by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

May 12, 2009

For two generations, members of the Kriegel and Wurgaft families have aided one another at the helm of Congregation Beth Ahm of West Essex in Verona.

First it was Rabbi Alter Kriegel and synagogue president Louis Wurgaft, whose friendship began in 1954.

Their involvement owes much to that chance encounter at a bus stop on Bloomfield Avenue.

“My father was waiting for a bus to his office in Newark. He was director of advertising at The Jewish News,” the forerunner of New Jersey Jewish News, said his son Marc Wurgaft. “Alter stopped and offered him a ride. That’s how they met.”

The older two men worked side by side as spiritual leader and lay leader of the Conservative congregation and became close friends outside the synagogue.

They shared much in common, but not their physical appearance.

“Alter Kriegel was five-foot-three; my father was six-foot-five,” said Marc. “They were really ‘Mutt and Jeff.’”

Nearly a half-century later, in 2002, Marc Wurgaft became president of the congregation and another Kriegel held the pulpit at Beth Ahm — Alter’s son, Rabbi Aaron Kriegel.

The families’ partnerships and the Wurgafts’ contributions to the synagogue will be celebrated on Sunday, May 17, at a gala congregational dinner honoring Marc Wurgaft and his wife, Jennis.

Marc is modest about the upcoming honor. “We have been members for a long time and I am a past president,” he told NJJN. “Each year they look to honor a couple, and I guess this is our turn.”

But Rabbi Aaron Kriegel is far more effusive about the Wurgafts’ contributions.

Marc, the rabbi said, “helped restructure the synagogue and brought a lot of people on as new members. He is one of our hardest-working people.”

As for Jennis Wurgaft, “aside from chairing two committees, she is a top-notch psychologist who helped us put together a widows’ support group and other support groups and has counseled members of the congregation without charge.”

Louis Wurgaft’s name is on the very first masthead of The Jewish News — in the inaugural issue of Jan. 3, 1947 — and he stayed with the paper for a quarter of a century. Marc recalled as a boy visiting the newspaper office on Central Avenue in Newark, as well as its printing plant in Belleville.

“I remember the smell of the ink,” he said. “I remember my father arranging layouts for the ads. When I was young, I thought we owned the paper because it was such a big part of our family.

“The printer was an Italian guy, and my father used to tell me he published The Jewish News with so much care and love, you would think he was Jewish.”

Louis Wurgaft retired after 25 years at the newspaper, in 1972, having spent the last few years in a wheelchair. “As the advertising director, his job was to get out and sell advertising,” said Marc. “He walked everywhere, but then he was confined to his office.”

Then gradually, things started changing in Wurgaft’s hometown.

Racial tensions caused a rift between many Jews and Christians in Verona: Some of them found themselves to be polar opposites on the issue of school busing.

“Alter Kriegel was very involved in the community, and we felt very welcome there,” said Marc. “But that changed after the Newark riots in 1967, when a state-funded busing program brought 30 inner-city students to Verona.”

The plan called for 30 black and Latino children to attend the first three grades of Verona’s public schools. The head of the board of education at the time, Hilda Jaffe, was Jewish. “The three-year program was abandoned in its first year, and Jewish residents were made to feel less welcome,” Wurgaft recalled.

More than 30 years later, Jaffe remembered the episode in a talk at a Jewish women’s political forum in Whippany. She told NJJN she missed her time in public office, “but I didn’t miss the abuse I took from neighbors and the anonymous phone calls.”

Around that time, Marc’s parents and many of their friends moved to retirement homes in Florida.

The elder Wurgaft died in 1986 at the age of 76.

Marc Wurgaft earned a degree in social work. He commutes from his home in Montclair to direct a drug and alcohol treatment program at Youth Consultation Services in East Orange.

Jennis Wurgaft is a child psychologist at Children’s Specialized Hospital in Mountainside. Their 16-year-old daughter, Hanna, is a junior at Montclair High School.

Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com

--TOP--