The Paths We Cross: A Story of Perseverance, Friendship, and Accomplishment

By Noam Eimer and Bruce Satalof

For some people, retirement means plenty of time to relax and pursue leisurely activities. For others, using some of this time to make meaningful contributions to their community can yield extraordinary results and friendships. Before their paths crossed in retirement, Noam Eimer and Bruce Satalof spent a combined 113 years applying practical, social, and educational skills to careers, family, and friends in their diverse lives. In 2007, they embarked on a collaborative journey in a volunteer program in the Philadelphia area that would be both endearing and enduring beyond all expectations.

Noam and Bruce came from different places and times: one from Israel in the early 1940's; the other from Philadelphia in the mid 1950's. Noam was an Israeli soldier in his teens; Bruce played street hockey until he was almost twenty and softball into his thirties. Along the way, they would experience many historical events (protests, wars, assassinations) through very disparate lenses, but the core values they did share - strong family bonds, keen work ethic, desire to help those less fortunate - would serve them greatly as a team. The Paths We Cross takes readers on a journey from the authors' modest beginnings to great accomplishment and may provide inspiration for those struggling with plans for "life after retirement."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098317546

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Copyright © 2020 by Noam Eimer and Bruce Satalof.

All Rights Reserved.

Some names have been changed to protect the identity of those people in the story.

ISBN: 978-1-09831-753-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-09831-754-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020909831

Back Cover Photographer: Joel Perlish Photography

Printed by BookBaby in the United States of America

Publisher Information:

BookBaby

7905 North Crescent Boulevard

Pennsauken, NJ 08110

Visit Online:

www.thepathswecross.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

First Steps

CHAPTER 2

Changing Times

CHAPTER 3

Making It Work

CHAPTER 4

So This Is Retirement?!

CHAPTER 5

The Company We Keep

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge all of our many colleagues of AARP Tax-Aide and thank them and the hundreds of other loyal volunteers in the program for being a part of the success story of our AARP Tax-Aide years.

Bill and Katie P.—colleagues, foxhole friends

Dave P.—colleague, friend

Dave W.—colleague, mentor, friend

Elliott Ben M.—colleague, mentor, friend

Jay V.—colleague, friend

Judy S.— colleague, friend

Karl K.—technology guru, colleague, friend

MaryAnn S.—colleague, friend

Michele H.– colleague, friend

Pam K.—State Coordinator, advocate, friend

Ray E.—DC, mentor, friend

Vicki B.—colleague, mentor, friend

And many more …

Thanks to Jim Argionis, Johanna Ehrmann, Marc Eimer, Ralph Guttman, Alan Kaufman, Steven Rudner, and Ann Saul for their help with this project.

In addition, we want to acknowledge and thank our families for their support.

PROLOGUE

Bruce

Noam and I joined the AARP Tax-Aide program in January 2007 as tax counselors preparing free tax returns for low- to middle-income clients, with an emphasis on helping senior citizens. We unexpectedly found ourselves in leading roles that would enable us to shape the tax preparation practice in our district. I assumed the role of district coordinator (DC), and Noam became the district’s technology coordinator (TC). After a decade of planning, incremental improvements, and effective execution of the plan to maximize the number of clients served by the tax sites in our district, Noam and I had achieved our goal.

We often talked about this achievement with an eye toward sharing this experience with other volunteers in the Tax-Aide program beyond the boundaries of our district. However, in 2017, our plans changed when AARP Tax-Aide’s national management (National) objected to some features in a site management software program Noam had spent several years developing and refining, for free. The objections concerned the potential risk to protection of confidential taxpayer information when using Noam’s program. Despite efforts to meet with National in hopes of continuing to use the software program in some fashion, we were told that its use must be discontinued immediately and completely, and we honored that order.

After completing the 2017 tax filing season in April 2018, Noam and I resolved to retire from the program the following year. During the transition of the district’s management to a new leadership team, in which we recruited from among volunteers in the district, we resolved to share our experiences, including those that took place in the decades prior to our unplanned convergence in 2007 (we call it kismet), which culminated in our mutual success as volunteers in the AARP Tax-Aide program. Who would have thought that the paths we took would cross?

Noam and I came from vastly different environments, family lives, and upbringings. Yet we found common ground, a sense of purpose, and the chemistry that was essential to work effectively and achieve our common goal. Our collaboration in the Tax-Aide program went beyond the tax preparation service; it evolved into a true and lasting friendship based on mutual respect and trust.

CHAPTER 1

First Steps

Noam

I was born on March 5, 1943, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the victory over imminent destruction of the Jews of ancient Persia by the biblical Queen Esther over 2,500 years ago.

To appreciate the significance of my birth to my parents and the people around me, one needs to understand that I was born in a time of great peril as well as great hope. My parents were born and raised as Jews in the Galicia region of Poland. My father, Ezra Eimer, grew up in an Orthodox religious home. He studied in a yeshiva (religious school) until he was about sixteen years old. My mother, Chaya Felzen, grew up in a more secular family. Her father died while serving in World War I and her mother who owned a fabric store supported the family.

What brought them together was the belief that the time had come for Jews to join together and determine their own fate without being subjected to the whims of other people. As a minority in Poland, Jews had constantly been harassed, blamed for other people’s failures, and accused of exploiting their non-Jewish neighbors.

The European Spring of Nations revolution, which started in 1848, was aimed at creating democratic nations, based on shared values, ethnicity, and a common language, that would replace the hated European monarchies. The secular Jewish elites in Europe had seized on the opportunity that came their way to promote the idea of Jewish nationhood. Until that time, religious Jews had prayed for millennia and have continued to pray for the arrival of the Messiah who would gather them from all corners of the earth, deliver them to the land of Zion, and restore the old glory to the Jewish nation.

Jewish writers and poets started to promote the idea of a Jewish entity in their books and poems within the Jewish community. Eventually, the concept of nationhood took hold and the Zionist movement was born. This revolutionary movement advocated land ownership by Jews, who were prohibited from owning land in the countries in which they lived. It advocated the revival of the Hebrew language from a religious, holy language to a modern, spoken, living language. And most importantly, those writers and poets—and others—came to create a Jewish nation in its ancient land of Zion. They envisioned an agrarian society where people would live off the land and renew its beauty.

My parents acted on this belief and met when they joined the Zionist movement in Poland, which advocated the return of all Jews to the land of Israel. My mother spent two years in a Zionist camp learning how to till the land and grow wheat, vegetables, and other produce as a prelude to her journey to the Middle East.

She was a city woman who decided to leave everything behind and go to an unknown place with nothing but a suitcase and the clothes on her back. In 1938, after completing two years of training, she and others in her group embarked on a trip across the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea to British Palestine (today’s state of Israel). My father stayed behind awaiting his turn to go to Palestine.

As the cloud of war was hovering over Europe and especially Poland, Ezra’s father advised him to leave at once due to anticipated travel restrictions. He gave him spending money and money for a boat ticket, but all of it went for a ticket on a ship that used to transport livestock and was now outfitted to carry Jewish immigrants to Palestine. It was one of the last ships that would leave before the port shut down.

My father’s journey took weeks. He had no entry visa to Palestine, and the British navy blockaded the coastal areas to prevent illegal immigrants from reaching the shore. Any ship that approached the coast was seized and its passengers incarcerated in military camps in Palestine and Cyprus. My father, along with other illegals, was advised by the group leader to jump into the sea at night and swim toward the bonfires on the beaches. When they reached the beach, they were met by total strangers who were partying there. These people grabbed them and whisked them to their homes in nearby towns. My father ended up in Tel Aviv. After a few days he joined my mother further up the coast.

Here were two people who had nothing to their names, living in separate tents near the coastal town of Hadera, but happy to have made it to Palestine and be together again. This pioneering spirit saved them from the Holocaust, but created new challenges. Hadera was established in 1889 by Russian Jews before the Zionist movement was established. Those early pioneers contended with the brutal Ottoman laws and with marshland that bred mosquitos. Although the early pioneers drained the swamps—at a high human cost—the town was prone to mosquito infestations. While living in harsh conditions, my mother contracted malaria. The remedy at the time included placing leeches on the person’s back to suck up the bad blood. Eventually, she recovered after being treated with quinine.

Despite the hardships, my parents decided to get married and start a family. They were married in 1941 and had me, their firstborn, in 1943. My birth certificate, a British document, identified me as a Palestinian Jew. I would be part of the community whose goal was to establish a state that would enable its people to control their own destiny. The new generation would have an identity, be free of prejudice and learn to defend itself.

My name, Noam, is a Hebrew noun that means pleasantness. It was recommended by a neighbor named Leah who was raising a fourteen-year-old daughter of her own. She became very close to me and helped raise me in the early years. I always thought of Leah as part of the family and kept in touch with her for many years. The name Noam was also symbolic of a trend among the new pioneers. They wanted to start new lives in an independent state, to create a new and unique culture and to shed all the baggage of exile. Many of them changed their names. For example, Rabinowitz became Rabin and Kazimirski was changed to Zamir. Many of them abandoned their Jewish traditions and adopted democratic socialism as the model for building the new state. They spoke three or four languages but insisted on speaking only Hebrew to their children.

In October 1942, five months before I was born, the decisive battle of El Alamein, in Egypt, took place. Had the Germans won the battle, the fate of the Jews of Palestine would most likely have been similar to the fate of the Jews of Europe.

As a baby and a toddler, I lived with my parents in one room in a communal home with shared common elements such as a kitchen and bathroom. Each family took turns using the facilities. Despite the humble living conditions, my parents were thankful for what they had achieved so far and were prepared for the long road to build a life together. I was blessed with a good appetite, but the diet was based on bread, potatoes, eggs and vegetables. When I got older, my mother told me a story about boiled eggs. One day when you were four years old, a neighbor boiled eggs and left a bowl-full in the communal kitchen to cool off. You went into the kitchen for something to eat, saw the bowl of eggs, and before anyone knew it, you peeled the eggs one by one and ate them all. Pictures from that period show a chubby kid with a big stomach. For the next decade I was known as Fat Noam. While living in the communal home, I met the neighbor’s son, Dan, and we became good friends.

In 1947, my parents were able to save enough money for a down payment on a two-bedroom house in Hadera. For the first time, I had my own bedroom. At that time the neighborhood was made up of rows of two- and four-family homes standing barren, with dirt roads, and no trees or sewers. Fortunately, the houses were connected to the electric grid and the water system. The houses and the road were separated by a ditch to help channel rainwater to an open field to prevent flooding. My mother wasted no time and planted annuals and perennial flowers in the front yard to beautify the surroundings. Little did she know that her quick action would create a problem with a neighbor. Apparently, the surveyors had not left the drawings of the property with the owners; instead, the property boundaries were conveyed verbally.

One day, the neighbor’s mother, who lived elsewhere in town, came over and pulled out my mother’s flowers without talking to anyone. She thought that the property belonged to her daughter. My parents did not understand why anyone would pull plants from the ground, regardless of ownership. They contacted the town’s commissioner to resolve the property dispute. In the end it was determined that the property belonged to my parents, but the damage was done. The relationship between the neighbors soured and remained strained for the next decade, until the passing of the neighbor’s mother. Only then were they able to make their peace and become good neighbors.

In May 1948 the state of Israel was proclaimed and the dream that started in Poland continued to materialize. I recalled my mom telling me, We have a state! It did not have much meaning for me then; all I could recall was the deep ditch that had been dug in the backyard. When the sirens started wailing, everyone ran there in anticipation of a bombing raid. Fortunately, I was not exposed to the fighting or bombings during Israel’s War of Independence. Only later was I exposed to pictures of older students in my school who died in the war. And it was later still that I realized the enormity of the achievement—living in a state of your own after 2,000 years of exile.

A year after the declaration of independence, I was in first grade, meeting new kids, owning my first notebook. School supplies were hard to come by and most parents’ income was not sufficient to purchase all necessities. People found ingenious ways to borrow, barter, and otherwise deny themselves the things they liked in order to make ends meet. Yet my mother found the time to volunteer in a health clinic on a regular basis.

In that same period, my mother took me on a long bus ride to visit relatives in Jerusalem. One evening I was walking with my mother and the relatives on the main street and noticed a large truck that had stopped by the sidewalk. The side