Growing Up With Subtle Anti-Semitism

By David Behrens | Staff Writer

Jack Ain, who was raised in Glen Cove and in Sea Cliff (Newsday Photo/Bill Davis / )

During his formative years on Long Island, Jack Ain did not experience many blatant incidents of anti-Semitism. Just a few cross-burnings now and then, he says.

Growing up in Glen Cove and later in Sea Cliff in the 1920s and 1930s, Ain and his parents, immigrants from Poland, were familiar with the burdens of minority status in this country.

His father, Julius, came from Poland in 1911, living for a time on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he learned the plumbing trade. In 1913, he moved to Glen Cove to work on the new St. Patrick's Catholic Church. His son Jack was born two years later.

``That year, when the church work was done, the man who hired him wouldn't give him any other job because he was Jewish,'' said Jack Ain, now 83 and one of the leaders of Temple Tifereth Israel in Glen Cove. ``No one would hire my father, so he worked for a time as a peddler, a tree trimmer, anything to get by.''

In 1927, when Jack was 12, his parents moved to Sea Cliff, where he was graduated from high school in 1933, one of four Jews in a class of 35. ``Anti-Semitism was subtle, but I remember the feelings. When I was 12, I joined a Boy Scout troop that met at a Methodist church. I had a lot of friends, mostly boys who were not Jews. Everyone was very friendly. Then, when I was 14, all of a sudden, they all disappeared.''

Most of the scouts signed up with a youth group connected with the church and Ain was no longer included in their activities. ``I don't think it was overtly anti-Semitic but if you were Jewish, you knew you would be accepted only up to a certain point. Then you were told you didn't belong. It was not something anyone ever apologized about.''

The Jewish population on Long Island was relatively small, even in the late 1930s. There were fewer than 18,000 Jews in Nassau County and fewer than 4,000 in Suffolk. In Queens, the number of Jews had just reached 100,000.

There were small Jewish communities in Huntington, Patchogue and Farmingdale, Ain remembers. Roslyn had only six Jewish families in the early '30s, he said, while Sea Cliff's Jewish community totaled about 30 families, many attending Sabbath services in Glen Cove. Jews were just beginning to settle in the Five Towns, while Jewish celebrities such as Eddie Cantor and the Marx Brothers had bought summer homes in Great Neck.

``In the '30s, Jews were not readily admitted to medical schools or engineering colleges,'' he said. But in the fall of 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, Ain was accepted at Clarkson College in upstate New York. ``I remember people trying to dissuade me, as a Jew, from pursuing an engineering career. They'd say: `You won't get a job as an engineer.' I was aware of this at the time.'' He ignored the advice and went on to a successful career as a mechanical and industrial engineer.

Back on Long Island, Ain remembers, Jews were not welcome in many of Long Island's popular and prestigious country clubs. ``It was an unwritten rule,'' Ain said. ``Some clubs might have a token member, but most didn't countenance Jews.''

So the Jewish communities founded their own clubs, such as the Glen Oaks Country Club and the Glen Head Club on Cedar Swamp Road, where the membership was primarily Jews from Great Neck and Roslyn.

Members of the ``restricted'' North Shore clubs offered swimming privileges at beaches on Long Island Sound, but Jews were excluded. ``There was never any question about it -- that Jews were not welcome. It was not written out in their charter. Everyone understood that it was a gentleman's agreement,'' Ain said. Later the phrase inspired the best-selling novel of the same name by Laura Z. Hobson and Elia Kazan's pioneering film on anti-Semitism.

While the Ku Klux Klan had lost its potency on Long Island in the early '30s, Ain does remember some of the cross-burnings in North Shore communities. ``But we felt we could stand up against them,'' he said. In college, he and his Jewish friends were more concerned about events in Central Europe and Hitler's rise to power. ``We all wondered what would happen. But we never guessed the direction it was going to take.''