POWAY, California — Molly Cohen, 97, was eulogized by Rabbi Nadav Caine at Ner Tamid Synagogue here. Following is the eulogy, delivered December 29, 2014:
Molly Cohen, a matriarch of San Diego’s Jewish community, died this past December 25th at the age of 97. She was her usual alert, brilliant, and giving self to her final days.
It was providence that Molly passed from this world just after the end of Hanukkah, with all the candles burning bright. Her neshama, her holy spark of God, continued to burn beyond all expectation, and as the sage Hillel suggested, the miracle is that her lights only increased its brilliance, its holiness, and its influence.
Mollhy’s shamash was her mother. Molly’s father was a gentle, kind, and charismatic grain-procurer from Siberia who had married a 15-year old beauty in Ukraine. Like so many of our immigrant relatives, however, his success did not carry over into the New World of America where he could not master the language. Molly’s mother recognized Molly’s brilliance – Molly skipped three grades in elementary school!– and knowing that they would not be able to educate her beyond high school, she made the radical decision of enrolling Molly is a college-preparatory High School rather than a trade school for shorthand and typing. She told Molly in Yiddish that this would be her only time to learn Latin, literature, geometry, and the arts. She also made sure Molly had a Hebrew School eduction. Molly graduated High School at the age of 15 and went to work.
The first light of Molly’s menorah was thus lit: her fabulous brilliance that brought success to all her worthy endeavors, for employers and for her causes. She lit up the offices she worked in. The Treasurer of a big department store for whom she served as secretary, he was grateful that she couldn’t take dictation, because that meant she would just compose and write all his letters for him. During the war, she worked her way up to heading the Plant Protection Dept in Military Intelligence and had two women doing her typing. If you knew Molly, you may well have received one of her many handwritten or typed letters, always perfectly composed, conveying an articulate direction for you. Her many letters to editors, to rabbis, to administrators, to aquaintances: her writing affected many… perhaps even Gorbachev, whom she wrote advising him to liberalize the Soviet Union in the name of respecting human rights. We certainly knew her brilliance, and succintness, as each week she introduced the haftarah she would chant with an explanation of its message for our lives.
The second light of Molly’s menorah was her love for her husband Sidney. Sidney was a gentle soul who loved the law. His tyrannical father, however, scuttled his plans, bullying him and forcing him (and Molly) to devote their lives to working Cohen’s Jewelry store in an old Polish neighborhood of Detroit. Sidney’s oppression led to ulcers and ailments. When his father moved away, they had “a few nice years” with the store doing well, having two children, and building a beautiful home with garden. But when the city of Detroit built its first freeway, they contructed it up to their door, so the store and area was cut off from everything and became a shambles. A large wholesaler knew Molly and Sidney to be good and trustworthy and very hardworking, and they partnered in Miracle Mart, a forerunner of K-Mart and Walmart. Sidney and Molly were worked to the bone, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and ran jewelry and displays. They made the place a huge success but were cheated by their partner and didn’t receive a penny. They ended up almost bankrupt. It was a 7 year nightmare. Throughout it all, Molly lived to bring light to Sidney’s life. Working side by side with him, always keeping him laughing, bringing beauty to everything she touched, and guiding him from darkness to brighter horizons.
Molly’s third light was as a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. During the dark days of the business, her children Marc and Charlotte were born. Marc was smart, gentle, and kind, Charlotte, while magnetically opposite of her parents, brought tremendous pride through unparalleled academic accomplishments. Reading at 3, winning every possible academic award including full scholarships (as a Jew!) to the Kingswood School, then Cornell, and finally Harvard. During a dark period of estrangement from Molly and Sidney, Charlotte gave birth to another light that lit up Molly’s life: the birth of her grandson Jacob Orville. In her last years, Molly greatest joy was her visits and phone calls from Jake and Stacey, and her great-grandchilden Owen, Chase, and Lucas. She would make recordings of herself reading books to the children. As Jake says, in an age of technology, there was nothing her kids looked forweard to more than receiving an old-fashioned recording of Molly reading a book to them in the mail. (Forget a computer, Molly didn’t even own a phone answering machine.)
Molly’s fourth light was her gift of bringing Beauty to this world. The simple house she designed was featured in Detroit Daily News. It was one of the earliest tri-level designs with Molly’s intention of having various spaces with a minimum of stairs. She had an inate artistic talent. She sewed her own clothes, she designed flower arrangements, she painted, she sculpted. Her Seacrest Village apartment was one third homey cottage, one third Torah study library, and one third art gallery.
Molly fifth light was the way she lit up each city she lived in, first Detroit and especially San Diego. She was a light unto the nations. After the debacle of Miracle Mart, she and Sidney opened up their own beautiful, “classy” jewelry shop and “became the popular town jeweler.” The owner of a large shoe chain told them, “You and Molly have done more in this mostly Lutheran neighbordhood to boost the image of Jews than B’nai Brith and ADL combined!” But after three years, Sidney’s health had deteriorated. His last asthma attack almost killed him. Molly wrote me: “We sold what we could, packed up our car and drove off to seek our fortune – in mid life. We drove up and down the California coast, loved Santa Barbara, almost chose San Jose, and in the end returned to our first love, San Diego. Downtown we found an old, dilapidated, filthy vacant store – no heat, a parlor stove in the middle, low rent, and we turned it, working like dogs, into a San Francisco-style shop that earned us a spot in the Tourist Guide Book and a plaque from the Chamber of Commerce for our contribution to San Diego’s Downtown scene. This was before Horton Plaza!” The Paper Tree was a fixture in San Diego, and her clients included all the members of the City Council. Molly and Sidney were frequently credited with being a cornerstone of the downtown revival.
Molly’s sixth light was the joy she brought in retirement to her Jewish communities and especially Seacrest Village, became active at Adat Shalom when it was just a two cottage setup, helped form the North County Inland Conservative Synagogue, later Ner Tamid, “and we were hooked!” Because of Sidney’s symptoms, they moved for a while to Leisure World in Laguna Hills, where Molly had a profound influence on a 20-something fresh-faced young rabbi named Brad Artson at Congregation Eilat. She nurtured him, as she has many rabbis including me, and today he is the leading rabbi of the Conservative Movement. When Seacrest Village of Encinitas bought the property in Poway, they moved back to be near their old friends at Ner Tamid. Molly has been the matriarch of Seacrest Village in Poway since its opening.
Molly’s seventh light was the influence she brought to building and sustaining Ner Tamid Synagoge. In her own words at its groundbreaking “the world is full of dreamers, but it’s the doers who get things done.” She helped build the synagogue. She was a voice of reason and of direction, always practical and never self-centered. She served on every committee, meticulously composed and published full newsletters, greeted each newcomer with the face of the shechinah, and chanted the haftarot each week, reminding us in her words, as the Prophets did, that Judaism was a religion opposed to violence and exploitation, and calling us to help all those who experience injustice. When Molly was honored with Ner Tamid’s first “Woman of Valor” award, at the age of 95, the sanctuary was full.
Molly’s eighth light was actually the blaze of all the Hanukkah lights without measure: it was the light she brought to each of us individually. Everyone seemed to have a special relationship with Molly. Everyone has that story of, “When I was going through a hard time, I started visiting Molly….” or “When my daughter was becoming Bat Mitzvah, she started visiting Molly….” or “I just got a letter from Molly…” and “She just called me yesterday…” All those lights remain with us burning, fragments of our beloved Malka’s soul continuing to burn in this world, in our lives.
Molly wrote, “While a funeral is a forever parting, mine should not be sad, because I have lived the very long life everybody prays for, and, as of this writing, I am still about as alert as I ever was, and that is something to celebrate, not mourn.”
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Rabbi Nadav Caine is spiritual leader of Ner Tamid Synagogue. Your comments about Molly Cohen, z”l, are welcome in the box below.
What a wonderful woman, and what an inspired eulogy!
The following eulogy was delivered by Molly Cohen’s son Marc, and forwarded by him to San Diego Jewish World:
My mother followed her dreams and her ideals and touched so many people and accomplished so much. But, she never took any credit and down-played her own abilities and contributions. Her strong will and perseverance came from her Russian parents. Her mother at 15 left Skvyra Ukraine with a grain broker from Siberia, my mother’s father. Skyvra was later hit with two rounds of pogroms. Together in 1915, two years before Molly was born, to escape the chaos and disruption in the farm economy just before the Russian Revolution, and seeking a better life, her parents took a ship in third class to the United States landing In Seattle before going to Detroit. Molly was buried today with a beautiful hand-made Talis from Uzbekistan given to her by my cousin Ina Cohen for her 90th birthday. I kept the Yarmelke that goes with that Talis. This is the Yarmelke.
My mother was creative and talented. She designed a house in Detroit with early American interior, which was written up in the home section of the Detroit News, she painted, created dried flower arrangements, made her own beautiful clothes, did gardening, loved animals and especially dogs. She was a partner in retail business with my father in Detroit and here” and in 1975 their store, The Paper Tree, received a plaque from the Central City Association of San Diego in recognition of their contribution. The Mayor was a frequent customer of their store. This was at the very beginning of the revitalization of Downtown San Diego.
My mother was a very good writer. She often wrote letters expressing her views including a two page letter to Mikhail Gorbechev in 1985 urging continued reforms toward personal freedoms, and letters to newspapers, one published three months ago in the San Diego Union-Tribune about gun violence. She edited newspapers.
My mother together with my father earlier, worked tirelessly to strengthen the Jewish community. She built synagogues, and when called upon did Haftorahs perfectly until she was 97. But for her, success was defined by progress as a community toward common goals and maintaining strong relationships with other people. Just over a month ago she asked me to get her a new address book because she had to update the entries and keep them current and there was no room left in her old book. Here is the new book. She struggled a little bit toward the end with the writing but in her last days she was not thinking about herself, her physical decline and difficulties, but rather updating her address book.
Her birthday was June 19, at the summer solstice. She was in tune with the natural environment and loved the long daylight. She loved the summer solstice and looked forward to it in the days and weeks leading up to it. She died ironically at the opposite end of the calendar, at the time of the winter solstice, the shortest days, but as Rabbi Caine noted, her final days were during Hanukkah and in her final hours
the Menorah was burning bright with all the candles lit. She died just hours after the eighth candle was put out.
We were all in her address book- and today and always she will be in our hearts.
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