Elya Naxon
Elya Naxon was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1927, the daughter of Sald Hurwitz, a modern Orthodox rabbi, and Shoshana, a Cantor born in Israel whose family were among the earliest immigrants to the country in the 1880s. Hebrew, rather than Yiddish, was spoken at home, and her upbringing was both intensely Jewish and richly cultural. She studied dance, once performing with a group at Carnegie Hall, and was surrounded by a large, close extended family with twenty first cousins. Her three younger brothers went on to notable careers as a Reform rabbi and professor of classics, a historian on a kibbutz in Israel, and a hydraulic engineer who helped design the port at Ashdod.
As a teenager Elya joined a Zionist youth group and became a strong Zionist. During the summer of 1948, while in college, she worked as secretary to the editor of an Israeli newspaper and worked clandestinely for the Hagana, even smuggling gold from Mexico to New York to help pay for armaments. Planning to move to Israel, she studied subtropical botany at the University of Miami, but there she met Bill Naxon through a campus Zionist youth group. They married in 1949 and first lived in small towns in Virginia and North Carolina, where his family ran a chain of department stores, before Bill struck out on his own with a franchise in Dallas.
The Naxons came to Dallas sight unseen in 1952 and found a warm, closely knit Jewish community that Elya came to treasure. They raised four children and were active in Hadassah, B'nai B'rith, the Council of Jewish Women, and the JCC, attending the annual B'nai B'rith Institute for decades. In her forties she earned a master's degree in occupational therapy and built a career with the Visiting Nurse Association, Texas Woman's University, and the Veterans Hospital. In the mid-1980s she traveled to Gondar, Ethiopia, to train nurses in rehabilitation and quietly monitor the situation of Ethiopian Jews. A committed Reconstructionist since 1949, she remained deeply involved in Jewish life, including serving on the Dallas Jewish Historical Society board. Bill died in June 2012 after a marriage of 63 years.
Full Transcript
today is January 28 2013 and I will be I'm Nancy younger men I'll be interviewing Elian axon and our video vide video Agra fur is Ruth Andrus go thank you well I'm elegant max and I've been in Dallas since 1952 so I which is three quarters of my life I'm 85 years old this year I was born in New York in breh and the Bronx New York in 1927 and my parents were a rabbi sald Hurwitz and he was an Orthodox rabbi and Shoshana cantor who is my mother and was born in Israel her families were some of the earliest immigrants to the shovin in
the 1880s I have three younger brothers and I'm very proud of their accomplishments my oldest brother Marshall is a reformed rabbi and he's also a professor of classics that's Greek and Latin and my second brother is Arielle and he lives on a kibbutz in Israel he made alia in 1951 and fought for the Israeli army he is a he has a PhD in history from the Hebrew University and he is the editor of the oldest Holocaust journal in the world and my youngest brother Raffy studied hydraulic engineering in Holland because of course they have waterways and he helped design the port in Ashdod so we
have a lot of connections with Israel and with Jewish life my home was very Jewish and very scientists because of this background effect my parents spoke to us in Hebrew rather than Yiddish that was not a language I learned when I was a child and we also had a very cultural life we my mother gave me books to read way ahead of my years that I was very fortunate because both of my pair from very literate I was interested in the arts I studied dancing in fact I studied with a dance group that performed at Carnegie Hall so I always say I danced at Carnegie
Hall but it was just one time as a teenager I joined one of the the Zionist youth groups it was called Hashem a house a year and that defined my teen years I was a very strong Zionist so that when I was in college during the war Israeli war for independence the summer of 1948 I was secretary to the editor of habo care which was a bokor which was a is Rayleigh newspaper and I also worked for the Hagana clandestinely I actually smuggled gold from from Mexico to New York and then it was transship to Switzerland in order to pay for the armaments in fact
my boyfriend at the time and listed in the Israeli army I guess you would call that he was working for the Hagana he had flown as a pilot and during world war ii so he was able to fly from czechoslovakia and fly the arms to israel and these are very important all of my friends my close friends were involved I'm not good at the math how old were you at the time I was 19 I was in college but it was very important to my life I didn't think about the dangers involved later I thought I could have been arrested I mean international smuggling is
not exactly something to do but it was so important to us because of the way we were raised that I felt that I had to do it and I was planning to go to Israel in fact I went to college and Florida at the University of Miami in the field of subtropical botany because I was going to be a halat's and live in Israel and build the new state and it was very exciting however that same year I met Bill Nexen and he changed my mind I met him in Florida and actually his roommate was a member of his foe which was a Zionist youth
group on campus and so through the Zionist youth group I met my husband which was very important we did have a lot in common in that we both came from huge families and loved the idea of huge families bill was born into a family of eight older sisters and he was very comfortable with women in fact the third week that I was going with him occasionally he invited me out for my birthday which was wonderful and he gave me an album of Scheherazade by Stravinsky and I said up this guy gets me and he did I mean it was just wonderful he found something that
I really loved and got to know me very quickly anyway we were married in 1949 and at the time we moved his family had a chain of small department stores and five intents and stores in towns in North Carolina and Virginia and so our first home was in Wytheville Virginia with Ville being a town of 7,500 it was a culture shock for me but it was interesting and then we moved to a slightly larger town called Gastonia there were 40,000 people there and finally to Charlotte but bill was very restless he was the youngest of eight sisters as I said and has yet tell the
story about him being born Oh Bill's birth was very interesting he had eight older sisters and the family was living in a small town called Kinston North Carolina his father was away on a buying trip to Baltimore and in Baltimore he was he bought for for his little dry goods store and he came home by train because we weren't flying in those days this is in 1923 he came home by train it was in the evening and he was met but everybody in town was torches and they and they yelled Eli Eli you have a son and they put him on this shoulder and they
took him home the hotel was very excited about this and he came in and and Bill's mother said Eli you have a son and she had opened some doors no no a son oh oh a son yes she have a son and then she opened the blanket and he looked he says yes it is a son and that was Bill I always said Bill caimans of the world very much loved and he went out of this world last summer in June of 2012 very much loved surrounded by a family of his own that he had four children and seven grandchildren and a marriage of 63
years so he was a lucky man and I was lucky to have found him then after we had lived in those in Charlotte for a while bill was very restless he as I said he was the youngest in the family and his brother-in-law's who loved him dearly treated him like kid brother he never felt that he got the responsibility or the respect that he wanted so he said you know I'm gonna strike out on my own and he solved his interest in the business and found a franchise here in Dallas Texas it was Reiko seat covers and we came to Dallas sight unseen I mean
when you're young you do things like that and I loved coming to Dallas in 1952 because it was larger than 40,000 people it had probably at the time about close to a half a million maybe 400,000 and there was a wonderful Jewish community and immediately I felt very comfortable here was a close Jewish community which was surprisingly everybody seemed to be involved and within two years I thought I knew everybody of course didn't know everybody was yours community but it felt that way and we got involved with Hadassah and Binet Burris and the Council of Jewish women initially we were members of Temple sheriff Israel
because it was conservative and I could not ask my father to come to a Reform congregation although he was liberal but not that liberal and so we stayed at sheriff Israel until my father passed away and then we moved to temples which was in the 60s but it it did almost didn't matter where you were because we cross lies our friendships cross lines it didn't matter what someone was extremely Orthodox or extremely reformed if we had to come and Jewish values that's the way it was one of the interesting to me interesting things about living in Dallas was for instance we went every summer for
about 25 or 30 years to the B'nai B'rith Institute and I would say that most of the friendships and close friendships that we had were people who joined us at these Institute's it was every summer for a long weekend as we brought in outstanding speakers in the field of Judaism it could be a history it could be a rabbi it could be somebody with other kinds of interests they could be a sociologist but we learned a lot about Jewish life in our own community and also outside of the community so it was those were profound things and there were probably between fifty and a hundred
people who attended every year so we we had a large circle of friends with common interests you were there and that was also very formative in in our early years in Dallas and Dallas was that kind of community was growing and forming and becoming more of a large community and I I always thought that this is probably the jewel of Jewish communities in this country when I visited the communities I never felt that same closeness now things have changed we're so big now we have 60,000 to 65,000 but at the time there was 25,000 and it was just wonderful here in Dallas we we were
in business and eventually we opened another aspect of our business called break Oh with our very closest friends rose and Saul Saginaw and we remained friends and business partners to the end our families were we celebrated holidays and all the symphysis together we raised a family of four they all live in Dallas I have two daughters and two sons Jan Alise Adam and Seth and between them they have provided me with seven marvelous grandchildren and they all live here in Dallas so we're very fortunate we have all of our holidays together I've spoken about the B'nai B'rith Institute say I think maybe I would like
to talk about my my own personal opportunities in this community in the early 80s bill sold his business and he went into real estate and I was kind of at loose ends because I had been working with him and I decided that I had a lifelong urge to become an occupational therapist I tried to talk my daughter into it she wouldn't do it so I finally decided well maybe I should do it I was 45 and I thought no one would hire me but I'm gonna do it anyway and I didn't roll in a master's program in occupational therapy and had a wonderful career first
I worked for the the Visiting Nurse Association and I ran a program for them for several years and then I was hired on a grant by Texas Woman's University for seven years I worked at the Veterans Hospital again it was a wonderful community experience it was a wonderful professional experience but I loved working outside of the Jewish community I never had done this before and I learned about people in Texas I learned about a variety of cultures that I had never been exposed so I mean only in a simple way but now I really learned about how people responded like it was it was a
great experience and I think it broadened me and it gave me an another interesting opportunity but in nineteen in the early 1980s Israel was quietly bringing Yemenite Jews to Israel they called it operation Moses and they would bring in a airplane and in the middle of the night in the desert and they would bring the whole group of Ethiopians to Israel unfortunately in 1985 somebody blew the whistle and they no couldn't do it anymore and the Israeli embassy was kicked out of Ethiopia because of that they were in the midst of a civil war and it became a political football so to speak so we
had nobody on the ground the Israeli government had no longer knew what was going on with the Jews and so through the religious Action Commission Committee of the reform movement I was recruited to go as a therapist to Train nurses in rehabilitation in Gondar Hospital Gondar is the area in Ethiopia where most of the Jews were concentrated so being in the hospital I could keep my ear to the ground of what was going on it was really two months of a very interesting experience there was a doctor with me also from Jewish doctor neither one of us identified ourselves as Jews we when somebody asked
me what my religion was I said I'm a reconstructionist they didn't know what it was and they said they accepted it for whatever I said but any size I was in my 50s at the time I couldn't possibly be a spy except I was because I had to report both the Israeli government through people who traveled through the country and I also had to report to the charge d'affaires of the American Embassy in Addis Ababa because it was a civil war going on and the hospital that I was involved with also had soldiers who'd been killed and that killed wounded in the Civil War so
I knew when there was a big battle we'd have an influx of soldiers who had been shot or serious very serious wounds which I worked with them too as well if I could they had a limitation on their medical equipment so I made a lot of medical equipments I taught the nurses how to do rehab they had no concept of rehabilitation it was a very good personal experience and I felt that I was doing something also for my Jewish people although when I went there I had some reservations I must tell you I said these people who say they're Jewish have not been trained the
way I was they're not biblical and they're not rabbinic Judaism they don't know rabbinic Judaism since they lived biblical Judaism and they celebrated their holidays only as they celebrated them in the Bible they had no concept of the Talmud or anything that developed in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries after so it was a very good experience just meeting them and they're wonderful people they're very bright and I came away saying look if they say they're Jewish I'm with them anybody who says the Jewish I'm with them but my reservations were early I really wondered well how I would feel about working with that
group so that was a also a very great personal experience that because of my profession and because of things so involved in Jewish life I had this opportunity to serve what else can I tell you well I can say this I'd like to talk about my marriage a little bit in terms of how we lived in this bill was active in B'nai B'rith he we were active in the JCC our kids went to all the JCC events we lived we built the house five blocks away from the Jewish Community Center and there were a lot of people and this became a Jewish neighborhood because of
the Jewish Community Center and we just loved it the high school that my children went to was probably 40% Jewish at the time with high school Hills Christ High School Hillcrest High School and their friends for Jewish and some non-jewish I mean they participated in all all kinds of activities but for a small Jewish community I felt that we had a lot of opportunities both to live in a community Jewish community and a secular community which was very very satisfying in fact bill came from a very small town and he had no opportunity to live a really true Jewish life and I came from a
very large city which in its own way while there were many Jews living in New York City had so many distractions that you didn't live an intensely Jewish life my father being a rabbi we had a Khmer congregation and we had people that we related to but there are so many distractions you have your cultural life you have music you have theater you have dance you have all kinds of secular things that are going on in a large community that are not necessarily Jewish and in fact one time I was talking to a rabbi that are very close to Sheol I said I said ten
you know I enjoyed those secular things like music and dance and things like that and he said that's fine just Judaizing good instincts so I stayed in the Jewish community I still do programming I'm part of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society board I have been doing proffering for 12 years at least I think it's 12 years it may even be more and I feel a very fulfilled life I I think for anybody living in Dallas in the Jewish community in this golden period from the end of World War two until this day that we have the advantages of a very good life most of the
Jewish community has done fairly well we we made a good living and we were able to send our kids to good schools but more than that there is not a there's not a lot of separation people are not valued here based on money it's what they do on the community how they participate you can live in the Jewish community and the non-jewish community in the non-jewish community I find a lot of not only support but really I represent to them something good and so Dallas is a wonderful place I will oh I hope it continues like this if we ever get too large maybe it
won't but this is the way I feel about living here and I'm finished okay your father was an Orthodox rabbi yes my father was an Orthodox rabbi but here's a modern Orthodox rabbi he yeah he graduated from American universities and he although he was born in Europe but he came here as a young teenager and he was an intellectual as well and he wrote a lot he wrote music he wrote plays he was he was also we besides his history and he had fellow rabbis in various denominations I mean he just liked the challenge of it it was quite an intellectual my mother was also
very bright she spoke seven languages I can't believe anybody knows seven languages but she was born in Israel and of course she came from my family that moved from Kim from Russia but their language at home was French cause the educated family spoke French so she spoke French and she spoke Hebrew she studied during World War one she was with her sister in Egypt and she was still a teenager so they put her in an Italian convent to finish high school so she spoke Italian and she spoke yeah there should she spoke German and she spoke English and yeah well I guess that's seven oh
whatever we figured seven so we had a very interesting family I mean I I learned to sing French Nursery songs as well as Hebrew nursery so this job and my brother became a linguist he was the child recommend I I think I was extremely fortunate to have him very good exciting growing up my grandparents lives not too far from us and they had a private home in New York that was very unusual they had their own private home and and we had all of our Saders for as long as we could add my grandfather and grandmother's house in fact I one of the funny stories
I remember is my grandmother had these two big rooms on the main floor and with pocket doors that they had in those days she opened the pocket doors in the dining room table everybody crowded around the dining room table except the little ones when I was little she set up a table for us with an ironing board she made the iron hood low and put a tablecloth on it and four or five of us would sit on a table around the ironing board because there were too many of us I have 20 first cousins and even today and I'm 85 me of the 20 and
I'm talking about husbands or wives so I'm just starting about the 20 cousins only four have died and so we have cousins in their 80s and 90s better still living we have good youth they were a happy family and they were very close so my cousins are like my brothers and sisters that was wonderful too and and that's what I look for when I got married and Bill and I had both huge families that is our greatest pleasure that is our displeasure and well as I said so bill worked also in the community when he could although his business was open seven days a week
so he works very hard at that and he also he joined the Masons and he did things in other areas of the community and when I had vacation from work which was in the summer since I was in academics we often took trips abroad so we hit every continent except South America I never wanted to go to South America I don't know why I still don't but we we've done a lot of traveling we we've been to Israel 15 or 20 times at least I go there every 2 or 3 years to this and my brother or he comes here and he has an extended
family there so travelling has been fun the main thing that I feel is that we are so fortunate to a found Dallas and the Dallas Jewish community because I think it reflects a lot of how we feel about life some of the ethics we've been able to surround ourselves with people who think like we do and live similar to the way we do so we're very lucky that you are surrounded by people thank you just out of curiosity how did you meet the Saginaw switch warrior which was you're part of my part well act very much like you yeah I I don't remember whether it
was a sheriff is real sisterhood meeting I think it was or it could have been a Hadassah meeting I mean they get these get vague on but Rose came in that that she's a very powerful person comes into her room she absolutely control this and so all of us were very interested in this new person and we became friendly and I don't take anything for granted I invited her to come over to the house and they became friends and they were looking for a business and we helped get them into the Reiko and then together form the break oh so we we've spent many years
together as friends as business partners with all the agreements and disagreements that happened in business it didn't matter if it was like a family we just got along it was wonderful and I miss them and we even have our own sent by the way we even have our own cemetery and years ago a friend of ours Ruth Jacobson decided that she needed to buy a triangle in the Hillcrest muscle Hill Press Sparkman Hillcrest so she bought the property had sold it to those of us who were her closest friends there are 50 graves in there and all of my closest friends there have yeah Rosenthal
and they're the saginaw isn't there the bakers are there you know the my burgers are there the gubins are there these are all people that we have been friends with over the years and it's wonderful we have 50 graves of our family what could be better this is gonna be a hard question okay who of all these people would be your role models okay well on a personal level I think Rosa Rosa was my role model because she always challenged me and when you have someone who challenges you you get get a little bit better don't you so yes she was my role model but
in terms of other people that I rabbis show wise who came to some of our Bonet birth Institute's was absolutely a role model for me in terms of my religious growth he he is a reconstructionist rabbi and he still alive think of this and in fact he had a son named Seth so I had to have a son named Seth but he taught me a lot about the flexibility of Judaism as well as when I said to him I don't believe in the efficacy of prayer he said to me prayer is poetry believed in and suddenly didn't matter because when I say something in a
prayer I think of it as poetry I think of it as my yearning my soul serving rather than something wrote that I have to read if things like that opened my eyes a lot to being part of the Jewish religion and Jews yeah so he was one of mine and also I early on in our marriage we went to another Institute in though and I did actually in North Carolina was one of the first that they had and mortify Kaplan was there in Healy's he was the founder of reconstructions Reconstructionist Judaism and so I would say that I have been a reconstructionist since 1949 and
I still believe in the basic philosophical view of Judaism that reconstruction of reconstruction ISM provides he was the one who developed the idea of Hubble Ross for instance that things should be personal extended families because we move around a lot and that's just one of the things of course he's just a brilliant man and he was a very powerful influence in my life and rabbi Olin was too I loved his lectures I felt like he never spoke down to me he always challenged my thinking and that was wonderful so I think there have been people like that along the way and just another question you
come from an orthodox background what made you gravitate first to conservative and then reform okay well I remember telling my father when I was 17 just before I started college dead you know I think I'm an atheist and he and he said you know when I was 17 I was an atheist he said you find your way in life and you'll find what you need and I did I didn't have to fight him anymore at that point it was wonderful he was very smart that way because if he said what do you be doing I would have been yeah yeah it's how I made a
journey well of course when I belong to this Zionist youth group we were all secular culturally Jewish not particularly religiously Jewish although we sang lots of songs that had its origins in the in the Bible you know take phrases from the Bible and make songs out of it so really we weren't very far from religion but we were far from organized religion and that was part of the transition and of course in my undergraduate work I was in in the science and so a lot of the things that many Orthodox take for granted I questioned it was just a question of my own maturing into
the way I think today which is living in a religious community is important in terms of setting your values God is not somebody something or somebody that I visualize sitting on high rather I read something one time and I think it's beautiful it's like a synergy your hand is a synergy your hand is composed of individual fingers that each one of them can do one thing but together they can do so much more and God to me is a synergy the universe and God is a combination of all that happens scientifically and all that happens spiritually and it's more than but you can't describe it
that's my synergy God is my synergy but you know that everybody has their own personal way of looking at it and that helps me get through my religious I don't have conflict within even religious things because I've worked out my way of accepting a lot of the rituals which if it was a pure ritual I could not accept it if it's a ritual and stance or something that I believe in then I can accept it just made this kind of compromise that's why I'm not Orthodox anymore but I certainly respect the Orthodox and how would your father field has a reform well my brother became
a reformed rabbi and when he went to the Hebrew Union College my father saw it as an education because but all of my brothers by the way were educated in Orthodox yeshivas in the lower grades I was the only one that wasn't because they didn't have girls going to meet Shiva so these only Hebrew that I learned was that my mother's you know when I was a child I spoke some and and I learned some from my mother but my Hebrew is not as good as my brother's by any means and yeah he my brother became a performer rabbi and he got his doctorate of
what do they call doctor or philosophy or whatever they call religion you know when you get your from the Hebrew Union you get it some kind of a doctorate anyway so he always introduced my son the doctor but other than that he accepted everybody you know and even is very contemporary we we always had very exciting discussions around the dinner table I mean it was never quieted and it kind of continues to this day because might when we sit down with my kids we always have very exciting loud discussion wealth of information it's a pleasure interviewing is there anything you want to conclude oh let
me look at my go see yeah yeah yeah I've covered a lot not I mean I didn't talk about fail because that's his story other than our lives together here and if I say anything it's because the two of us lived that life but he had an interesting background - yeah yes thank you so much this has been wonderful I enjoyed it you