by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

January 22, 2009

As they mourned Max Kaufmann, the memories of family members and close friends were studded with superlatives.

“Genius.”

“Brilliant inventor.”

“Caring human being.”

“Renaissance man.”

Kaufmann died of emphysema on Jan. 13 in Livingston, one month shy of his 84th birthday. In the days that followed, those who knew him spoke of his well-lived and memorable life.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Kaufmann was a tool and dye maker who would eventually live in New Jersey, where he opened machine shops named “Createc” in Clifton, Bloomfield, and Passaic.

He made his mark as an inventor, supplying important designs to the federal government and industry. He designed gyroscopes — one of them is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC — to ensure steady photographs by the first American satellites to orbit the earth.

“‘Tool and dye maker’ includes everything from being a machinist to being a designer to being an inventor,” said his son Larry. “My father was able to do all the aspects under one umbrella. He could create something from scratch, know what the finished product had to look like in order to design it, order the materials, machine it, perfect it, test it, and ship it.”

Born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1925, Kaufmann was 14 years old on Kristallnacht when he watched the Nazis burn the synagogue where he had become a bar mitzva.

He even dared to photograph the flames that destroyed his house of worship.

“Dad’s parents were affluent enough to get him and his sister, Elsa, on the Kindertransport to England,” said Kaufmann’s daughter, Pam. It enabled the two youngsters to survive after their parents were hauled off to die at Dachau.

Elsa was adopted by a family in Glasgow, Scotland, and was never reunited with her own relatives. Max was sent to a hostel housing refugee youth in London, where he received his training as a tool and dye maker.

“He made one-of-a-kind prototypes, nothing mass-produced by machines,” said a close friend, Judy Fellner. “He could see something in his head and make it. He never knew if his machines would work, but they always did work. If General Electric couldn’t do it, they would turn to Max.”

Because of his expertise, Kaufmann was sought out by the Johnson administration when the Vietnam War escalated in the mid- 1960s.

“He was already working in the military industrial complex when the Pentagon asked him to design sophisticated radar systems,” said Larry. “I was there when he designed the first radar system capable of picking up signals up hills and down mountains.”

His father, said Larry, “didn’t have any formal education, but he had the ability to look at square one, look at the end point, and make it happen. He was always there with the right answer.”

He also had “an excellent sense of humor, but it was very wry,” said Pam. “English was not his native tongue, and yet he wrote more beautifully than any of us.”

One example may be found in words Kaufmann wrote in 1988, a half-century after Kristallnacht. He had made a bitter pilgrimage to Mannheim for the opening of a new synagogue to replace the one torched by Nazis.

“I had a nagging desire to attend this dedication in search of a lost era and at the same time a repugnance to set foot on soil which I thought never again could be home for Jews, a country where the odor of corpses, gas chambers, and torture cells permeated the environment,” he wrote. “I had gone to Germany in search of what had been taken from me, and I concluded that it all lay buried in the mausoleum of European Jewish history.”

He donated anonymously and gave a lot of people money — family and non-family — when he saw they were in need. He used to say, “Charity that seeks to advertise ceases to be charity,” said Pam.

Kaufmann was active in the founding of Temple Beth Shalom in his adopted town of Livingston, “but he was agnostic and had a lot of anger toward God. I guess that’s why he was not an atheist,” Pam said. “But he was very adamant that all of us go to Hebrew school and be bar and bat mitzva’d. He tended to be silent during prayers, but he went there for the community. He didn’t pray. He just stood there meditating.”

Throughout the years, Kaufmann maintained a friendship with his rabbi, Azriel Fellner, as well as with Judy Fellner, the rabbi’s wife.

“We dealt with everything from the Holocaust to the present state of the world,” said the rabbi. “We discussed theology and music and art and modern pop culture, even though he didn’t care much about modern pop culture. His natural intelligence overcame whatever he was not able to learn formally.”

A chain-smoker, Kaufmann was diagnosed with emphysema and bronchial asthma in 1982.

“He lived under a lot of tension, and that caused him to keep smoking. And he always thought of himself as a man who was in good physical shape,” said Judy Fellner, who took long walks with him on an almost daily basis.

They became close confidants, and Fellner visited him during his final days.

As she said in her eulogy, “Despite the obvious pain and great toll of his cruel, debilitating disease, whenever he saw how anxious I was about his death, he would reassuringly say, ‘You can’t kill a weed.’”

Kaufmann is survived by Lila, his wife of 59 years, as well as his sons, Stuart and Larry, his daughter, Pam, and three grandchildren.

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