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August 13, 1999/1 Elul 5759, Vol. 51, No.45
Summer as a season of loss
Vigil for slain civil-rights workers recalled 35 years later
JONATHAN MARK
New York Jewish Week
Summer, the season most associated with love and escape, is just as often the season of loss, endings as elongated as the hot, drawn afternoons. The Jewish calendar meanders through the Three Weeks and Nine Days in late July, mourning the foreboding even more than the end itself. Unlike the usual procedure of "sitting shiva" after a death, the mourning here is about the vigil - the days before the Temple's burning, marked on Tisha B'Av, not the nine days after.
The first days of the Hebrew month of Av are considered ill-fated in the present tense, still. Rabbis warn Jews, even now, that these are inauspicious times. This year in late July, the days stretched on as Americans wondered about a lost Kennedy in summer's ocean. Back in 1964, in these same summer weeks, America waited out the disappearance of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney - the famous two Jews and a black who had traveled to the South to help with voter registration drives to benefit African Americans.
Goodman's mother, Carolyn, says, "We were cultural Jews. We didn't practice, but knew damn well that we were Jews and we wouldn't deny it under any circumstances."
Today, in her sitting room filled with books, is a carefully labeled shelf: "Jewish subjects." There are volumes about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Arab-Israel conflict, a 1968 travel guide book to Israel, and Jean Paul Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew."
There were no guides for where Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were going, but you packed your duffel with an eerie premonition. Volunteers loaded up on bandages and antiseptics, $500 for bail money, and four copies of portrait photos (and the address of your favorite hometown newspaper), so the movement's communications office could help the media when volunteers involuntarily disappeared.
As they drove away in a Ford station wagon on June 21, 1964, Schwerner called out, "If we're not back by four-thirty, start phoning. But we'll be back by four." They weren't. Their bodies were found six weeks later.
This is the summer of their memory. Last month, buses filled with pilgrims commemorating the Freedom Riders departed from the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, bound for the Mississippi earth by the side of a dusty road where the three bodies were found.
This year's Freedom Riders memorialized Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney in the most Jewish of ways: Small stones left by mourners on the consecrated earth.
On the other side of the planet, in Israel, on that same day of 12 Tammuz, a Lubavitcher chasid with a long beard lit a candle and went to shul to say Kaddish for his brother Andy. Jonathan Goodman became religiously introspective, several years after Andy's death, and wondered what it "really" meant to be a Jew. His answer led him to Chasidism and emigration to Israel's Kfar Chabad, where he lives with his wife and seven children. Andy was never even given a Hebrew name but his posthumous niece and nephews are Ruth Chana, Aaron Zev, Kalman, Menachem, Shimon.
Carolyn Goodman lives in the same apartment on Manhattan's West Side. All mothers know something of waiting and praying; she carried Andy for nine months in 1943. After their own tortured "Three Weeks," Carolyn and Andy's father, Robert (she a psychologist, he an engineer who helped build the Lincoln, Holland and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels) found comfort in American scripture.
Robert Goodman later said, at Andy's memorial, that during the weeks of waiting, "my wife and I, in a sense, made a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial, in the evening, and stood in the great shrine looking down past the Washington Monument toward the soft glow of the light around the White House. Full of the awe of a great nation that surrounded us, we turned to read emblazoned in black letters on the white marble, 'It is for us the living to dedicate ourselves, that these dead shall not have died in vain.' "
Back home in Manhattan was a postcard, with a four-cent Abraham Lincoln stamp, dated June 21, 1964: "Dear Mom and Dad, I have arrived safely in Meridian, Miss. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful, and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."
Going to the South was a natural thing to do. Carolyn Goodman - who was arrested herself a few weeks ago at the sprightly age of 83 while protesting the New York shooting death of Haitian immigrant Amadou Diallo at the hands of police - says she's been involved with liberal causes, "since shortly after I was born." Andy didn't come out of nowhere. His two parents were activists, involved with everything from the Spanish Civil War to organizing New York State dairy farmers to being leading supporters and directors of Pacifica Radio, the parent network of radical radio station WBAI.
It was no surprise to the Goodmans that, when Andy was old enough, he went off to see the coal mines and Appalachia.
No, there were no 24-hour news stations - neither radio nor TV nor cable - when Andy disappeared in Mississippi, but it was a grueling vigil.
"I'll tell you," says Carolyn of those summer weeks. "I was so stunned, it was as if I was walking through clouds. It was like it was me, and not me. I'd walk into my house, it was jammed full of people; friends, well-wishers, the press was all over the place."
When his body was flown from Mississippi to Manhattan, it was brought to Riverside Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue.
"I'll never forget going into that chapel," says Carolyn. "Of course, the coffin was closed. But I 'saw' Andy sitting on top of it. I never had hallucinations before or since. It wasn't Andy as he was at 20. There he was at the age of 4, maybe 3, sitting on top of that coffin ... I can see him right now, wearing his funny little hat."
She pauses: "This whole life of mine has been one bittersweet experience."
Under the coffee table in her sitting room is a book, "The Chabad Musician," a collection produced and arranged by Yonason (Jonathan) Goodman.
In the songbook is an old but lively Chabad anthem, "Ufaratzta," in which Jews are inspired to go out beyond, to the North, East and West, to every corner of God's world.
Andy went South.
Jonathan Mark is a columnist for The New York Jewish Week.
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