Though he has been dead for 20 years, the legend and legacy of Hank Greenberg, the first Jewish sports superstar, is very much alive.

A group of enthusiastic baseball fans gathered at the Synagogue of the Suburban Torah Center in Livingston on Dec. 11 for a screening of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg and a presentation by Aviva Kempner, the documentary’s writer, producer, and director.

The audience of about 50 included several preteens. “You’d be surprised; a lot of them have heard of Hank Greenberg,” said Stephen Greenberg (no relation), president of the congregation’s men’s club, which sponsored the program. “They have not seen the film, so I’m very excited to see their reaction to it.”

One such young viewer was 11-year-old Daniel Sherpis, son of Steve Sherpis, men’s club secretary/treasurer, who had arranged for Kempner’s appearance.

Although Daniel didn’t know much about Greenberg before, he knew that the former Detroit Tiger first-baseman was an important Jewish athlete.

“I thought the movie was great,” said Daniel, a fifth-grader at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston and a first baseman/centerfielder on his Little League team. “I was very inspired.”

Daniel was not alone. Most of the men at the event had never seen Greenberg play.

But Peter Berkowsky, 64, fondly recalled meeting him at a game between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox at Yankee Stadium in 1964; Greenberg was general manager of the White Sox at the time.

“I was sitting in a field box and I recognized him right away. He was very distinctive. I made a beeline, went right over to him,” he said, proudly showing off an old scorebook that bore a prized autograph.

“He would have been an even bigger star if he’d played in New York,” said Berkowsky, who organizes a minyan for runners at the annual New York City Marathon. “He didn’t realize how much of an influence he had on the American-Jewish community until after he retired.”

Perhaps the only one at the program old enough to have seen Greenberg in his prime was Sid Dorfman, veteran sports columnist at The Star-Ledger.

“To me, Greenberg was a social and cultural figure. Jackie Robinson, when he broke in, didn’t have a better friend than Hank Greenberg,” said Dorfman, 86.

He was referring to an encounter between the two ballplayers in 1947, Greenberg’s final season and Robinson’s first. Greenberg was playing first base, where Robinson was standing following a base hit. The veteran assured the Major League’s first African-American player, “A lot of people are pulling for you to make good. Don’t ever forget it.”

“Greenberg himself had to try and survive almost as much as Robinson did,” Dorfman said, alluding to incessant anti-Semitic remarks from opponents and disgruntled fans. “He had fistfights, but he was a big guy and he wasn’t called out too often. He even had a fight with one of his own teammates who was getting on Robinson.”

Dorfman occasionally leaned over during the film to whisper a memory prodded by a particular comment or picture, at one point “calling” a home run seconds before it transpired on the screen.

Kempner, whose other award-winning documentaries include Partisans of Vilna, about Jewish resistance against the Nazis, and Today I Vote for My Joey, about the 2000 presidential election, explained her choice of Greenberg as a subject.

“When you grow up an immigrant child in Detroit, you heard about Hank Greenberg,” said Kempner, who was born in Germany and is the child of Holocaust survivors. “I heard about him so often during Yom Kippur that I thought he was part of the Kol Nidrei service.”

When she learned of Greenberg’s death on Sept. 4, 1986, said Kempner, “I started work on the film the next day.”

She noted the irony of Greenberg, a native of the Bronx, playing in Detroit, which she called “a hotbed of anti-Semitism” in those years. Auto-maker Henry Ford was an unabashed anti-Semite who frequently published defamatory articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and Father Charles Edward Coughlin, another Michigan native, broadcast his own tirades over the radio.

Kempner’s film follows Greenberg not only as an athlete but as a symbol of Jewish pride, especially during World War II. One shot of a Detroit newspaper stating “Talmud clears Greenberg for holiday play” drew chuckles from the audience. Greenberg became a legend — even to non-fans — when he declined to play on Yom Kippur in 1934 with his team in the midst of a heated pennant race.

After the screening, Kempner told NJJN about the naches she felt from the film. “I fall in love with my subjects, and Hank is still a great passion of mine. I can’t imagine what it would be to go to work every day and have some cat-call about being Jewish. We just don’t appreciate it today.”

Kempner lives in Washington, where she splits her time between working on her films, trying to secure voting rights for DC residents, and rooting for the Washington Nationals. Her next project considers the influence and impact of Gertrude Berg, who created The Goldbergs, one of early television’s most popular sitcoms.

It took her 13 years to raise the money for Greenberg. “I’m turning 60 in less than two weeks, so there’s not another 13 years in me,” she said. “I’m hoping in the next year I’ll raise the half-million dollars.”

Comment | Print | Subscribe | Webmaster