typesetting” at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, “but I finally got a job as an insurance salesman, which I was for 30 years.”
Gilbert has also been using his graphic designer experience in many of his volunteer tasks.
In 2000, while he was driving around for his sales insurance work, he started his career as a volunteer in the political arena, as he would then “also put up signs for political candidates.”
Now he continues political volunteering by “helping candidates campaign with literature drops, placing signs and anything that may be needed,” he said.
(Full disclosure: When this writer’s husband, Rabbi Avner Zarmi, ran for Shorewood trustee on a non-partisan ticket, Gilbert laid out the fliers and spent several months printing them.)
For every candidate’s campaign that he helps, he does much of the non-glamorous grunt work, and takes the signs and literature, after the campaign, to a recycling center.
Flags and quilts
Gilbert also helped to organize the forum at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center for the debate between Wisconsin senate candidates former Gov. Tommy Thompson and now Sen. Tammy Baldwin. “I personally persuaded Thompson to take part in it,” he said.
Gilbert began his volunteer work in earnest after he retired. He became a member of the Jewish War Veterans and he is now the adjutant of the organization.
“Every Memorial Day I go around to the graves of Jewish veterans to put flags on the graves,” he said. “I’ve also been trying to involve the Jewish youth of Milwaukee in the flag decorating ceremony.”
Though Gilbert is adjutant of the Horenstein-Katz 701 Post, he said he also helps out when needed at Milwaukee’s other two JWV posts. “I’m constantly trying to get new members for the organization,” he said.
For veterans groups Gilbert uses his skills at layout to design and print fliers for events.
In his volunteering for the Eighth Air Force Historical Society, he organizes members to get to parades and other events. If any Jewish veteran cannot get to an event, Gilbert will pick them up and drive them there, even if it means going to Sheboygan and back.
Gilbert takes veterans to appointments that they can’t get to on their own. A self-taught computer maven, he also will update and clean up veterans’ computers. “I often spend hours on some of them,” he said.
His involvement with the Eighth Air Force Historical Society includes not only taking veterans to events like the Fly for Freedom where a dozen World War II veterans got to fly in a B-17 and a B-24 bomber airplane, but he organized the logistics for it.
Gilbert said he also volunteers for The Collings Foundation, a non-profit devoted to automobile and aviation history, as ground crew when it holds events in Illinois or Wisconsin.
Gilbert represents the Milwaukee JWV on the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. At the JCC, he set up a display of Israeli airplanes.
Part of his involvement with the Jewish War Veterans is being part of the Veterans Board of the Milwaukee War Memorial. At any event concerning Wisconsin war veterans, Gilbert usually is one of a couple of JWV members representing Jewish veterans.
“In the last year or so I’ve been working with Christian ladies in Grafton who made lovely quilts which are sent to disabled soldiers in Israel, as well as to Jewish war veterans here,” he said.
Gilbert is an inveterate online news reader. He sends anything relating to the Holocaust to the Nathan & Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center in Milwaukee. He often sends several a week.
He also knows what goes on weekly in Milwaukee’s Jewish world and sends emails to many in the Jewish community on Jewish programs in the city.
After his volunteering for the presidential elections he took all the food that was left over at the campaign headquarters and delivered it to St. Benedict’s on State Street, a shelter for the homeless.
Last month, he travelled back to Israel for a reunion with his military unit, held Oct. 20-29 at Yad La-Shiryon, the Armored Corps Memorial Site and Museum at Latrun.
Arlene Becker Zarmi is a freelance writer whose work has been published in more than 40 publications nationwide. She was also the producer and host of a travel TV show for Viacom, and is a Jewish genre and portrait artist.
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