From Persecution to Service: the Chaplain Gary Cohen Story.

By Gary Cohen

This is the story of Gary Cohen, a Jewish boy who was persecuted bitterly in school, and how he became a Christian. When his family was shocked at his conversion, Gary joined the army. He suffered through basic training, remained in the army reserves, and eventually became an officer and an army chaplain. After graduating from the USAF Air War College, he rose to the rank of colonel.

This is the story of a young man who gave away his clothes to needy missionaries and ended up with more suits than one can count. It is an account of a young man who rarely traveled outside of his home in Philadelphia and went to college only nine blocks from his house, to one who earned a commercial pilots license and traveled to teach and preach the gospel from Seoul, Korea and Hong Kong to Australia, Israel, and Egypt, and a hundred more places. This is an inspiring story of how the Lord can lift up someone on the ground and then use him to lift others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781449797294

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FROM PERSECUTION TO SERVICE:

The Chaplain Gary Cohen Story.

An Autobiography

GARY COHEN

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Copyright © 2013 GARY COHEN.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-9728-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9730-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9729-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910742

WestBow Press rev. date: 6/19/2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapters:

1. Surrounded

2. Summer Camp, Central, and B.S.A.

3. Temple and Christianity

4. I Join the Army

5. Seminary and Marriage

6. Studies, Trials, and Israel Tours

7. An Army Officer and Chaplain

8. 56th Brigade, 28th Inf Division

9. More Army Adventures and Tennessee

10. Teaching at Christian Schools

11. Army Duty with the 3220th USAG

12. From Norton to Abraham

Epilogue

With gratitude to God and to our Savior, for grace,

this book is lovingly dedicated to my wife, Marion

who has supported me all through the years,

and to our children, Sharon, Caralee, & Steven

and to all of our dear friends, loved ones,

and fellow soldiers, though not named,

yet loved and not forgotten.

Mark 10:45

CHAPTER ONE

Surrounded

PHILADELPHIA, 1947

N ORTH PHILADELPHIA WAS a tough neighborhood for a twelve year old Jewish boy in 1947 two years after World War II had ended. My father, born in 1898, had been a child eight years old when brought to America from Lithuania, via Kiev, Russia and then South Africa, where his father had died. He used to tell me of his remembrances of Russia, with traders coming in to his town with icicles hanging from their moustaches. His mother, Pearl Cohen, brought him and his two younger brothers, Phil and Harry, to New York in 1906, as they fled from the persecution and prejudices against the Jews that so pervaded Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. They sailed past the Statue of Liberty with a hope of rebuilding their lives, and immediately moved to Philadelphia. She remarried a man name Schwartz, apparently a hard man who treated her roughly, and had two more children—two daughters, Celia and Ida.

My father, Abraham Cohen, although bright, had to quit school after sixth grade, typical of the poorer immigrants of those days, and managed to get a job at the age of twelve cleaning fish on the docks of Philadelphia. When eighteen, he married Mary Segal, a sixteen year old Jewish girl from a family of twelve children, whose sisters always told me how pretty she was. Dan, Hyman, Phil, Rose, Mary, Iris, Isabel, and Ida were eight of their names, in order of their birth. Mary’s family had come from the same area in Lithuania, then Russia as Abe’s, so the match was a natural.

Abe and Mary opened a grocery store in partnership with their life-long friends, Max and Rose Lipkin. The Lipkins had two children, the boy, Herbert went on to be a doctor, and the girl married Paul Wapner, who also became a physician. This same physician, Paul Mordecai Wapner, delivered me in 1934. Then as life has it in the big city, twenty-seven and thirty-four years later, this same Dr. Wapner, along with his partner, Dr. Arno, also delivered Sharon Cohen and Steven Cohen, Gary and Marion’s first and third children. Thus these two children have the rare distinction of being delivered by the same doctor who delivered their father! More will be said about this later.

In those days we lived in Philadelphia in the corner house at the intersection of 16th and Oakdale streets, where there seemed to be an automobile accident every night. Much of this was due to the traffic going to the baseball games, as both the Philadelphia Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies played at Shibe Park which was at 22nd and Leigh Avenue, with Leigh being just one thin half block north of Oakdale. I recall with happy affection sitting in the evenings on our grocery store steps with my father and listening to the radio to the baseball games, after seeing the crowds go by as they walked a mile west along Lehigh Avenue from Broad Street (which was 14th) to the ballpark at 22nd. As a young boy I recall two baseball games to which my father took me. One was when, despite my protests, we left in the eighth inning because the Phillies were seven runs behind. Of course, you guessed it; the Phillies scored eight runs in the ninth (which we missed), and won the game! The other was in 1947 seeing Harry the Hat Walker batting, when he was with the St. Louis Cardinals and the American League batting champion that year—I stared at him through boyish eyes as though he were the messiah, I was so impressed.

There was, however, another side of my childhood in those days. When I awoke in the morning, every morning, when I would leave our house, always walking through our store, I would see across the bricks of the wall of our corner row house, written in large freshly chalked letters, words such as, Jew and Dirty Jew. Then, when I walked the half mile to M. Hall Stanton Elementary School at 16th and Cumberland Streets, I was daily greeted with catcalls of Jew this and Jew that. It was a day when anti-semitism was still strong, despite the monstrous discoveries of the Satanic evil of Hitler’s death camps, which were emptied in 1945 by the United States and Allied liberation.

It was a tough neighborhood, with Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish immigrants and others. We had a Jehovah’s Witness family on the street, which at that time mystified me—I knew little about the different religions then. In North Philadelphia parents, instead of teaching their children to respect others of different faiths and backgrounds, pushed them to pick fights and beat up anyone who was different. Of course, since then I have met many wonderful wholesome people from all of these groups, so I do not for one instant have ill thoughts towards any group. I am only, however, relating what went on in Oakdale, Tucker, Bouvier, and Sydnham streets in Philadelphia in those days.

One day, I was knocked to the ground when they were demolishing Baker Field, only two blocks east of our house, where the kids would play on the rubble after the workers went home. I recall being cursed as a Jew again, knocked down, and surrounded by a circle of neighborhood kids who were dumping garbage from nearby abandoned cans on me. I remember praying that night that God would bring those evil children to harm—I did not at that time, of course, know of the grace of God’s forgiveness. There was one particularly mean boy down our street, one year my junior, Joey B 30838.png , who never could walk by me without giving me a shove—for whom I recall particularly praying—praying for his destruction. Today, I know not where he ever went, but I rather pray for his salvation.

This boy, Joey B 30840.png , who was a year or so younger than me, particularly tormented me. Whenever he saw me, he would come up to me and begin calling me names, always with a Jew added and sprinkled with curses against all Jews. He would always (yes, always) immediately pick a fight by pushing or knocking me down, and a group of kids would at once encircle us, yelling, Fight, fight! At first I was a poor fighter and would always end up knocked to the ground and with a bleeding nose. Then, as time went on, I both improved and became more resigned to the world of fighting that I lived in. One could not win because as soon as you (meaning I) knocked your attacker down or made his nose bleed, another would step in to replace him and on it would go until you (again meaning I) were on the ground bleeding. I don’t ever recall crying at the end of a fight; I just wondered why everyone hated us so.

I recall one afternoon when the police arrested Joey for trespassing onto the nearby railroad yard. His mother came out and pleaded with the two policemen in the Red Car (Philadelphia police in those days drove bright red sedans), and sixty years later I can still recall the scene perfectly in my mind. She said, He is a good boy! Mind you, here to my young mind was Satan himself, who bullied, cursed, destroyed property, was always tossing a glass milk bottle at someone’s house, who was totally anti-social, always angry, always beating up someone, and had no mercy on anyone. They let him go.

Finally one day when Joey walked by me, knowing that in a moment he would jump me or do some other evil trick, I hauled off without warning and punched him in the jaw as hard as I could. It was a punch out of desperation more than courage. I recall him bouncing off the wall and going down. He got up and we fought as usual, but this time, for the first time in perhaps fifty fights with him, because of the pre-emptive strike, I won the fight. We had a few more fights after that, and then it stopped. It was a deliverance. I recall in the same year, hitting Eddy MacNemy, also a younger tormenter but nothing like Joey, on the head with a heavy metal toy gun and leaving him in the gutter of Oakdale Street. That incident likewise ended his tormenting me.

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CAMP SHALOM 1945 Gary, bottom right

At first some people urged me to tell their mothers. I tried it a couple of times and was abruptly told by both mothers that they teach their children to take care of themselves and that was the end of it. Amusingly as I look back, from age 7 to 12, I was sent to Camp Shalom for eight weeks each summer. This was a camp for Jewish children; I was really too young to be in camp for the entire summer, but staying home only meant endless fights so no doubt I was better off. Unfortunately my dear mother would remark, while working in our grocery store, to some of the neighborhood boys (or hoodlums, to be more accurate), that, Gary was learning to fight at camp. In that neighborhood that was like letting the hyenas smell meat. Also, unfortunately, the fighting at Camp Shalom among its refined Jewish clientele, was strictly supervised, three three-minute rounds, wearing heavy boxing gloves, with someone your own weight, and with a counselor as the referee. Fighting these nice boys was inadequate preparation for the brutal fights with street hardened kids that went on in the neighborhood. My wonderful mother, Mary, meant well, but I was always welcomed back in that last week of August by tough boys waiting in line to fight me.

Two incidents should be enumerated here.

First, I was a reader and a student, and throughout my life I would read How-to books on every subject and would noticeably improve. Thus as a teen, I purchased a thin book on How to Fight Using Ju Jitsu, which in those days was before Karate or Kung Fu or Tae Kwon Do became more dominant. I also began to lift weights at home, then in my latter teens regularly went to Fritze’s Gym in Germantown Philadelphia. I mastered to some extent two techniques of throwing someone over your shoulder and some other tricks. (These actually work best with someone near your own weight.) Then, as providence would have it, a strange tough kid at the Avenue Movie at Germantown and Leigh Avenues, accosted me outside the boys bathroom during an intermission between pictures. (By the way, it cost ten cents in those days to go to the Saturday matinee.) He started to pick a fight, and I promptly grasped his right hand with my two hands (as the book had instructed), rotated right, bent over and yanked him, and he flew in the air over my shoulder and hit the ground! He got up and said, Wow, that was neat! Where did you learn that? and before I could answer, he walked away never to be seen again.

Secondly, I learned about a cross hand to the throat and a very big guy began to push me around, in this case playfully, but never-the-less physically manhandling me. I gave him this chop that the book advocated, and to my shock he fell to his knees choking. I was horrified to have hurt him, despite that he was much taller and heavier, and apologized profusely. He never pushed me again. To this day, however, I have a regret when I think of the incident; he really seemed hurt badly for a while, which I never intended.

I got a job at Christmas time sorting mail on the night shift at the North Philadelphia post office, only one block east of our house. I must have been about 17 or 18. To my shock, as I sat sorting mail, all of a sudden, a big fellow about my age looked at me, and yelled out loud for all to hear, Hey Jew, and began a line of public abuse. It was a disappointment to me, and still is as I look back over the years, that not one of the many full-time adult workers in the post office who heard him abusing me said even a word. Shame on them. Well, I had been through this many times, so I got up walked over to him and confronted him. I wanted to fight right there and then, figuring that one of the adults would break it up and that would end the incident. No, he said, we would fight in three hours, when we returned at one o’clock A.M. after our lunch break. He was bigger than I, but I had no choice but to wait.

I recall walking home in the dark, no one encouraging me, all alone. I ate a sandwich, laid down on the couch and knew that in about forty-five minutes I would have to get up and fight him when I got back at the post office. I prayed, Lord be with me, and laid down to nap. In one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, I awoke and discovered that it was about seven hours later! It was morning and I had slept through not only the fight appointment but also the rest of my night shift. I still feel somewhat embarrassed over not showing up. What must they have said?

About a month later I saw this same young man on the platform of the subway at North Philadelphia Station, at Broad St. and Lehigh Ave. I walked up to him and confronted him, and to my shock, he denied that he had said anything to me. I walked away and thanked the Lord.

I should mention that when we moved to Clearwater, Florida in 1979 where I was to teach and be an administrator at Clearwater Christian College, our son, Steven, then eleven years old, was picked on and beat up by, of all things, a local Jewish boy in the neighborhood. He was pulled off his bicycle and knocked around by a couple of these boys. I later went to the parents of the boy and his mother dismissed it with, Oh, that’s what they do to all the new boys who move onto our street. I tried to tell these parents, who were Jewish, that we as Jews who have been victims of this sort of treatment for centuries should never be the perpetrators of such. They didn’t get the message. After what I went through in my childhood, it infuriated me and I recall threatening the father that it had better not happen again. Soon after we enrolled our young son at a boxing gym and in a couple of months he was transformed as a fighter; all picking on him stopped. In fact, a few years later, when he was in his junior year at Cooper City High School, a loud tough boy with the reputation of school bully, picked on him publicly in front of the entire class and abused him verbally out loud. The teacher disappointingly let it go, but at the end of class, in the hall, the other boy began it again, pushing him and verbally ridiculing him in front of all the boys and girls in the hall. Steven punched him once and knocked the boy out! They were both suspended for fighting, but the vice principal told us that Steven was the nicest boy that he ever had to suspend, and he shortened it to only a couple of days. Interestingly enough, Steven, about two years later told me that some fellow had just come up to him in a restaurant and asked him, Say, aren’t you the guy who knocked out so-and-so, the school bully, at Cooper City High School two years ago? . . . We were all rooting for you!

All was not fighting, and I do recall that in sixth grade a very nice Greek girl, Joan Charmers, to my memory, seemed to like me. I was, however, not yet fully awaken to girls. I recall that at Christmas time that year we had a class pollyanna, where everyone reached in a bowl and pulled out the name of another student for which he or she was to buy a gift. The gifts were to cost twenty-five cents to a dollar, maximum. Some of the students, I noted, traded names to get someone they wanted. I, with my mother’s help, probably spent a little over a dollar for the present I was to give. When the last day of school arrived, the day before the start of Christmas vacation, all the presents were placed in a pile on a table in the front of the classroom. It was soon noted by everyone, about thirty students, that among all of the small wrapped gifts, there was one gift that out-sized all of the rest; it was about two and a half feet long and about ten inches by ten inches. The boys in our class, I recall, all eleven or twelve years old, were saying, Oh, I hope I get that big gift!—I said to myself, Oh, I only hope that it is not coming to me; it will only mean more trouble!

The gifts were taken off the table, one at a time, and the recipients were called to the front of the room where he or she opened it up, recited the name of the giver that was written on the tag, said, Thank you, and then took their seats. I was in dread as name after name was called in this procedure, and the large gift was held for last, and my name was still not called. You guessed it; I was the only person left and my name was called for the big gift. It was from Joan Charmers, the girl who liked me, and I unwrapped it amidst jealous owws and ahhs from the class. It was a large four motor wooden airplane on wheels, painted blue-gray and red, with propellers that you could turn with your fingers, and with wings that folded in an out. It obviously cost more than the one dollar limit. It was a horrible walk home, as I carried that large gift in its box, and it produced a reaction akin to the young Joseph in Genesis chapter 37 being given the coat of many colors, with boys from the class all around me telling me how lucky I was. When I finally got home I did love the plane, but, even today—not wishing to be ungrateful—I rather wish that I had been given a twenty-five cent dull clam shell or something, rather than a huge gift that would again cause me to stand out amid a rough gang of young boys. As I look back today, I philosophically think that it was very nice of Joan and her mother to have gotten me that airplane; it was nice that someone liked me in the class. Let me not be ungrateful and say more.

Let me recount one more incident from childhood. It was really just one of hundreds as daily some kids would goad others into making fun of and attacking the Jewish boy in the class. By the way, I did not swagger or verbally abuse anyone ever. This was simply part of the anti-semitism of the day. This one hurt me deeply, as the one who was goaded by the others on that day to challenge me had been someone I thought was my friend. One day after school, a Filipino girl in my sixth grade class [and you will below understand why I include that she was a Filipino—it will end well] named Constance Manjaras, publicly called me out to fight her. She was a very attractive young girl, and I had never seen her before in any type of altercation. The crowd had somehow put her up to it. There must have been fifty or sixty sixth graders encircling us, as the cry went out that, A girl is going to fight the Jew. (There came, sadly, no teachers to rebuke anyone although fights in the school yard were a daily occurrence after school, and in those days schools did not have guards.) I said that I would not fight a girl and in front of the whole crowd she slapped me hard in the face. I can still feel in my mind the sting of that hard slap all these years later. Now you have to fight me, she said. I shook my head; it stung, both the slap and the humiliation of it all. Again I declined, and the crowd dispersed, of course, making all kinds of demeaning remarks in my direction. I, however, felt within that I had done the right thing, and silently prayed to God to deliver me, and walked home.

HONG KONG, 2007

I had been asked to speak at the Keswick Bible Convention in Hong Kong in March-April 2007, along with Rev. David Jackman, from the United Kingdom. Actually, something came up with one of the speakers first asked, and a local Miami friend suggested me. It was a great honor and needless to say, a blessing for me to speak on the same platform as Rev. Jackman, a London master of the sacred Word and of the Queen’s English. At the end of the week I was also asked to speak to a youth rally and on Saturday morning to the Filipino Christian Women’s Monthly Meeting. This latter group were Christian women from the Philippines, mainly domestic workers, who were living either permanently or temporarily in Hong Kong, often to earn money to send back to their loved ones in the Philippines. I was told that there would be at least a thousand Filipino women at the rally—there were at least that many, as the entire huge auditorium was packed.

I spoke from Proverbs 31:10-31, the passage that begins, Who can find a virtuous woman, for her price is far above rubies? I chose it because it honors women who labor, and I was speaking to a thousand of these. It was a joy to explain to them that this sacred poem of twenty-two verses was an alphabetical poem, with its verses going from Aleph to Tav (the Hebrew A to Z) in order, extolling the working woman who honors the Lord in her labors. I begin with the words, Ladies, you know, that when I grew up in the United States, in the city of Philadelphia, as a child I had a prejudice concerning Filipino women. [At this everyone in the auditorium hushed into absolute silence.] I was told as a young boy that Filipino women were the most beautiful women in the world; and I believed it then, and I still believe it today! The thousand women cheered, screamed, and arose as a body applauding. About forty minutes later, I concluded, explaining and reminding all that Jesus had worked as a carpenter, a humble job, and although he was Lord of all, did a great work for us all, dying for our sins. I noted that the Bible, God’s Word, expressed appreciation for faithful laborers. I prayed, and again the room exploded with a thousand Filipino women rising and applauding (which is unusual at the end of a biblical exposition). They crowded around me, with my wife trailing behind, as we plodded down the center isle to leave. I thought of that day when Constance slapped me and the crowd encircled me. How different this day was. It was God’s blessing as I had wanted very much to encourage these hard-working wonderful Filipino women. I was very moved and I thought of the verse, The angel of the Lord encamps round about them that fear Him, and delivers them (Psalm 34:7).

SEOUL, KOREA, 2007

It was our annual trip to the dual graduation of the Ang Joong Central Presbyterian University’s graduation, led by Dr. Ki Hwan Baik, the able moderator and dynamic leader of that denomination, combined as it has been for the last twenty years or more, with the Cohen University graduation. The latter was founded by Dr. Paul S. Kang, one of the outstanding leaders of the Korean church, and surprisingly named for me. It is God’s work and thanks to the devotion of so many self-sacrificing Korean leaders and missionaries, it now has over fifty affiliated schools scattered around the world, most of them started from scratch by sending missionaries from Korea. These include schools in Osaka, Japan; Lima, Peru; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Paraguay; Moscow; Mongolia and the fringes of China; India; Africa; and many others, with the headquarters located in Torrance, California. Many of these I have visited personally.

My wife, Marion, and I were taken to a wonderful lunch celebrating the publication of a new book by Dr. Paul Kang, on Jewish Child Training Based on the Old Testament. From there we were driven in a Presidential-style limousine to a Korean church by its pastor who said that his people, and he himself, had never met a Jewish person. The children of the church had learned two Hebrew songs for the occasion of meeting me. When I and my wife entered, we were profusely welcomed and seated at the front of the church in two chairs facing the congregation. After the children were led in the two Hebrew songs, which they did so well one would have thought we were in Israel rather than in Korea, I responded with our deep thanks to them and to our Lord who, by His work on the cross, had brought us all together into one loving company. I was reminded of our Lord’s words, And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd (John 10:16).

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WE RECEIVE FLOWERS IN KOREA

Then, each family came up to my wife and me, with one of their children handing us a bouquet of flowers, and then each family as they came up would get behind and beside our two chairs for a