Full Transcript
i'm joe reingold and i'm interviewing liz leaner and today is june 14 16 2020. and liz tell us a little bit about your family what you know of your parents your grandparents where they used to live where they were from and if if applicable how they got to dallas and why they settled here okay um my father uh is native born dallasite i'm actually third generation on my father's side of native dalasite and as far as i know his grandfather was a russian bolshevik and he came the united states i don't know what year but certainly before world war ii and he started out as a peddler on the streets of highland park he had a little push cart um
and was selling produce and a little bell that he would ring going up and down the streets my father still has that that bill my push cart and um on my mother's side her father came from warsaw in the 1920s and so um i think she grew up in kansas city and moved to dallas fort worth when she was a child and let's see so besides polish on my mother's side i think my my maternal grandmother's mother was born in england i don't know her story about getting here and um on my father's side there's a it's lithuanian and russian as far as i know
so i'm 100 ashkenaz okay yeah back up for just a minute and tell us if you know why did they pick dallas both sides i mean how did they end up here of all places do you know oh i don't know on my dad's side why i know on my mother's side she grew up in kansas city and she kept getting pneumonia and the doctor up there in kansas city said you need to move to a warmer climate and my grandmother's sister lived in fort worth so they initially moved to fort worth eventually i'm not sure what drew them to dallas but they made it
over to dallas and my mother went to hillcrest she was i think i'm one of the very first she moved from thomas jefferson over to hillcrest so she was one of the first classes when the school opened up wow very good yeah okay so as a child what did you like to do where did you live what was your neighborhood like i lived in preston hollow my parents are still in the same house after 60 years over 60 years very near temple emanuel i went to preston hollow elementary school ed walker for eighth grade hillcrest high school for high school and um you know as
everybody did back then no cell phones uh we rode bikes a lot we went swimming at each other's houses or the jcc uh just hung out very uh innocent time i guess sort of um what was the other question what did i do what was it well just what did you like to do for amusements and also what kind of things were you involved in as a well in high school i joined dbyo so i was very involved i was in jenny shepp's bbg i was a nom for like levi eshkol neither of those chapters are in existence today but yeah i i don't ah
let's see i grew up in north park that's still my sweet spot love to go to north park what affiliations did your family have were you part of the synagogue were they were they members of any particular organization when you were growing up i grew up a sheriff israel although half my family on my dad's side went to temple emanuel so i hung out a lot at temple manual but sheriff was my primary i went to religious school all the way i was in preschool there and i went all the way through high school um i know my parents were my dad worked really hard
in the grocery business so they were not particularly active in the jewish community so that that kind of my grandfather on my dad's side his father was a city councilman he was very civic minded he was on the city council when they broke ground at dfw airport there's a picture of that in my parents home and he was on the grand jury a couple of times um he was involved with a lot of civic organizations that was my next question that's good yeah what were your memories of sunday school in hebrew school i liked it yeah really i enjoyed it i went to hebrew school
monday wednesday afternoons and on saturday there were these these twin girls who used to beat me up a lot i won't mention their name that set fire to one of the classrooms at sheriff israel at my bar mitzvah party you know we lost touch anyway um yeah i enjoyed it mark shore with one of my teachers and see yes they were they were my teachers in high school to the two main teachers but um yeah i learned how to read hebrew didn't learn how to speak it really learned all the prayers typical had a bot mitzvah which consisted of uh being there on friday night
um giving a speech about the hof torah so yeah it's not what it is today but i had about mitzvah and i was married at sheriff israel and um but you know we moved on and when i got married we kind of moved in a different direction so i was going to ask you what you did right after high school what was your life like after that i went to college i went to university of texas at austin majored in computer science i was in delta phi epsilon sorority when i was at school um loved ut loved austin wanted to stay there like most kids
do when they graduate but i came back to dallas and i started working for a swedish company called ericsson and i worked in telecom for about 17 years and doing first computer programming and then more systems design and things like that but it was great i used to travel to sweden a lot oh wow wonderful that was mine that's good yeah so when and where did you meet your husband and how has your family grown since then so i met robert at my cousin's wedding so robert is three years older than me and he and i knew so many of the same people but we
did not know each other i knew my sister and my cousin sherry to buy schedlovsky at her wedding i met robert it's the last time i had a suntan and i guess he liked it so yeah he asked me he asked me out and um we were engaged after nine months so i was dating a couple other guys at the same time so he had to kind of wait his turn great it was worth it right for him of course he married us no kidding and how has your family grown your immediate family uh grown in what sense with children and where they are yeah
okay yeah so we have three children um our oldest is aaron and he is 29 years old and he went to university of texas at austin also he lives in dallas and he works with robert in the business which is a a optical which is a family business that robert's father and mother started aaron works has worked there for a number of years and benjamin is our middle one he's 26 he lives in chicago he went to indiana university and worked for merrill lynch in chicago he's been here for about six weeks because of the coronavirus but he is going back in about 10 days
and sarah our youngest is 18 and she just graduated from yavina she hopes that she'll be doing a gap year in israel next year depending on how the virus goes and she plans to attend the university of michigan to study kinesiology wonderful yeah back to your work can you think of a memorable project that you worked on that you're very proud of it doesn't have to be with erickson but in general something that you were really really proud of that you accomplished um i've been involved with a number of boards over the years um but i think the one thing that was not really board
related was i actually wrote a memoir about marcus rosenberg that's this one right here oh beautiful and i marcus was not living at the time that i was commissioned to write the book but i did interview 100 people family and work associates and friends and wrote this book and it kind of the publishing of the book coincided with the 50th anniversary of akiba academy he was the founder of akiva um and i really enjoyed that process and maybe this is something that will outlive me you know so i enjoy that very much that's true more about the hmm i said that's truly something to be
proud of i mean i know i know more about his family than mine sadly okay yeah what are you and your husband or separately involved in the jewish community at this time presently and also if you're involved in any civic activities either both of you or one of you so robert mainly his board experience has been with our synagogue charity tequila he was a board president and he's still involved in on several committees with the synagogue and that's primarily you know he works full-time so right that was that was his big thing um i have been involved i started working on the board at akiba
and i was a board chair in the late 2000 like 2007 to 2009 and not long after that i got on the jcc board and i got on the dallas jewish historical society board and i'm um also on the legacy senior communities board so i'm currently active on three boards okay so um with any of that activity is there somebody that you can think of in particular that you would consider a mentor to you um i try and learn from i mean i let me sound hokey but i try and learn from everybody because you know everybody has different approaches and we can always improve
ourselves um i really admire the the leadership of all three of the agencies that i'm involved with deb polsky at the historical society and melissa orth over at the legacy and artie allen at the j they're wonderful to work with and i always i always learn from them every time i we get together i learn something from them wonderful okay since you're a native of dallas tell us a little bit about uh comparing what dallas was like during your childhood versus how it is now that you from your eye through your eyes in my eyes i mean it's it seems smaller i mean it was
geographically smaller i my grandfather had a a boat a motorboat out at lake lewisville we used to call it lake and we would drive out there on the weekends my father would take preston road all the way up didn't want to go on the highway and when we got to beltline and preston that's where civilization ended and the rest of it was farmland pastures and so yeah dallas has really grown into a very um metropolitan cosmopolitan city it's very big i look at my daughter she just finished four years of bbyo and these kids are kids are out in frisco they're out in plano and
then it's just it's big very big um i feel like we were maybe a little more closely knit also i went to hillcrest which had a very large jewish population at that time so i i always had non-jewish friends but um lots of jewish friends too both in high school and then bbg specifically how would you say the dallas jewish community has changed besides size size we know about but anything else related because it's become much more diverse we certainly have an orthodox community here that we did not have growing up we couldn't keep a single kosher restaurant in business when i was growing up
and uh now it you know a lot of uh treasure caters kosher establishments um and like i said uh a number of orthodox communities between oraha torah oh have shalom all the chabad houses and then my synagogue character so that aspect um i'm trying to think we don't have that many more conservative and reform congregations but we have definitely a lot more fourth of july what led you what led you and robert to be the most comfortable at uh sharo tefillah i think when we put our kids into the kiva we started becoming friendly with families there it was a it was a long process
we lived 18 years out um frankfort and preston and i got so tired of driving back and forth you know three times a day so we moved um south of lbj we live in the what they call the south a-roof well we were at fair at israel for a long time and then they lost their rabbi and we also ended up moving into the neighborhood very close to tequila where we had a lot of friends so we decided to to join shari tefila and robert that's kind of not didn't take very long after that that um he got on the board and began you know
serving as president so uh and also robert's sister is uh ultra orthodox and that probably had a little impact on us although we're nowhere close to the level of the observance that she is okay besides your book about marcus rosenberg is there anything else that you can point to that you are the most proud of my family i guess i i love working in the community and i represent a demographic that um you know i'm a native dallas site i grew up conservative and now on moderate orthodox so i think on some of these boards i might be like you know one of maybe one
or two people that fit that demographic so if you want diversity on the board i mean that's kind of nice so i enjoy that but i can't point to any other accomplishments okay all right um is there anything else about your family that we did not cover that you'd like to talk about hmm any nice jewish girls you want your sons yeah well my middle one has a girlfriend now she's from dallas and she's jewish they did not know each other they met in chicago at maryland that was funny but yeah we've met her over the coronavirus break she's very sweet and um she met
one of my friends uh over the break uh my daughter threw a little mini surprise party for me in the backyard a few weeks ago so my son's girlfriend was there and i introduced her to a friend of mine who i also had a mask on and my my friend is south african and she opened her mouth and my and my son's girlfriend said oh my god you were my bat mitzvah teacher and she and she was so it's really small world but if you know somebody from my oldest son that'd be great 29. right okay good i'll think of that again um if somebody was to ask you why they should or should not relocate to dallas what would you say to them oh i would say come on down no taxes no state taxes a good economy nice warm weather warm winters or temperate great jewish life every night of the week there's at least one thing to do and and and most of the time it's multiple things to do in the jewish community for sure culture here you know post coronavirus let me go back to normal so liz this is your last chance if you'd like to add anything
at all anything in general i love the dallas jewish historical society and i thank you joe for everything that you do for this agency very important i don't have anything else um okay it's just burning in my mind i think i might be a little too young for this yeah and even though i got in the early senior hours at target this morning we're trying very hard to actually reach people of all ages at this point it's not it's not just for the elderly anymore so okay i know all right well we appreciate it very much your time and your energy and all the work
that you do kohaku vote and thank you so much for interviewing with me thank you very much you
