The painting is thought by many to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris since 1797.
After my father’s passing, I settled into my role as the family patriarch, with Florence as my leading lady. Just as we had moved to a more luxurious home, we also began upscaling our Catskills vacations, building a vacation house on Lake Louise Marie, a beautiful artificial lake near Monticello, New York. It was a gorgeous home and we spent some nice summer holidays there.
One day I was chatting with a broker I knew and he said, “Listen, things are changing too slowly in Brooklyn. If you want a changing neighborhood, you should look at Washington Heights.” There, in the northern section of Manhattan along the Hudson River, German Jews were moving out and being replaced by a new wave of Latin American arrivals, especially from the Dominican Republic.
Finally, at one last stop, another woman was rousted from a bunker by the deputy. Rembocha eyed her as she struggled and yelled. “Don’t worry about her,” he said, pushing her roughly into the wagon. “I will take care of this one myself.”
Afterwards, they brought me back to the police station and put me back in the holding cell. It had been a horrific day and the images of what I had seen tormented me into the night.
I could see that the third house had been abandoned for years. Its roof was mostly gone. Inside were just a few rooms, with a living area in front and kitchen in the back. The cooking fixtures were mostly intact, with a cast-iron oven and coal bin in the center and storage compartments along the wall. In better days, the stove had probably served both for baking and heating the home.
A massacre had happened at a bunker in the forest not far from our own a few months earlier, Lonye said. Huddled with our group in the bunker, he had heard the gunfire and even smelled smoke wafting through the forest. Later they got confirmation: A terrified group of Jews had indeed been smoked out and killed in their forest bunker, which was then filled in and served as their mass grave.
In recent years, we have been major givers to the upbuilding of the Hampton Synagogue, the Orthodox shul just a few blocks from where we have our lovely summer home in Westhampton Beach. We have given substantially each year we have been members, on top of the donation we made for the construction of the synagogue’s great hall, which we dedicated to our loved ones lost in the Holocaust. The elegant Edelstein Hall, in a building across the landscaped outdoor plaza from the synagogue itself, is used for banquets, concerts and community events. We are very proud of it.
After the first meeting I saw Florence several more times at the clubs. She was usually with her two girlfriends, Miriam and Betsy, who lived in her neighborhood in the Bronx. They also studied together at the Workmen’s Circle school, where they went to study Yiddish in the afternoons after their regular high school let out.
The Educational Alliance had a “Guys and Dolls” club with movies, social events and lectures for young singles. They devoted a room in their building on East Broadway to what was called the Col. David Marcus Club, a social hall for new American singles named for a Jewish American military commander who had died in the Israeli war of independence.
A considerable part of our tzedakah over the years has been focused on the health and social welfare needs of the Jewish people. In Israel, we have contributed ambulances to Magen David Adom and Bet Halochem. We contributed a CAT scan room to the Sha’are Tzedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and gave a sizable contribution to the Israel Cancer Research Fund.