Anitta and Sheldon Fox hope to celebrate their 60th anniversary along with Israel’s in May, just as they did the two 50th anniversaries 10 years ago — as seen in this photo.
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Your turnFebruary 28, 2008
If their prayers are answered, Anitta and Dr. Sheldon Fox will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary by sponsoring a Hadassah luncheon in May — to honor Israel’s 60th anniversary.
“We’ve always loved sharing our simhas,” Anitta said recently. “We celebrated our 50th anniversary this way, with Israel, and, God willing, we want to do the same thing this year for its 60th birthday.”
Marking special occasions like this has been a way, she said, to link their personal pleasure to causes they care about, and maybe increase support for them at the same time.
Celebrating with Hadassah is a natural for them. Anitta headed up the Elizabeth chapter for 15 years, until it was absorbed into the Hillside chapter in 2006. Celebrating with Israel is a natural too; their support for the nation has been a shared passion since their wedding in 1948, just a month after the establishment of the state.
At 83 and 88 respectively, Anitta and her Shelly are both battling health problems. He has had over a decade of illness; for her it is very recent. But both of them are as charming and friendly as ever. Even in a household in which people were gathered to help contend with infirmity, the atmosphere was filled with laughter, teasing, and hospitality.
Anitta was a 22-year-old occupational therapist when they met in Manhattan in October 1947, nine years after she and her parents arrived in the United States as refugees from Austria. A young doctor friend gave her a ride to a lecture; in the car was a fellow doctor who that day had also started his radiology residency at New York University. Shelly Fox was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn and a veteran of the U.S. Army.
He wasn’t particularly chatty. “Despite what people might have expected, I wasn’t much of a lady’s man,” he recalled. But in her bright, friendly way, Anitta engaged him in conversation and then insisted that he join them in the front seat, so she wouldn’t have to keep twisting around to talk to him.
He perked up quickly when she mentioned that she swam frequently at the indoor pool at London Terrace on West 23rd Street. He was a regular at the St. George’s pool in Brooklyn, where he lived, but he was looking for a pool in Manhattan. She told him she would be there the following day, a Thursday, if she got out of work on time. “I’ll see you there, or I’ll call you,” he announced.
As it happened, she had to work late the next day and couldn’t go. She hoped he would call, but three days passed without a word. Then, on the following Monday, she got a call from someone with a very nasal voice. “It was Shelly. He said he’d been in the hospital with a broken nose,” she recounted, giggling at the memory.
He had gone to the London Terrace pool as arranged, dived in, and swam slam-bang into the blank white tiles at the far side. “They should have had black markings,” he grumbled 60 years later.
That didn’t deter him, though. Bandaged and black-eyed, he borrowed a car and headed up to Washington Heights, the heavily German-Jewish neighborhood where Anitta lived with her parents in what she called “the Fourth Reich.” They went for a walk, and sat on a bench relishing the moonlight and her favorite view, of the George Washington Bridge, then with just one deck.
That evening is still crystal clear in Anitta’s memory. So is the poem she later wrote about the bridge. With tears in her eyes, she quoted the first line: “May its strength and gallant beauty be symbolic of our love.”
Asked what made him head uptown that night, not exactly looking his best, the white-haired doctor, fragile in his robe and clearly not feeling well, still grinned. “I was very anatomically inclined,” he said, but then admitted: “I liked her figure — and I also liked her personality.”
‘We were lucky’
Looking back 60 years to their wedding in June 1948, Dr. Sheldon Fox still chuckled over how happy they both looked.
From almost that first date, there was very little doubt for either of them.
With the blessing of the parents on both sides, they got engaged just three months later and married five months after that. “We were very lucky,” Shelly said.
Not everything went well. The first few years of their marriage were spent nursing first her beloved artist father until he died, and then Shelly’s mother. Those losses delayed their first trip to Israel and starting a family until the early 1950s. But they went on to visit the Jewish state many times, and to have their three children — Serena, a doctor; Dan, a lawyer; and the youngest, Judy, a sculptor.
Asked if she had been head over heels in love when she married Shelly Fox, Anitta sighed and said, “I still am. Isn’t that silly, after all these years.”
Your turn
This is the second in NJ Jewish News’ occasional feature Kol Simcha, relating the stories behind our readers’ special celebrations. If you would like to share your special story — how you met your spouse, an unusual wedding, a milestone anniversary — contact Elaine Durbach at 973-275-1633 or , or c/o NJJN, 901 Route 10, Whippany, NJ 07981-1157.
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