A Godsend for Geeks

One day shy of 75, Irving Gelman must be slowing down--because he’s about to let himself be honored. “Some people run to awards,” says Gelman, a Holocaust survivor and founder and chairman of Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School in Irvine, the only kindergarten-through-12th grade coeducational Jewish school in Orange County. “I have always run away from them.”

Until Sunday, that is, when 630 admirers from across the country will pack the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Irvine to say happy birthday and thanks to one of Orange County’s most remarkable and beloved Jewish leaders. The event--among the biggest Jewish fund-raisers in the county--will raise more than $300,000 for Tarbut scholarships.

“His passion is to ensure that Jewish life will continue,” says Bernice Gelman, the principal of Tarbut’s elementary school and the founder’s former daughter-in-law. “If you educate a bright, talented and energetic generation of Jewish kids, they will be the future of the Jewish community.”

His Holocaust experience fuels his fervor for educating Jewish children. To avoid being captured by German soldiers, he spent 14 months hiding--with four other people, including his future wife--in a 6-foot-square, 4-foot-high hole inside a barn in Poland.

“Almost in every generation,” Gelman says, “we have another Hitler. And how do you make sure we survive our enemies? You teach Jewish people to be proud Jews and not to let them be destroyed.”

In 1984, Gelman moved to Irvine from New Jersey so he and his wife, Rochelle, could be closer to their children and grandchildren. But Orange County, he quickly found out, was hardly the land of milk and honey.

“For a Jewish person, it was a cultural desert,” Gelman says.

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After two depressing years, he went to work to try to change the landscape. Having been a founder of a flourishing Jewish day school back east, he hooked up with a local synagogue and started a school. But after a couple of years, Gelman closed the school in a dispute with the local rabbi.

Again relying on his considerable entrepreneurial skills, Gelman--who made his fortune in the textile business after arriving in the United States with $5.60 in his pocket in 1947--founded Tarbut in 1991.

The school opened in an industrial section of Costa Mesa with 37 students. Seven years later, 420 students from across the county attend Tarbut’s new $18-million campus on 10.5 acres off of Bonita Canyon Road in Irvine.

The state-of-the-art school features computer and science labs, art and music rooms, a library, a kosher cafeteria, a full-size soccer field, tennis courts and a gym with a rock-climbing wall.

The award-winning architecture echoes life in Jerusalem. The campus is divided into four sections, as is the Old City of Jerusalem. Jerusalem stone adorns the lobby walls. And the landscaping is done with plants and trees native to Israel or found in the Bible. On the school’s gates, the Ten Commandants are inscribed in Hebrew.

A staff of 82 carries out Gelman’s vision, which includes a rigorous curriculum that’s roughly 65% secular, 35% Judaic.

All this comes with a price tag--$8,000 in tuition each year, though the school scholarship fund subsidizes many students. Last year Tarbut handed out $650,000 in scholarships out of a $4-million budget.

“As of today,” Gelman says, “I’m proud that we’ve never turned anybody away who wanted a Jewish education, if academically qualified.”

“We love the warmth of the school, it’s a very heimish environment--which means warm, loving, kind,” says Ronda Kushner, a parent of two elementary schoolchildren. “We wanted our children to have a Jewish education and learn about their heritage. We did it as a family commitment.”

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The school--which will graduate its first high school class in 2001--is nothing short of a godsend for parents such as Sheila Stopnitzky. Her older children went to a Jewish day school through eighth grade, but then, as she puts it, “they ran out of grades.”

“After 24 months in public high school, there was a marked difference in attitude toward learning,” says Stopnitzky, a Laguna Hills resident. “In public school, you don’t want to be an honor student--you’re a geek. In Jewish school, that’s the goal. The honor students are the role models.”

Now her two younger children--in fifth and seventh grades--will be able to stay at Tarbut until college. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t say ‘baruch hashem’--thank God--for Irving Gelman and this school.”

On campus, the students call Gelman “Papa,” and, whether he’s visiting a classroom or strolling across campus, they often go out of their way to give the school’s founder a hug.

“He cares about every child. He even knows if a child has had a haircut,” Stopnitzky says. “And every child feels an accountability to Irving Gelman.”

And Gelman--despite having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust in addition to the deaths of a daughter and grandchild--feels an accountability to God.

“I may have had an argument with God, but I keep it to myself,” Gelman says. “There’s a reason for everything. Maybe I’m a modern-day Job. I believe in God; it’s nothing I can change, and hopefully we’ll be vindicated in the end.”

So the man who at one time kept five stockbrokers busy has long since cashed in his investments and poured them into his school, doing what he can to preserve the Jewish community.

To explain it all, he likes to quote Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, from memory: “A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be a different place because I was important to the life of a child.”