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'They're Never Not Holding Hands': Party To Toast Rabbi, 99, and Wife, 100

By Benjamin Woodard | April 23, 2015 5:57am | Updated on April 27, 2015 12:57pm
 Rabbi Herman Schaalman and his wife, Lotte, in their Edgewater condo. The couple celebrate 74 years together next month.
Rabbi Herman Schaalman and his wife, Lotte, in their Edgewater condo. The couple celebrate 74 years together next month.
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DNAinfo/Benjamin Woodard

EDGEWATER — Rabbi Herman Schaalman, who turned 99 this month, said he owes his long life and happiness to two things: taking a trip from Munich, Germany, to study in the United States 80 years ago — just after the Nazis took power — and then meeting his soon-to-be wife, Lotte, a few years after he got here.

"No question," said the renowned teacher of Reform Judaism who has led an Edgewater congregation for decades and emerged as a world leader of the movement. "From a very personal point of view, these two things are a foundation of things that ever happened thereafter."

The couple is celebrating huge milestones this year. Schaalman turned 99 on April 16, while his wife turned 100 in January. The inseparable couple celebrate a 74-year wedding anniversary next month. And the celebration comes after 58 years of living in Edgewater.

Ben Woodard says their story together is incredible:

A party for them is planned for May 31 at the Emanuel Congregation synagogue, 5959 N. Sheridan Road.

"They’re never not holding hands — even when they’re not physically holding hands," said Senior Rabbi Michael Zedek, who took the reins from Schaalman at Emanuel 10 years ago. "They are a team. There’s no question about that. She is awesomely and historically supportive of him and his ideas, his concerns, his convictions. He is in awe of the ways in which she connects and interacts and responds to people's concerns."

Schaalman was born during World War I in Munich in 1916. His father spent the war in the trenches and left the military as a sergeant, he said.

After graduating from high school in 1935 he entered a seminary in Berlin and shortly after was offered a scholarship, with four other students, to study at a seminary in Cincinnati.

In August 1935, he and his friends boarded the SS Britannia and arrived a month later in New York. He said his emigration saved his life because the Nazis had just taken power in Germany.

"In Germany, as a Jew, you tried to hide at this time. ... Anything Hebrew was a distraction for destruction," he said. "I was afraid for my life."

But the culture shock was nothing short of intense in the United States, he said.

He had been brought up in a traditional Jewish home. The Reform tradition he began to study — and later would champion — was just as foreign to him as the English language.

"This was so totally strange and foreign I didn't know how I would possibly fit into this," he said. "It took me years, frankly, before I became comfortable."

He said he would write out and memorize his sermons in English before mastering the new language — something his wife and study buddy, remembered well.

Lotte Schaalman, then 20, had just moved to Cincinnati when her soon-to-be husband began to attend the seminary there. At a dinner party, they met "by accident," the rabbi said — and married less than a year later.

"We celebrate it every day," he said.

The couple then moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and lived there from 1941 to 1949. They had two children, a son and a daughter who are now 72 and 67, respectively. A second and third great-grandchild are on the way.

He said it was in Cedar Rapids that he learned the importance of working with people of all religions to accomplish progress, socially and religiously.

"This led to my understanding that there was a different possibility of living a religious life in the United States that I had never heard of," he said. "That was an interfaith life with a great respect and attempt to understand each other and to not look at each other as potential hostiles and enemies."

In 1956 he came to Edgewater to serve as Emanuel's rabbi.

Zedek said Schaalman has been credited with uniting the religious leaders of the neighborhood by forming the Edgewater Clergy and Rabbi Association, which eventually became the Edgewater Community Religious Association.

"Rabbi Schaalman has always been fond of extraordinary creativity and bridge-building," he said. "He’s one of the giants of interfaith work."

Schaalman also said the founding of a Jewish camp near Milwaukee — called Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute — was one of his proudest achievements.

Officially, Schaalman retired in the 1980s, but he hasn't stopped working. Each week for the last 50 years, he's taught a class with other rabbis at Emanuel. Once a year, he shares a sermon with the rest of the congregation.

"I'm now 99, and certainly at the end of my life; there's no question about that," he said. "Nonetheless, I can look back at what had happened to me and ... that has been extraordinary — as far as I'm concerned."

Schaalman had a bit of advice for a long-lasting marriage.

"Be the first to forgive," he said. "Compete with each other to be the first to forgive. Then you'll have a good marriage. I never go to bed with 'Momma' at night mad."

Responded Lotte Schaalman: "My darling. My dearest darling. ... I love you. It's a wonderful, nice story, isn't it?"

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