Pupils Can Learn From His Efforts

Irv Gelman paused on the steps leading up to the new Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School, his dream-in-the-making in the hilly southern outskirts of Irvine.

“I’m walking you this way so you’ll have a feeling for the entrance,” the Poland-born Holocaust survivor said, peering through rimless glasses at the administration building’s 35-foot-tall lobby tower.

“We named it the Tower of David after the King David Tower in the Old City of Jerusalem because everything has some symbolism here,” the school’s founder said above the din of a small landscaping bulldozer. “If you look on top, the windows give you the look of a menorah, a candelabrum.”

The design of the modern, 10 1/2-acre campus of the kindergarten-through-12th-grade Jewish school is a reflection of historic Jerusalem--from the four academic “villages” representing the four quarters of the old city to a 22-foot-tall “Western Wall.”

The public buildings--the gymnasium and student center--are on the “temple mount,” and the school is set within a biblical garden bearing date palms, olive and cedar trees as well as other trees and plants mentioned in the Bible.

Earlier this week, workers were hurrying to install the school furniture, complete the landscaping and clean up construction debris in time for the school’s dedication ceremony Sunday morning at 10.

The new Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School, which is not affiliated with any branch of Judaism, can accommodate 550 students. It boasts the latest technology, including one computer for every two students. More than 300 pupils are already enrolled for the start of classes in September.

For members of Orange County’s Jewish community, the new school is a welcome addition.

“As an edifice, it’s a wonderful thing,” said Jerry Werksman, president of Jewish Federation of Orange County. “But what it means to the Jewish community is just a high-quality Jewish education, and Jewish education equates to Jewish continuity.”

The new school, Werksman added, “just bodes well for the future.”

A multimillion-dollar donation from an Orange County donor who prefers to remain anonymous made the campus possible.

But Gelman, a 73-year-old retired textile manufacturer who has devoted the past four decades to furthering Jewish education, is the driving force behind the Tarbut school.

“Irv,” Werksman said, “is as devoted to Jewish education as a person can be.”

Gelman--who was heavily involved with two Jewish schools in New Jersey, where he and his wife, Rochelle, lived until he retired in 1984--founded Tarbut V’Torah in a converted warehouse at the Jewish Federation campus in Costa Mesa in 1991. (Tarbut is Hebrew for culture and Torah is the five books of Moses.)

In starting that kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Tarbut school, the soft-spoken, unpretentious man with a puckish sense of humor revived the name of a Jewish academic tradition that perished more than 50 years ago.

As a child in Poland, he attended one of the many Tarbut schools that flourished throughout Eastern Europe in the years between the world wars--before the Nazi war machine steamrollered across Europe. Before the Holocaust. And before his future wife, 17-year-old Rochelle Smola, whose parents were murdered by German S.S. soldiers, joined him, his parents and sister in hiding.

The five of them spent 14 months living in a 6-foot-square hole under a barn, a pitch-black refuge not even deep enough to stand up in.

For Gelman, whose immediate family survived the Holocaust, it was always his dream to build a Tarbut school in this country.

“I always believed in education,” Gelman said. “My father--may he rest in peace--back in Poland was involved in a school like this, so I must have picked something up from him.”

When the anonymous donor stepped forward, the 200-student Tarbut V’Torah had already outgrown its 10,000-square-foot location in Costa Mesa.

Groundbreaking for the 65,000-square-foot campus on Bonita Canyon Drive began late last August. Due to rain delays in pouring the foundations, construction didn’t really begin until January.

“This is one of the quickest [jobs] I’ve ever worked on,” said project designer Jim Kisel of LPA Inc. of Irvine, which last year won the top Orange County architecture award for its design of the school.

Gelman’s goal was to have the school completed in time for his 50th wedding anniversary this month. To meet the deadline, construction workers have been working overtime the past few months.

The Gelmans’ anniversary was actually July 4. But, as Gelman jokes, “I gave them a week’s grace.” At the new campus this Sunday evening, 150 invited guests will join the couple in celebrating their anniversary and the completion of the school.

Since construction began, Gelman has been on-site six days a week--making sure things are running smoothly and giving tours to groups of students and parents of prospective students.

“It’s taken up all of his time, from 7 in the morning until 6 at night,” Rochelle said. “It’s his school, it’s his baby. Some people enjoy retirement, but he can’t do that. He’s not the type to just sit and do nothing.”

Gelman still volunteers at the school’s original campus in Costa Mesa.

“If only we could all have his kind of energy,” said Gerald Barkan, who will be the middle school and high school principal at the new school.

“He spends a tremendous amount of time here on everything--from working with new families, recruiting students and building operations. If it needs to be done, he’ll do it--from unplugging the sink to moving furniture and talking to the kids.”

Gelman is known to tie younger students’ shoelaces when they need tying and to comfort those who need cheering.

The students call the ever-present grandfather figure “Papa.”

“The students, particularly the older ones, recognize that the school is his passion, a reflection of his energy and a love for education and for creating a Jewish institution,” Barkan said.

Gelman--who has four grandchildren attending Tarbut V’Torah and whose daughter-in-law, Bernice Gelman, is the elementary school principal--founded the school in memory of his daughter, Naomi Gelman Weiss, who died of breast cancer at 38 in 1989.

The playground at both the old and the new campuses are named in memory of his grandson, Joshua Gelman, who died at the age of 7 of asthma.

“So, I had a few tragedies,” Gelman said softly, “but I keep bouncing back. I’m not a quitter. I never quit in my life. And I’ll tell you something, all my life I was always a winner. Somehow God kept an eye on me.”

*

The son of a shoe store owner, Gelman grew up in Hosht, a small town in eastern Poland, which fell into Soviet hands after the country was divided between the Germans and the Soviets in fall 1939.

When war broke out in June 1941, the Germans overran the Soviet territory within 14 days.

“And then,” Gelman recalled, “the trouble started.”

As elsewhere in Europe, the Jews in Hosht were rounded up and forced into a ghetto.

The Gelman family made the decision to go into hiding in October 1942. By then, Gelman said, “the order was to clean out the territory of all Jewish people. We knew every week, every day, in a different town or village, the Germans were rounding up the Jews and killing them.”

A Christian farmer and his wife who lived in a village three miles away agreed to hide the Gelmans in a hole beneath their barn. In so doing, they risked being shot by the Germans. But, Gelman said, “the wife was a very strong believer in God.”

When Gelman’s father told him that he had found a hiding place, Gelman insisted on taking Rochelle Smola, his future wife, with them. His father hadn’t even met Rochelle, who had come from a nearby city to live with relatives after the Germans killed her parents.

“Is she the only orphan in town? Why her?” his father asked.

“We are in love,” Gelman, then 18, said, “and if you refuse to take her, then I will not join you either.”

The truth is Gelman barely knew Rochelle. He was friends with her cousins and had seen her when he visited their home, but they had barely talked to one another.

“It was very shortly after my parents were killed, and I was contemplating suicide at the time,” Rochelle Gelman said. “I didn’t pay attention to boys, but he decided he was in love with me.”

As Rochelle Gelman recounted, Irv Gelman’s father said it wasn’t up to him to decide to let her join them in hiding. He would have to ask the farmer and his wife: “They agreed to four people, not to five.”

“It just so happens that the woman, she was a saint. I mean, she was an angel,” Rochelle Gelman said. “When the husband told her, she said, ‘To save an orphan is even more important than to save a family.’ So she was all for it.”

Living in the 4-foot hole, they barely knew whether it was day or night. It didn’t really matter.

“It was night in there anyway,” said Rochelle Gelman. “Three people were able to lie down during the night and sleep and two had to sit up, so we were taking turns.”

“The only way we knew it was daylight or nighttime,” Irv Gelman said, “was by the roosters in the morning, the motion of wagons going into the town or to the fields, and when things quieted down we knew it was nighttime.”

Every morning, the woman would bring them a large pot of potatoes, bread and water.

“Once in a blue moon,” Gelman said, “the lady would open the cover and let in some air.”

Because they never knew who might enter the barn, they could not talk above a whisper. They tried not to even do that. All they really could do, Rochelle Gelman said, was think--”and hope that we will survive, and make plans for what we are going to do after that.”

The worst part, Irv Gelman said, “was not knowing when it will end.”

“And if it will end,” Rochelle Gelman added.

After 14 months in what she came to refer to as their “hellhole,” guerrillas killed a German soldier in the village--an action for which, they believed, the Germans would surely retaliate by burning every house and barn around.

Irv and Rochelle left their hiding place together; his parents and sister left the next day.

The two teenagers spent the next two months in hiding together at another farm. Then the Russian army arrived and, Rochelle Gelman said, “we were liberated.”

Though their time together created an incredible bond, the Gelmans didn’t fall in love until after the war.

“I felt like I was a member of their family,” Rochelle Gelman said. “His parents were like my substitute parents at the time, so he was like a brother, actually.”

After Poland was liberated, Gelman was drafted into the Russian army. He was stationed in Hosht, where Rochelle had returned to live with her aunt and cousin. At one point, Gelman was ordered to Russia. He was gone a month.

“That’s when I began to miss him,” Rochelle Gelman said, “and I realized my feelings for him.”

Though they were engaged in 1946, the Gelmans weren’t married until after they came to the United States in 1947.

Gelman arrived with only $5.60, a gift from a Jewish organization on board the ship. He quickly landed an 80-cents-an-hour job as a shipping clerk in a textile firm. Within seven years, he started his textile-manufacturing business. He named it Dome Textiles, after Domka, the farm woman who had saved their lives.

Around 1958, after he began “making a nice living,” Gelman began donating time and money to a Jewish elementary school, the Yavneh Academy in Paramus, N.J. He later led a fund-raising drive for a Jewish high school.

“To me, education and a Jewish education to the children meant a lot,” he said. “I consider this will perpetuate our nation.

“To me, it meant a lot that so many people were destroyed, and if those kids will not know [about the Holocaust], you might as well finish it up. I looked at myself as a survivor. There must have been a reason why God made me survive.”

Walking through the empty school buildings in Irvine late last week, Gelman was asked what the completion of the new campus means to him.

“It gives me a great sense of pride, a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment,” he said.

“I feel,” he added, “like I have reached the epitome of life.”