Rabbi’s mom muses on separate paths she and her Orthodox sons have taken

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

To put it mildly, Maxine Myers said she was “very surprised” when her son Baruch came home to Maplewood for Thanksgiving vacation during his sophomore year at the University of Michigan and announced “he couldn’t eat in my house and he couldn’t go to my sister’s for Thanksgiving dinner.”

Just a few weeks earlier, when she had gone to visit him in Ann Arbor on Columbus Day, “he had picked me up at the airport on Shabbat and he had been eating cheeseburgers. Then on Thanksgiving he comes home and tells me he’s completely kosher.”

It was quite a transformation for a 19-year-old secular Jew who was keenly interested in classical music and who had spent weekends, while he was a student at Columbia High School, studying piano, composition, and conducting at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan.

As a music major at Michigan, Baruch Myers met a man his mother called “a charismatic Chabad rabbi, Aharon Goldstein. Baruch was very attracted to that movement. After college, he put off his music career to pursue studies at the Rabbinical College of America in Morristown.”

The new career path led him to Argentina, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, then Leeds, England, and, finally, to Bratislava, where he is the Slovak city’s only rabbi.

“In the beginning I missed the music and couldn’t help thinking that a great talent was wasted,” said Maxine Myers. “But as the years passed, I got used to the idea.”

Her son’s life choice was quite different from Maxine’s upbringing as a “mostly lapsed Conservative” who grew up surrounded by the “philanthropic Judaism” of her father, Carl Leff, a charter member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

She inherited that philanthropic impulse and has helped finance a center for people with special needs in Ofakim — a partnership Israeli community of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ — and a physical therapy room at the Judy and Josh Weston Assisted Living Residence on the Aidekman Jewish community campus in Whippany.

“I think my parents were less observant than I am now,” she said, even as she noted the very different religious path each of her three sons has taken.

Her son Asher Meir, who now uses the Hebrew form of his birth name, Andrew Myers, works as research director of the Business Ethics Center of Jerusalem and writes a weekly Web-based column called “The Jewish Ethicist.” She describes him as Orthodox, but not hasidic.

Her third son, Mark, a North Carolina businessman, is, she said, “ultra-Reform.”

As Maxine is quick to point out, “I’m an extremely, extremely observant Reform Jew.” Now a resident of West Orange, she attends Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove. Her sons, she said, “left me for their kind of Judaism, and they know that my Judaism is as intact as theirs, and they can’t do anything about it.”

Becoming a grandmother to Baruch’s 10 children and Asher’s seven has helped gloss over the theological differences that run in the family.

She enjoys semi-annual visits to both her overseas sons, and “even though Bratislava is not a place you would want to visit more than twice in your lifetime,” said Myers, “you have to see your grandchildren.”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.