Joel T. Klein
Our father was born, according to family lore, six minutes before midnight on December 31, 1922. He lived to see his 100th birthday, which we as a family celebrated together last week. He is among the last of his generation, having outlived Mom, who died in 2013, as well as his younger brother, Sandor and his wife, and all of Mom’s siblings and their spouses except for our uncle, Imre Berczeller.
Tibor Klein was born in a small town in Hungary (Megyaso or Hajdunanas – we were never sure which was Mom’s birthplace and which was Dad’s) but grew up in Ujpest, a neighbourhood of Budapest with a thriving Jewish community. He was the oldest son of Jeno Klein and Serena Reich Klein. Jeno was a shoemaker, and Serena decided very early that Tibor was going to be a rabbi, following in her family’s long line of rabbis.
Dad’s Hebrew name was Joel, or Yoel. He was called to the Torah as Harav Yoel ben Yosef. In the Bible, Yoel was one of the twelve Minor Nevi’im, or Prophets, who called upon the people of Judea to repent from their sinful ways in the face of a plague of locusts. Needless to say, he was not greatly appreciated by his fellow Jews or the establishment.
I like to think of Dad as a minor prophet. He was a man of great intellect and strong convictions, and he was not afraid to express these views even though they ran counter to long-held beliefs, common knowledge and practice – even if it cost him popularity and sometimes even his job. His life was in many ways a search for recognition and respect, in the face of tremendous odds and the most life-shattering waves of history. He relied on his faith in rational thought and on his lifelong observance of Jewish laws and traditions to carry him through the worst days, ones which we here cannot even imagine.
Dad attended school in Budapest, in the face of the rising anti-Semitism and the numerus clausus restrictions in Hungary during the 1920s and 1930s. When World War II broke out, he was drafted into the euphemistically-called Jewish Labour Brigades, who were slave labourers used to support the Hungarian and Nazi war effort. Because his birth was registered as 1923, he was spared being sent to the front against the Red Army in the Ukraine, from which no Jewish labourers returned. In the last days of the war, he was able to escape from a death march, and at the end of the war, returned to Budapest with his father and brother, to learn that his mother had been sent to Auschwitz on the last train out of Budapest and murdered in the gas chambers there.
He returned to his rabbinical studies, receiving PhDs in Semitic Languages, Near Eastern Studies and Psychology. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1949 and posted to Baja, a small town in the south of Hungary. There, the local cantor’s wife arranged for her cousin’s beautiful daughter, Anna Berkovits, to visit for Passover to meet the new young rabbi. They fell immediately in love and on June 28 of that year they were married. Less than one year later, I was born.
Shortly thereafter, Dad was named Chief Rabbi of Northwestern Hungary, and we moved to Gyor, where Judy was born. He ministered to the remnants of the Jewish community in the city and the surrounding villages. It was very difficult to be a rabbi under Communism, where his live and radio sermons were reviewed and censored by the authorities, and he had to use guile and subterfuge to get his messages through to his congregants.
The Hungarian Revolution against Communism broke out in the fall of 1956, and Gyor was conveniently located 30 km from the Austrian border. Mom’s family arranged an escape to Vienna in the back of an army truck. Unfortunately, Dad was in Budapest at the time working with the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society to help Jews escape, was captured by the Russians when they invaded the country and sentenced to death. Miraculously, he was helped to escape by a Hungarian guard whom he had previously helped out of difficult circumstances years earlier.
We along with Mom’s family managed to emigrate to the US, and we arrived at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving Day in 1956. We were reunited with Dad three months later, when he arrived in New York on Valentine’s Day in 1957. He attended night school to learn English and worked in a fur factory packing boxes during the day. He joined the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly and was given a position as assistant rabbi in West Springfield, Massachusetts, followed by his own 100-member congregation in the small town of Claremont, New Hampshire, and then a larger congregation in Waukegan, Illinois, whose most famous member was the comedian Jack Benny. In 1964, we moved to Manchester, NH, where Dad served as the rabbi of Temple Israel for 13 years, where his most famous member was the comedian Adam Sandler. After his retirement from the rabbinate, he turned his attention to pastoral and family counselling – as he said, it was all of the things he loved about being a rabbi, and none of the things he hated. He became a founding member of the New Hampshire Pastoral Psychotherapist Association, which gave recognition to this important aspect of the work of clergy of all faiths. In 1999, he was given an honorary PhD by the Rabbinical Assembly for his 50 years of service as a rabbi. In 2010, Mom and Dad moved to Portland to be near Judy and Rich and their family, taking up residence at The Cedars, where they were loved and given wonderful support and care. They were also
welcomed with open arms by Temple Beth El, where Dad attended Shabbat morning services thanks to members who arranged to pick him up each week.
Dad was brought up in the Hungarian Neolog stream of Judaism, which was roughly equivalent to the Conservative movement in North America. He believed that Judaism survived through the centuries by constantly adapting to changing circumstances and society, not by blindly following traditions. We like to think that this made him a Reconstructionist Jew at heart.
He was a Holocaust survivor and unlike many others who rejected their Jewish identity or asked why this had been inflicted on them, Dad always asked the question, “Why was I kept alive?” His answer was always that his mission was to bring light where there was darkness, and knowledge where there was none. Both Dad and Mom have recorded testaments for Stephen Spielberg’s Shoah Project.
He spoke three languages – Hungarian, English and Hebrew – and was conversant with many others, including German, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and ancient Babylonian, and could read Egyptian hieroglyphics. While his English always had a Hungarian accent and he frequently mixed up his pronouns, he commanded an impressive vocabulary, which he used with great effect in his sermons and public presentations. He was however often baffled by English slang – including famously, while reading “Portnoy’s Complaint” when he asked Judy and me what the word “sonofabitch” meant.
Dad wrote four books, all self-published, including “In the Name of God,” his revolutionary view of Jewish and Christian history through an analysis of the names used for the Jewish god Adonai, and a book co-authored with Mom entitled “In the Shadow of the Pulpit,” a retrospective of their lives as a rabbi and rabbi’s wife in Hungary and the United States.
Most of all, Dad loved us, his wife and us kids. He always had our love and respect, and he in turn took enormous pride in our accomplishments. He adored Toby and Rich, as well as his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, though in his later years he had trouble remembering their names and, thanks to COVID, he never got to know Asher and Isla. He also taught us that we must find our own ways to express our identities and our Judaism, and though our practices varied from his, he accepted our decisions with grace and abiding love. He and Mom made great sacrifices on our behalf, and we will never be able to adequately thank them.
The Talmud says that those who die on their birthdays have perfectly completed their mission in this life. True to his namesake, the prophet Joel, Dad spoke truth to everyone and inspired us all to reach for the best that we could be. He could leave us no greater gift than this. May his memory serve as a blessing and comfort to us all.