Alina Gerlovin Spaulding, dean of admissions at a South Carolina Jewish community boarding high school, apparently could have a second career as a stand-up comedian.
In her remarks at the Milwaukee Jewish Federation 2016 Annual Campaign Kick-Off Celebration, held Sept. 17 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, she had an audience of about 170 roaring with laughter much of the time.
She riffed on her New Jersey accent, her mother’s anxieties about her daughter’s travels, her Russian family’s mystification when they first met American food packaging and much else.
But that was hardly the point. Overall, her family’s experience presented a case for the work that Jewish federations and their supported agencies do.
The Hebrew word “hineni,” Spaulding said at the start of her talk, usually is translated “I am here,” but it can also mean “I am ready” and “I am willing” to be present, to stand up for someone, to help.
“Everything I have, everything I will accomplish, and everything my children have and everything my children will accomplish for the rest of their lives is because of you and people like you standing for me at a critical moment,” she said.
Her parents were Jews in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s, normally a very bad time to be in that situation. But at first, Spaulding said, it wasn’t so bad for her family because her father was an athlete with the possibility of representing the USSR in the Olympics as a skier.
Therefore, the Soviet government considered him “useful,” said Spaulding, and gave him, his wife and their newborn daughter special privileges for food, housing and medical care.
But then her father broke his leg in a skiing accident, and everything changed. “In the time it took them to get my father from the top of the mountain to the bottom, they had evicted my parents from their home,” Spaulding said.
Moreover, he was not taken to the special hospital for the athletes, but sent to a clinic where he was not seen by any medical professional for eight days. Then he was seen not by a physician, but “a medic.” And this “medic” told her parents that her father needed surgery, but her mother would have to collect on the black market much of the material necessary.
Spaulding said it took her mother nine months to do so; and when the surgery was done, it was not successful. By 1975, her family was told that her father was likely to die within five years. And all this “because he was Jewish and had just become completely worthless” to the Soviet regime, Spaulding said.
But some time thereafter, her mother heard about the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, one of the main overseas beneficiaries of Jewish federation funds; and she learned that “they come to Russia and they rescue Jews,” Spaulding said. She didn’t believe it at first; but in 1979, more than 55,000 Jews were taken out of the FSU, including Spaulding’s family. After a month in Austria and six months in Italy, “fully supported and cared for by the dollars you give and raise,” the family was brought to Passaic, N.J. They lived there for a time in “a fully furnished apartment” — furnished “not with the junky stuff that you throw away,” but “things you would put in the homes of your own family members,” Spaulding said.
Moreover, through the community grapevine, her father’s medical condition became known to a physician on the West Coast. An anonymous benefactor flew this physician to the east to meet the family and perform an experimental surgery on Spaulding’s father. The surgery was performed in 1980 and was completely successful. “In 1981,” Spaulding said, “my brother was born. In 1982, my father went skiing again.” In 1990, Spaulding graduated from high school; in 1994, from college; in 1995, her brother celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem — and both her parents attended all these events. Hosts of the event were Joan Lubar, 2016 General Campaign Chair, and Lauri Roth, 2016 Women’s Campaign Chair.
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