by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

February 07, 2008

At the age of 97, Edith Mendel is starting to slow down a bit. She is hard of hearing in her left ear and needs a walker to get around the comfortable Livingston home she shares with her daughter and son-in-law, Marcella and David Sabo.

But she does keep busy. Her hands are occupied with knitting clothes for residents of a battered women’s shelter and her mind is filled with happy memories of a lifetime of volunteer work in and outside of Essex County’s Jewish community.

“What do I do now?” she asked wistfully. “Damn little. My age affects my ability to get around and I very sorely miss my friends. I’m the last leaf on the tree.”

Her roots began in Newark and date back to 1845, when her grandmother’s family settled there from Germany.

She was born Edith Maas in a house on Sterling Street in May 1910 and began her commitment to helping others in earnest when she turned 17.

“I got a car for my 17th birthday,” Mendel said, recalling the green 1927 Buick she received from her parents. “They told me I had to do something positive with it. So I started by taking kids from the Jewish Day Nursery and Neighborhood House to various parks and swimming pools in the neighborhood. I shudder now when I think how many kids I drove — row on row, lap upon lap.”

In those days, few social workers had cars.

“They wasted hours waiting for buses,” she said. “So once or twice a week I would chauffeur them around all day, and I became very interested in their casework.”

That interest persisted through her years at South Side High School, then set her on a career path after she dropped out of Columbia University.

“I said, ‘I’m never going to need Latin, and I’m never going to need chemistry, so why should I study them?’ College didn’t prepare me for anything except life as a parasite.”

Her life from then on was anything but parasitic.

After marrying William Mendel in 1930, she kept herself out of the workforce at her mother’s advice.

“It was the Depression, and she said, ‘It’s immoral to take a job away from someone who needs it. If you want to work, there are plenty of volunteer jobs.’”

‘A very good worker’

For more than a half-century, Mendel worked without ever drawing a salary.

“I was active in Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, Community Chest, the Jewish Family Service, and the Red Cross,” she said. “We ran a home for malnourished children called the Personal Service Association. I visited shut-ins. I did a lot of casework for the Red Cross. I worked for many years with Planned Parenthood, and I worked with Al-Anon,” a support group for friends and families of alcoholics.

Usually, Mendel declined leadership roles in those organizations. “I’m not a leader, but I’m a very good worker,” she said. “I decided the world was very full of wonderful volunteer jobs and you shouldn’t stay in any one too long. You should make room for new people with new ideas and new enthusiasm. I would try to stay no longer than five years with every agency.”

One special moment was when Eleanor Roosevelt visited Newark as guest of honor at a benefit for the Essex County Symphony Society.

“She was perfectly charming,” said Mendel. “We were all thrilled. She was very much loved in the Jewish community. We had finished some piece of community work, and our reward was lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt.”

But afterward it was back to reality.

“When I came home and said, ‘I had lunch with the president’s wife,’ my mother said, ‘Get down from your high horse. The iceman missed us today and you have to go get us ice.’”

Mendel’s home was next door to Temple B’nai Abraham — then an Orthodox synagogue and now an independent one located in Livingston.

“But we didn’t belong there. We were Jeshurun people,” she said, referring to the city’s oldest Reform house of worship, Temple B’nai Jeshurun, which now stands in Short Hills. “But we were not very active in the temple.”

Her father, Morris Maas, was an old-fashioned family doctor in the Clinton Hill community.

“Most of my father’s friends were gentiles,” she said. “Not many were the Jewish folks. The Jews played cards and they smoked, but he didn’t play cards and he didn’t smoke.”

He was also an atheist. “My mother said, ‘You should have the Jewish education for your future life, but I don’t approve of confirmation. All I see is kids saying, “Ooh, I got this. How many presents did you get?”’ She said, ‘You will go through confirmation class, but you will not be confirmed.’”

Although her parents were registered Republicans, Mendel dissented.

“The older I got, the more liberal I became,” she said. “All you have to do is read the papers and see the voting records of some of these birds we put in Washington. I think the Bush administration has been a complete disaster for this country, and it will take us many years to come out from underneath it.”

Looking back on her own years, Mendel recalled some rough breaks along the way. Perhaps the toughest one was losing her husband 11 years ago and her son Norman just two weeks later.

A few months before her 98th birthday, she described hers as a “most enjoyable life.

“I’ve got four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and a one-year-old great-great granddaughter,” she said. “You can’t do that when you’re young.”