Mike Erman Testimony

Okay, my name is Mike Erman. I was born in Düren Germany in July of 1938. My parents were Morris and Frieda Erman.

My family had been in that part of Germany for many generations.

In 1938, the situation, the Nazis getting worse all the time. My father was the only one of eight Erman siblings still in Germany.

Some had immigrated to the U.S. The youngest brother had gone to Palestine, then Palestine now Israel. In 1936, he was the founder of a kibbutz and one brother had gone to South America. In 1938, when I was three months old, we boarded a ship in Holland for New York.

It was my parents and me as an infant. My grandmother, who was my dad's stepmother, my dad's father had died years before. And as I said, he was the last of eight siblings to leave Germany. We were sponsored to come to this country.

You had to have a sponsor to get immigration permission.

My cousin of my dad, whose name was Morris Hertz, lived in a small town in Missouri called Maysville.

So we went to Maysville from New York by train.

Of course, I don't remember any of this being an infant, but mostly from stories and family lore. At any rate, my dad's family had been cattle traders for generations in Germany in an area called the Rhineland.

His hometown was Gerlstein. The Rhineland's an area south of Cologne, small rural villages.

I'm told, many of those villages, I'm told 600 had some Jewish presence in that area. No Jews in the Rhineland now. But anyway, we were the last of the family to leave.

My mother's parents stayed.

Their hometown was Drove, another small village in the same area. I don't know the distance, but 50 or so kilometers away. After we got to this country, my parents had worked on paperwork to get my mom's parents over here.

But they ran out of time and they were eventually deported to the camps and murdered by the Nazis. My mom had a brother who did get over here, the other brother. He was here a short time, was drafted and served in the U.S. Army during the war. So as I said, my dad's background was agricultural related.

We went to this little area in Missouri without any money.

I think my dad had smuggled some cameras into New York, which he sold for enough money to get to Missouri. They rented a farm, I think it was 80 acres, and my dad started farming and doing a little trading in livestock. It was a succession of rented farms during the war years. Excuse me.

My sister, Betty, was born on the farm in 1941. Sister Fran was born on a different farm, but in the same area. I think that town was Wetherby, but it was right near Maysville in '43. After these two girls were born, I think my parents had been reasonably successful in farming and trading and livestock during the war, enough so that they felt they could move on to something else.

My dad was anxious to get his family to some place where there was Jewish life. I was already in school in this little town of Maysville.

In 1945, in the spring, I think March, we moved to Omaha.

My dad had a sister and brother-in-law here, the Sieglers, and he felt he could make a living here because there was a stockyards, and that was what he knew.

My uncle Bernard, my dad's brother-in-law, was already working in the stockyards in Omaha.

So he came here. Dad went to work for a feeder cattle farm, Jewish-owned.

Man's name was Dave Rosenstock, and he was with Dave Rosenstock for I don't know exactly, but I would guess three or four years, and then struck out on his own as an order buyer, which was someone who bought cattle on commission for out-of-town clients, mostly meat packers.

And at the same time, he started feeding a few cattle on his own, and so that's what we did.

We originally lived on the near north side, 1818 North 21st Street. The neighborhood's all been torn down now. New housing's been built, but when we lived there, my brother Joe was born in 1946.

We rented the downstairs of a house on North 21st Street.

In maybe '46 or 7, my parents bought a house in South Omaha on a street called Hoctor Boulevard, near Vinton School.

Where I went to grade school, I had started, when we came from Missouri, I had started at Kellom School, and when we moved to South Omaha, I went to Vinton School. We lived there until I was in the eighth grade. While we lived there, my brother Melton was born in '48 in South Omaha.

In, I think, December of '50, my parents bought a house on South 51st Street between Dodge and Farnham.

We had been members of Bethel.

On the high holidays, when we lived in South Omaha, we used to walk to the South Omaha schul, but we drove on Shabbos to Beth El on 49th and Farnham.

So we bought this, our family bought this house on 51st Street, so my dad could walk. He wouldn't have to drive on Shabbos anymore. And that's where we lived.

I transferred to Dundee School in the middle of the eighth grade. So we were five children, and the house we moved to was more spacious. The house in South Omaha was a very small house.

Meanwhile, my grandmother, my dad's stepmother, had moved to the share home, I think maybe in '48 or 9 she had had a stroke. And so on Sundays, we used to go to the share home to visit her.

Dundee was quite a life-altering event for me, because in South Omaha, at Vinton School, there was one other Jewish family.

Stanley Magid was a couple years ahead of me. His brother, Bernie, was already gone, but their parents had a grocery store on 20th and Vinton. They were really the only Jewish people in the whole area where we lived. Farther South, there were other Jewish families. Moving to Dundee, as I said, I was in the middle of the eighth grade. Dundee School had a significant percentage of Jewish kids, so I became friendly with some of those kids, some of the boys. I think my closest friend in those years and through high school was Dan Dennenberg, Colin Greenberg, who lived on the corner of our block. We were friends. On the corner of Dodge Street near us was John Goldner's house. Danny and I were friends all through high school.

And after, I met Eileen, my wife, at Danny and Naomi Dennenberg's wedding.

Eileen was a bridesmaid. I was a groomsman. She was living in Kansas City, growing up in Kansas City. So that's how we met. We married in September of '61.

By that time, I had had a couple years in Nebraska. Was not much of a student.

Dropped out of school. The draft was on everyone's mind of my generation. I managed to get into a National Guard unit in '59. Went to basic training.

It was an Air National Guard unit. Went to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

Then tech schooled to learn to be an auto mechanic. In Rantoul, Illinois, which was, Rantoul, Illinois Chanute Air Force Base was just a few miles from the University of Illinois campus in Champaign.

So in late '59, I got home from tech school, was really planning to go back to school. And I was helping my dad in the stockyards. An opportunity turned up.

The bank approached my dad. There had been a new, very small slaughterhouse built called Nebraska Iowa Dress Beef, which had operated for a few months and failed. And the bank was looking for someone to take it over and operate it because they had debt on it. They approached my dad because he was a well-regarded cattle buyer. He said to me, if you're going back to school, I'm not interested in this, but if you'd like to try it, we'll take it on. I'm not interested in doing it alone at this point in my life. So we did it. We opened in January of '60.

Company was called Nebraska Iowa Dress Beef.

And having grown up in the stockyards, around the stockyards, I thought I knew a little bit about cattle. Probably did know a little bit. I'd been around them all my life.

So in a small business, you do a little of everything. I got up early in the morning, went to the packing plant to work until time to go to the stockyards and buy cattle. And then we did that, back to the plant, working the plant the rest of the day. But the business prospered, little by little, we got on our feet.

In 1968, my brother Joe graduated from University of Iowa.

He joined the company. So we had a very nice relationship going. My dad's health was not good.

And he couldn't any longer stand the Nebraska winters. They used to go to Florida.

Then they went to somewhere on the Gulf Coast because my dad had emphysema. There was a clinic there that he thought might help him. Eventually they wound up going to Arizona.

In 1970, my parents went on a trip to England, Israel, and Germany. My dad's youngest brother was on a kibbutz [?] in Israel.

My mother's family, and they were of a large family, my mother's parents both were groups of large parents, went on a trip to England, Israel, and Germany.

My dad's youngest brother was on a kibbutz paid ashiyata in Israel. My mother's family, and they were of a large family, my mother's parents both were groups of large numbers of siblings.

All those generations were lost in the Holocaust, except my mother had a cousin, and an aunt and uncle, a cousin that had immigrated to England and was able to bring her parents. So she had a cousin and an aunt and uncle in England, and my dad had this brother in Israel. My mother also had two cousins who survived Auschwitz, two sisters.

Their brother and their parents were lost, but these two girls came to America, and I'll talk about them later. My parents went to, I don't remember in what order, but they visited my mother's cousin and aunt and uncle in England, my dad's brother and his family in Israel, and wound up in Germany.

Germany was the real reason for the trip, because my dad had filed an application for some compensation from the German government because he felt his health had been damaged by the change in climate and the hard work on the farm and being around the stockyards where he had allergies.

His claim had been denied, but they told him if he would come to the clinic at Wiesbaden to be examined by the doctors there, possibly they could reconsider. So that was the last stop on this trip.

They were in Wiesbaden, and he was being examined by the doctors there and had some kind of an event on the examining table, some kind of a heart event, which he didn't survive. So he died in Germany, which was, we thought, pretty ironic.

My mother called. My brother Milt was in school at Columbia. He was in the summer. It was six days, five days after my dad's 65th birthday, June 15, 1970. My brother was the only one with a passport.

I said to mom that I'd get him right over there. She said, no, I'll be gone before he gets here. I found Chevra kadisha[?].

We're getting all the arrangements made to ship Dad's remains home, and she was on her way. So that, that's how it, that's how it happened.

She came back to Omaha.

Took a few days to get the necessary permissions but we did get dad's body back here.

He was buried at Beth El Synagogue alongside his stepmother and later my mother, who lived 20 years after that.

She died in August of '90.

My dad was 65 years and five days. My mother lived to be 80. She lived to see grandchildren start to grow up.

My dad saw a couple of grandchildren, both of mine. They were all little ones. My girls were seven and five when he died, so their memories of him were somewhat limited. But he did get to enjoy them, get to know them a little. So talking about grandchildren and the little pleasure my dad got from them, in the short time he was able to be with them, brings up another subject.

Coming from Germany and leaving when we did, this, my parents were living in Drove, which was my mother's hometown, waiting to imigrate.

I was born in Düren, which is near Drove, because there was no hospital in Drove. When we left Drove, I think the intention was for my mother's parents to follow. They brought with them in their household goods, the Torah from the synagogue. I don't know if it was the only Torah. I think there were a couple of families still there, so I suspect there was more than one Torah. We don't know where that Torah spent the war years when we were in Missouri. I am guessing it might have been in the synagogue in St. Joe because I'm sure my dad would have wanted it to be used, not be stored. And on Friday afternoons from the farm, I used to ride with my dad and go to St. Joe for Shabbos. We stayed with the Hertzes. We lived in St. Joe. That's the family I mentioned. We lived in Maysville and it sponsored us. By this time, Morris Hertz was in St. Joe, also in the cattle business in the St. Joe's Stockyards. So we used to go to St. Joe for Shabbos Friday night, Saturday morning. I think just my dad and I, I think my mom stayed on the farm with the girls. My memories of that are somewhat dim, but there are memories.

We used to eat lunch Saturdays in a restaurant in St. Joe, a deli called Magoon's Deli, which was a kosher deli. Imagine St. Joe, a kosher deli. I think there were two, maybe three synagogues in St. Joe in those years.

So that Torah came with us to Omaha in 1945.

I'm not sure where it was for the next couple of years, but I do know that when my mom went to the share home, excuse me, when my grandmother went to the share home, the Torah went to the chapel there and was in regular use there. When the Blumkin Home opened in '74, the Torah was moved to the chapel at the Blumkin Home. And it still is at the Blumkin Home. Although, it's now in a display case. I would like to see it regularly used and I think it's occasionally used, but it's theirs to use as they want and they want to put it in this display case where it is today. When my first grandchild, my grandson Oliver was Bar Mitzvah, he was born in '94.

So his Bar Mitzvah must have been in '07.

He read from that Torah and that was the beginning, of what's become a tradition.

Backing up for a second, I think that he had organized a fund to bring a sofer home on, restore Torahs in the community and they restored Torahs for all of the synagogues. And this Torah was one of them that was restored and made kosher if it wasn't kosher by the sofer. Anyway, Oliver read from that tour in his Bar Mitzvah, as did his sister Caroline, Lori and Michael's three girls, one just last year, Emma.

So far, two of Betty's grandchildren have read from that Torah. So Emma was the, I think, eighth of my parents' great-grandchildren to read from that Torah on their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. In the spring, my brother Joe's oldest granddaughter, Abby, will be Bat Mitzvah. Hopefully she'll do it as well.

It's become meaningful, I think, to all these kids knowing that generations ago their ancestors held and read from that Torah all those generations and decades ago.

We don't know the age of the Torah. We know that it came to the US.

We landed in New York on Kristallnacht by pure coincidence, November 10th of '38.

So that's 77 years ago and we think the Torah is 18th century. That's what the sofer thought who worked on it. I'm told it's an unusual Torah. It's small and the script is small. So each of the Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids have had, whoever was coaching them, asked for the Torah a few days early because the script looked slightly different than what they were learning from and they wanted them to get used to that. We covered the Torah and we covered the move to Dundee. After Dundee School, I went to Central High. Corey and Danny and I used to stand on the corner of 51st and Dodge and hitchhike to school. I said before I wasn't a very good student in college.

I wasn't a particularly good student in high school either but I did get out.

I have good memories, fond memories of high school and it's hard to believe it's coming up next year on 60 years since we graduated. Danny died in a plane crash in '98.

Coley died just last year. He was living in Arizona. But let's back up to my family.

I mentioned earlier that, excuse me, that I had met my wife Eileen at Danny and Naomi's wedding, which was in Lincoln in 1960. So she came to visit them in Omaha, Danny was in medical school. She came here from Kansas City in fall of '60 for Thanksgiving weekend and Danny and Naomi asked me to go out with her and I did. And one thing led to another. We started to date and we got married in September of '61. I was working in the packing businesses I had said before. I got up very early in the morning, 3:30 or so, to go to work. But I enjoyed the work and it was, even though we worked hard, it was good to feel we were accomplishing something.

So we got married in '61. We lived in a little apartment in a building that was newly built on the site of the former Omaha Community Playhouse, which had burned on 40th and Davenport. It was a basement apartment, but of course they called it garden level. That was 105 dollars a month. We had one car and I brought an old truck home from the plant in the evenings to get back and forth. Jill was going to school. Eileen was going to school at UNO.

It was then the University of Omaha.

In '62 she was expecting, so we moved to a duplex on 107th Avenue.

Far out in the suburbs then south of center, which is where we lived when Stacey was born in January of '63. So we lived there and had a nice life there when Stacey was born and started to grow. In '64 we bought a house on 92nd and Leavenworth, 9204 Leavenworth.

It was our first house that we owned. And Lori was born in April of '65.

We lived in that house and in the late 60s a new neighborhood was developed nearby on a farm that had been skipped over by the city. The neighborhood was called Regency. We bought a lot there hoping to one day build a house. We bought a lot in '69, I think.

In '71 we started construction on a house, moved in in '72. And that's where Stacey and Lori kind of grew up. They went to Swanson School. We had switched from Beth El, switched our membership to Temple.

So they went to Sunday School and Temple. Both had her Bat Mitzvahs at Temple. One was Stacey, I think, was when the Temple was down because of the tornado. So her Bat Mitzvah was here at the JCC.

Or maybe it was at Boys Town, I'm not sure. I think it was at Boys Town. Anyway, kids grew.

We had a nice life. Went on family vacations. We did lots of things together.

Going back a little, I said I was at Central and graduated. I did go to college for two years in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska, lived in the Sammy house. Still have good friends from there. After two years, as I had covered earlier, I went into the Air National Guard and came back and the opportunity to get in the packing business came up. One thing led to another. So here we are.

I'm working in the packing business. We have two young girls growing up. Nice family situation.

My dad died in 1970. By then they had sold their house on 51st Street and moved an apartment on 48th.

Mom then moved to an apartment in Regency, which was new and which was near us. And she lived there 20 years until she died in 1990. Girls grew up, finished school. Stacey went to the University of Illinois.

In the summers, she worked in Chicago at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

She'd gotten a job through a friend of mine there, Bill Chapman, who got her job as a runner. She got interested in that. So when she graduated Illinois, she went to the Mercantile Exchange to work and became what's called a local, I think it is the term they use she was a floor trader there for an old account. Lori went to Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona. And she also went to Chicago, knocked on a lot of doors. She wanted to get into banking and she finally got a job. Also as a trader, she traded euro dollars for the Industrial Bank of Japan. So I was pretty proud of these girls. They were both doing things that I didn't understand. But they understood them and that's all that matters. Stacy went to England on vacation, I'm trying to think of the year. It would have been maybe 1990 with some other girls, friends.

And lo and behold, she met a Jewish boy in a bar. Jonathan Rockman.

And they became friends. And the friendship evolved into a romance. She moved to England for a short time.

Then they moved back to Chicago. They got married at Temple in 1991.

Lori also met a nice young man in Chicago. His name was Michael Miller, his family are a long time Chicago family. He was working in real estate and he was for a while with the real estate arm at GMAC who offered him a transfer to Omaha.

So he did transfer here. So, excuse me, both girls wound up in Omaha. Michael in real estate.

I have to back up a minute. An opportunity. We had sold the packing business in 1988.

And I worked there for something less than a year after the sale. In 89, I left the company and didn't do anything for a while.

In '92, an opportunity arose to buy a business manufacturing pressure sensitive labels here in Omaha. Jonathan, Stacey's husband, had some packaging experience in Europe. So we bought the company.

And Jonathan and Stacey moved here. And he went to work as a manager in the Industrial Label Corporation, which was the company we bought.

Sometime after that, as I said, Michael had an opportunity to go to Omaha with GMAC, which he did. He went through a couple of other opportunities, wound up in real estate where he is now at Pacific Realty, now it's called Colliers. We sold Industrial Label in '06.

I think Jonathan stayed with his successor company for about three years and then moved on.

Now he's doing something else with another company.

Michael is still with Colliers.

He's an owner there, doing well in real estate. Stacy had had two children, a boy and a girl, Oliver, and Caroline.

I mentioned them in connection with the Torah earlier. Lori meanwhile, I had three girls. So I'm really lucky to have five wonderful grandchildren.

In 1994, we went on a family vacation in the Bahamas.

Eileen didn't feel good the whole time.

In that winter, in early '95, we went to San Francisco and then to Palm Springs where we were spending winters. And Eileen got worse to the point that she could barely get up.

We flew home. And in, I think it was the last day of February, February, 1st of March, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

So we lived two and a half years with that ongoing bouts of treatment and something approaching remission. Had some good times and some not so good times. Lori was living in Chicago. She came home every weekend to be with her mother until Hannah was born in Chicago. And then we went to Chicago for Hannah's baby naming.

Hannah was born in '96. And we were able to take Eileen to Chicago for her baby naming. Rabbi Azriel went with us to do the baby naming at Lori and Michael's apartment. It was the last trip Eileen made.

We did it in a wheelchair through the O'Hare Airport. But she was able to do it, and able to enjoy it as I said, that was the last trip she was able to make.

We had done a trip when she was relatively cancer free.

When Caroline was a baby, the whole family went to Hawaii. It was Lori and Michael and Stacy and Jonathan. Oliver was maybe two and Caroline was a baby. So Lori and Michael moved to Omaha.

Must have been sometime in '97 because Eileen was living. They bought a house on 128th and I don't remember the street but it was north of Dodge on 128th, off 128th.

Anyway, they bought a lot where they live now. With a house on it, in Glen Oaks. Eileen got to see that. Got to be involved in some of the planning for a new house for them. Meanwhile, Stacy and Jonathan had bought a house on south 93rd. Eileen also was involved in helping them plan it and decorate it and move in. She saw that house. She saw Lori and Michael's lot and knew about the demolition of the house that was on it, the plans for a new house.

But she died in June of '97.

She knew there was a baby on the way. That's Leah.

Leah was born September of '97 so Eileen didn't get to see her but she did get to know Oliver and Caroline and Hannah and she knew Leah was on the way.

June 29th of '97, Eileen died.

That next year Lori and Michael, Stacy and Jonathan, were very, very supportive of me.

In '98, something a little less than a year after Eileen's death, I started to date a little.

I bumped into Phil Shrinker. He said there was someone he wanted me to meet, a widow of his cousin who lived in Los Angeles.

He said I'll have to call her and see if it's okay. And he called me later that afternoon and said it was okay and I should call her, gave me a phone number. So I called. Her name then was Jill Siegel. Her husband had died in '96. She was living in Beverly Hills in a house. We talked on the phone for about a month and then I went to California to meet her and then we met once in Santa Fe.

A couple other times I think I went to California.

Stacy had suggested if you like this woman why don't you invite her up for the High Holidays. Which I did. So she came here for Rosh Hashanah in '97. We got engaged.

We got engaged. We married in September of '99. Did I say '97?

It was '98 when we were dating. Eileen died in '97.

We started dating summer, July I think of '98. We married in September of '99.

It's been rewarding and gratifying to me that Jill and Lori and Michael and Stacey and Jonathan have had a very good relationship. She loves the girls and she loves the boys and she really loves the grandchildren. She never had any children of her own and these are about as real as grandchildren can get to her I think.

I know it's not always easy for people to adapt to these kinds of changing situations but at least as far as I can tell it's worked very very well. Kids and their families come to California to visit us. We live half the year here, half the year there. Jill of course has family in California. She has a sister Joan in San Diego. She's very close to Joan and to her children. Her nieces and nephews.

They're as near children as she has other than my children. She also has a niece in Los Angeles, Ari, that she's close to. Now a great niece there. Ari's little girl.

So today we have a very nice and comfortable life. Been lucky to be able to do the things we want. We traveled a fair amount. Want to back up speaking of travel to some trips.

I mentioned earlier that my parents had gone to Germany where my dad died and in 1990 all five of we siblings, myself and Eileen, Betty and Marshall, Fran and John, Joe and Ruth, Milton, Sue and my mother went to Israel as a family and we had a very lovely time together. Toured all through Israel we were there ten days, maybe two weeks I don't remember.

That was in, must have been May because I know we were there for Israel Independence Day. Mom died suddenly in August of that same year. So it was nice that we were able to do this trip as a family. Later on after I married Jill, my brother-in-law Marshall had died in August of '98. So it was before I married Jill.

Fran and her husband John had separated. Betty met a nice man. Jack Adler and she got married to him. Fran, has since, met a nice man in Fort Wayne. Irv Adler. So both my sisters are named Adler but their husbands are not related. I think in '06 we organized a family trip to Germany to see the places that my family had come from. I mentioned earlier that my dad had family in Omaha, the Sieglers. The Sieglers had two sons and a daughter. My first cousins, Sylvan and Manny, were born in Germany. Then Judy, maybe 18 or 20 years younger than Sylvan, was born in this country. On this trip, Sylvan and his wife Myrna went with us. They asked all five of us and a cousin from Birmingham, Ruth Siegler, who was married to a cousin of Sylvan's who died very young. Sylvan was bar mitzvah'd in Germany so he had memories and actually still had a relationship with a boyhood friend in their hometown. Ruth was a young girl when she and her sister and their parents and brother were deported to the camps. The brother Ernest was murdered as were the parents but Ruth and Ilse survived and they both wound up in Birmingham, Alabama.

So Ruth and her son Steven went with us on this trip as did Sylvan and Myrna. Sylvan and Ruth both had pretty active memories of their life as in Germany because they were Sylvan at least was 13 or more when they left.

We were welcomed in all the towns we visited.

They said we were dignitaries. Ruth stayed with a girlhood friend in her hometown which was a village called [unclear]. Sylvan had a long-time correspondence with a friend of his in their hometown, a village called Kaisersesch. All these towns were, I don't know how far apart, 5, 20, 50 kilometers but in the same general area in the Rhineland. We visited the Jewish cemeteries in all those towns where our families buried. The cemeteries were all maintained by the towns. There are no Jews in the area today. I mentioned that earlier with regard to the Torah. I think 600 communities in the Rhineland with some Jewish presence.

As far as we know there are no Jews in the right land at all. But these towns do maintain the Jewish cemeteries. They've put up nice plaques, memorial plaques where the synagogues stood. The synagogues were just little steeples maybe three or four villages combined to organize a school. I don't really know. But as I said we were welcomed in each town by the mayor, by the local dignitaries. I think anti-Semitism in these towns was pretty minimal.

Although in the Nazi years, I'm sure people were very fearful for their own lives. Couldn't help anyone. There's a story, I don't know if it's apocryphal but my mother told the story, that the fire department in Drove was ordered by the Nazis to burn down the synagogue. And they said, we don't burn, we don't start fires, we put out fires. So the Nazis had to bring in somebody from another town to burn the synagogue in Drove. My mother had been back there once.

Between the time my dad died and the time we made the trip, I spoke of earlier to you as a family. She went with the Hertzes, the people who had sponsored us. Who were by then living in Scottsdale.

And someone recognized her on the street. She left there at 38.

This would have been in some time in the mid-80s, late 80s. Someone actually recognized her on the street and spoke to her. Anyway, we've actually, we actually have fond memories of the trip my brothers and sisters and I and our spouses made to Germany. With Sylvan and Merlyn and Ruth, Steven. Sylvan died I think around three years ago in Kansas City where he lived.

Ruth loves still in Birmingham today. Enjoys a good health at 87 or so.

She's done a Shoah tape. She was very reluctant to talk about it until the last 10 years or so.

Her husband Walter died very young, 40ish. But she's been in Birmingham for many years, as is her sister Elsa, whose husband also has since died. So here we are in Omaha.

It's 2015. We had the last of my grandchildren's Bat Mitzvah this spring.

Babies keep coming. Joe and Ruth just had twin granddaughters in San Francisco.

Mel has a daughter and son-in-law in San Diego who have two children. A son and daughter-in-law in New York who have a little baby boy who I hope I'll see soon because we're going to be in New York. His name is Neil and another one on the way. So I think we'll have these Bar and Bat Mitzvahs until the end of our lives and probably beyond. When these new twins are Bat Mitzvah age, I'll be over 90 if I'm still here. Hopefully we'll get through all these Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and maybe lucky enough to see some weddings.

Oliver's 21. Caroline will soon be 20. Hannah was just 19 and Leah was just, oh, she will be 18 the day after tomorrow, September 11th a momentous day because that's the day she was born.

She's the one Eileen knew about and didn't get to see but she has a grandmother who loves her, Jill. So we look forward to lots more family occasions and get-togethers.

Next week between Rash Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we're going to Seattle, Washington and Vancouver. Stacey and Jonathan, Lori and Michael, Jill and I to celebrate Lori's 50th birthday which was in April.

We did the same thing for Stacey's 50th two years ago. We all went to Austin, Texas and a great time together.

[sneeze] Excuse me. So we have lots to look back on, lots to look forward to and we're lucky to live in Omaha, a great community where people have been wonderful to us.

My parents had an opportunity to build a life here, to come here as immigrants in 1945 and in the 25 years until my dad died to be able to build a life and enjoy prosperity and raise a family and have the opportunities we've all had here is something I treasure deeply and I've said many times I don't think there's any place in the history of the world where the opportunity existed for this to happen to a Jewish family.

Hopefully we've been able to contribute to the community as well.

I was asked to be on the Temple Board sometime in the 70s. Became membership chairman, treasurer, vice president, was President of Temple from '81 to '83.

I went on the Federation Foundation board nearly since its inception, at least since the late 80s. Joe and Ruth have both been active in the community.

Joe's been on lots of boards.

So we've enjoyed the fruits of living here and hopefully have helped to make those opportunities available for our children and grandchildren.

We were blessed to have this wonderful community, wonderful set of opportunities that came along in series.

Kids are healthy, happy, I think. Grandchildren are all healthy.

Four are now in college.

Where?

Ollie will've graduated in the spring from Emory School of Business. Caroline his sister is in New York studying at a school called the School of Visual Arts. Hannah is a sophomore at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. And Leah, the one Eileen didn't get to see is a freshman at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And we had a real wonderful treat when Emma came along in '02.

So we still have one in Omaha that we get to see from time to time. And of course the others we see when they get back here. We were able to spend some time with them this summer.

We took Emma and Leah, they had a joint, B'not Mitzvah.

Because they're only 13 months apart. We took them to San Francisco, Joe and I, as a Bat Mitzvah present.

We took each of them to Disneyland when they were five. They all came to California, went to Disneyland is was all five of them. First Oliver, he was the first one that Joe was able to take. In succession we took them all. So we took Oliver to New York on a trip for his bar Mitzvah.

New York on a trip for his bar Mitzvah. We took Caroline as well. I just said we took Hannah and Leah to San Francisco. So next month we're taking Emma to New York for her bar Mitzvah trip. She had her bar Mitzvah in May. We, uh, will you stop it for a sec?

Mhm.

So next month we're going to New York with Emma. And while we're there I'll get to see my great nephew Neil. Who I haven't, well I did meet him once, actually. And we'll be able to spend some time with Caroline because she's there at school. We're looking forward to being with Emma. Just the three of us just in New York so that'll be great. I've said how lucky we are to have everyone happy and healthy and growing up to see this. How joyful it all is. I think I'm going to wrap it up by going back to a story.

I said Eileen died in June of '97 when Laurie was pregnant with Leah. By that time Leah or Lori, Michael, and Stacey and Jonathan all were living in Omaha.

Leah was born September 11th of '98.

There was a family wedding, the Siegler family, that next month October in Kansas City. So my brothers and sisters were going to be in Kansas City.

So we planned Leah's baby naming for the Sunday after that Bat Mitzvah in Kansas City.

Well it was a wedding in Kansas City because not soon Betty and Jack and Fran and Irv would be there. So they all came to Omaha. We scheduled Leah's baby naming on Sunday and Eileen's stone setting on Monday.

To me that represented the circle of life that when it's gone a new one comes. Had no way of knowing then that a year later I would meet Jill and five years later we'd get to have Emma in our lives.

But life continues. We have sad times and gloriously happy times and whoever's watching this needs to hear me say that you just keep going on. Treasure every day.

Treasure your family and love those around you. And I'm thankful for all the good times we have had. Thank you, Joey.