"My mother, may she rest in peace, always told me I was a bum and I’d ask why I was a bum, and she’d say, 'Because you are 33 and you are not married.' I reunited with my father in 1961. He never came to this country. He stayed in…

"My roommate was arguably the best basketball player who ever played the game. His name was Wilt Chamberlain. Even though the team was owned by a Jewish man, our traveling secretary, shall I say, was not exactly a big fan of Jews or blacks. I…

"Three or four days before I was ready to graduate from basic training, an officer and our company commander, who was a chief petty officer, came walking through the barracks, and they said, 'Everybody six foot and over stand in front of…

"When he was liberated-- Russian troops came through and liberated Romania at the end of 1944 beginning of 1945. He was freed, but of course he was sick. So they put him in a hospital for him to recover. He came back and when he walked into the…

"We went into hiding in our own apartment. The windows had been darkened; blankets and sheets had been shoved under the door so no sound would come out. That is where I spent the next sixteen months of my life, in that apartment building. My mother…

“Romania did not have an extermination camp. They did not systematically murder the Jews like they did at Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and so forth. They had a slave labor camp known as Transnistria. That’s where my father, when he was…

“Well my parents were Orthodox Jews. They were very observant. My mother lit candles every Friday night. Holidays were observed. When I was born it was against the law to have Jewish ceremonies, so my father smuggled in the mohel, the one who does…

“We landed in New York City, August the 17th, 1951. We did not come through Ellis Island. We landed on the Hudson River in New York. My mother’s brother Emory was there to pick us up along with my cousin Marty. My first recollection of the United…

“The earliest memories were good ones. Even though Romania was part of the allies of Nazi Germany, and they followed the Nuremburg laws, up until December 1942, when my father was arrested, we had a fairly decent life. Of course they had confiscated…

“We have a common obligation to make this a better world for the privilege of living on this earth, of living in this world. And we gotta work at it to do that. We gotta make things happen to make this a better world. We gotta serve the…