Kay Schacter
Kay Schacter's family roots ran through both small-town Texas and immigrant New York. Her maternal grandfather came from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France at about age 16 with experience in the corset business, and the family story holds that an uncle won a store in Hereford, Texas, in a poker game. Her grandparents settled in Hereford around 1921 and built a men's store, trading food for clothing to survive the Depression. Her mother, an only child and a reluctant violin prodigy, left for California and New York before meeting Kay's father, a New Yorker and World War II veteran, at a Jewish resort in the Catskills. Her father's own parents were immigrants; his father came from a wealthy Polish family and became a brass maker after being disowned for following a woman to America.
Raised in Hereford with her older brother Sheldon, Kay worked in the family stores from childhood and felt her difference as one of the few Jewish families in town, traveling 45 miles to Amarillo for synagogue. As a teenager she volunteered at the temple in Amarillo, and she later attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and West Texas State University, where she earned a business degree. After a first marriage ended, she returned home and rejoined the family business, which included stores in Hereford, Amarillo, and Sugar Land. She met attorney Carrie Schacter at a Temple B'nai Israel food booth in Amarillo, and the two married in a hospital room, with Rabbi Scharf officiating, while he recovered from a serious case of mono.
In Amarillo, Kay was deeply involved in civic and Jewish life, serving as president of the merchants association at Western Plaza Mall, sitting on the zoning board, and supporting the symphony and opera guild, while her husband served as president of Temple B'nai Israel. After a corporate dispute forced the family store to close, the Schacters moved to Dallas in 1989 so Carrie could open a law firm. They raised four children, including a daughter, Hannah, and provided Jewish education through Akiba Academy. The family joined Temple Emanu-El along with several other congregations. Kay served as sisterhood president at Ohev Shalom from 1993 to 1995 and at Temple Emanu-El from 1995 to 1997, and she reorganized and ran the Temple Emanu-El gift shop as a volunteer for more than 22 years, considering it her proudest Dallas accomplishment.
Full Transcript
good morning i'm joe reingold and today is april 8 2019 and i am interviewing kay schachter hi there kay hello tell us about your family what you remember about your grandparents your parents where they lived what they did for a living etc and how they came to be here my grandfather came over from alsace lorraine france when he was about 16 years old and he had some experience in the corset business so the family story is that an uncle had been in a poker game and part of the pot was a store in hereford texas which is 45 miles southwest of amarillo so he and
his wife that he met and chased until she agreed to marry him settled in hereford texas in about 1921 and put together the what was essentially the general store it was a men's store in downtown hereford and he sold mostly to the farmers and when the depression hit he exchanged food for clothing and that's how they survived the depression the store was remodeled two or three times my mother was an only child she grew up there and was kind of a violin prodigy although she hated it so she never played i still have her violin i need to do something with it but um so
my mother was kind of eager to get away from her she went to school starting in canyon texas but then she went away to california and had a few adventures there before she ended up in new york and in new york she worked for mccrae and smith which is a buying office being in the clothing business so while she was in new york of course she went to the catskills to one of those wonderful places like in mrs maisel or dirty dancing it was a a a um what would you call it a a jewish getaway for people in the in the catskills and she
was sitting on a fence with her long red hair and her big blue eyes and my father walked by he'd come back from the war and he saw this beautiful redhead and so the rest was history so he they married he tried to keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed in new york and that did not work out so much against her will he brought her back to her from texas and they started the ready to wear business and also connected to my grandparents store so it wasn't a a good situation being in business together sometimes when my grandfather would receive received
on accounts that would really go to my father they would end up in my grandfather's coffers so it was not a very good situation so when the mall came into these small towns that really destroyed the downtown businesses my father jumped at the chance to have his own store and my mother being an only child and being very much kind of ruled by her parents her family ended up being involved with my dad's store so again it was not a happy situation so anyway about six months later he had an opportunity to open a store in amarillo 45 miles away so they did they they
opened that store and it was beautiful i have a picture that i gave you and it has a picture of the chandelier that was it my mother was very artistic and she did all of the display for the and all of the it was just a gorgeous gorgeous jewel but kind of like the carriage shop used to be here in dallas but um so anyway i started working in the stores from a very young age i have a brother he's 18 months older than i am and we were both raised in in hereford i went through school there um i had some interesting experiences some
of my very best friends growing up about the time i got into high school uh i remember i think we were separated we had a new high school that a new junior high that was built so she went to one in the last year and i went to the other one and when when we were reunited at the hereford high school in one of the first classes i mean i couldn't understand what happened we weren't really friends anymore and she would come into the store and she you know just kind of ignore me and then one day in class we got to talking about where
everybody went to church because our family had to travel 45 miles to amarillo to the nearest synagogue which i missed more than i made but when the subject came up she pointed her finger at me and she said ask her what she is and that was the first time i had an inkling it was the fact that i was jewish that we weren't friends anymore so when i went home in tears and i told my mom my mom said that she had grown up with this little girl's father and that he was also anti-semitic so that was my first experience with understanding just how different
we were which is not to say i didn't already know because mom and dad always made it a point with us that we had to be an example to everyone because we were jewish and we were different and that always had a a big impact on on me and my brother where were your dad's parents and your dad from where did he grow up well my dad grew up in new york his parents were immigrants and apparently his father came from a wealthy family in poland and had a shoe factory and a woman who worked there left to go to the states and he followed
her and was thereby disowned by his family so he became a brass maker and he worked with brass and i have a pair of hands that are my father's i think my brother has that now and what i have of my great grand of my i never met the man was is a it's a mortar and pistol made out of brass that he had made so that's what we have in our family of his okay and uh so i was just wondering your dad and your mom she's from a tiny town and he was from a big city so that's from the big city okay
yeah yeah and uh having come back from the war he got involved with a jewelry business and uh when that didn't work out then he got involved with a dry cleaning business and he uh kind of unionized it and he was quite a mover and a shaker it was a very handsome man you could say my my dad looked like omar sharif and my mother liked to compare herself to loretta lynn so they were both very handsome people and a kind of big city for herford you know they had that very you know regal look about them and but my dad really liked being in
a small town but wherever he went he was still you know with his new york accent he was always a yankee but i heard that he would go with the police chief and drive around with him at night to see kind of the action that would go on after hours in hereford so he was he was a bit of a adventurer i guess so but um so what did you do after high school where did you go well during high school because i missed so much at the uh at the temple i volunteered there as soon as i got a driver's license i would drive
to to amarillo and vol they wanted to pay me and i wouldn't let them and they last time i was there they still have a clock on the wall that i donated with what would have been my my income but i went away to my brother went to the university of colorado at boulder because we had some family in new mexico the moise family and their sons had gone to see you in boulder so of course if they did then my mother thought well that's where sheldon should go so he went there as well and um and he was there so i went there and
um then we we got a little bit of trouble in the store in 1960 let's see what was that like 1968-69 you may remember the mini skirts that match where the fad then and then all of a sudden lamb it became the midi and the links dropped to the low way you know catholic and it was such a such a dramatic change and such a shock in a place like herford it just you know my parents got to financial trouble because that was the fashion and they went with the fashion and the people in hereford dug their heels in and they just weren't going to
do it so my brother was taken out of school after his second year to help pay off the sba loan and i think that had a pretty dramatic effect on my brother and led to the fact later on that he uh he met a a baptist girl who had it in her head that she was not only going to convert sheldon she was going to convert the entire family but they married under rather you know shotgun circumstances in her hometown of of muskogee oklahoma and and that had a real effect on my my parents you know my dad never really forgave him i mean he
would always my god had a way of always throwing things up that you would do wrong and so for you know right after the day he died he he would throw that up but um did you stay there in boulder did you finish college there i also wanted to get away from hereford i had the feeling had i not gone to see you in boulder to go to school that i might never escape so there was a young man that i met in going to school and we kind of had to get married and you know i didn't have any children with him but you
know roe v wade yay and so i was married to him for about four and a half years after about the first two and a half i knew it wasn't right so it took me another year and a half to get out of it and i came back home i got involved again in the business and uh at this point we have the three stores we have the hereford downtown store the sugarland mall store and the amarillo store sugarland houston sugarland mall oh yeah for texas oh okay yeah that's the mall that they put in there okay um so so once i moved back home
sheldon was married and he had a couple of kids and and i was involved we were all involved in the business together and of course amarillo store was a million-dollar whereas the hereford stores were not so my parents interest was really more now in in amarillo where they were kind of free from my grandfather and uh so that was that was that and they picked up and moved or they just kept driving we had an apartment in amarillo that our home was was still in hereford and we would always go to the herford country club and enjoy the wonderful food there and there was a
swimming pool and even when my children were young we would drive to to hereford and enjoy the club because we didn't join any clubs in amarillo there were still policies preventing jewish people from joining those clubs but not in hereford not in hereford that's interesting yeah well my parents helped found that club and helped interview the wonderful manager uh that that ran it so so yeah my parents were very much civic leaders in in hereford which is why they towed the mark for us so much that we should be an example which made it difficult in in high school for me and probably for my
brother too because always touted to to toe a certain mark and i was always dressed to the nines being having a clothing store of course and one other small town little fact is i think i was the only child that ever had a standing appointment at the beauty shop with my mother do you remember those days when you'd have a standing appointment my mom not me but yes i remember made me do yeah so you know i was kind of the weird kid in in high school and i didn't date my father didn't think that i should and uh whereas my brother played football so
he was very popular i was the weird kid but there were reasons for that i can't blame all the kids at school for that i had a bad experience at the hereford country club and the man was written out on the rail but no one ever talked about it my parents didn't even go into any detail after i confided in my brother what happened to me they never came back and asked how far things went um but after that experience i i it affected me and maybe i was a little withdrawn and maybe the kids in hereford of course no one knew so there were
probably reasons but i did go back for my 25 year high school reunion and hoping that i had grown as a person i was married and have children and had a very successful life here in dallas and but it was very interesting 25 years later it was like nothing had changed i was still aware of weird girl nobody wanted to talk to me and i found i found myself very isolated just like i had been in high school so that was quite a an interesting experience that you know i'm sure if i went back now and we had another reunion it would probably be the
same experience but um some things never changed some things never changed so what things were you involved in or were you involved in in amarillo uh in amarillo i i was president of the merchants association at western plaza mall for three or four years so we directed a lot of the business that happened at the mall the promotions we had i was on the zoning board uh i was involved in all the lady civic activities the uh we had a an opera guild that started we were involved with the with the symphony we just had our 40th wedding anniversary the kids put together an album
for us and then looking through the album there are pictures of my husband and me dressed the nines and i have my symphony ball outfits and so we were very very involved civically and also in the temple my husband was the president of the temple binay israel in amarillo and yeah okay go ahead so we were very active both in the temple and in the civic community in in amarillo and how did you meet your husband back up a little one of the first things i did for the temple when i moved back to dallas i hadn't even been divorced yet from my first husband
but i moved back to to amarillo uh from denver where i had been living with my with my first husband and i the first thing i did was there was a big fair at thompson park that the junior league put on and the temple beneath israel had a food booth they had cheesecake flown in from chicago and they had bagels and cream cheese and canishes and i work the booth i did the early shift from 12 to 3 and then i was off from 3 to 6 so i could walk around and then i worked from 6 to 9. my parents were in new york at market during this time so i came with like four dollars and i had no idea everything it's a fundraiser and everything was so expensive i couldn't afford anything and during that first shift from 12 to three this these young people were kind of hanging around the booth and this one guy was leaning over the booth with one of those bagels waving it around going oh oy oh this bagel is so good and i was hungry so i leaned over and i bit his bagel and that's how i met carrie schachter and he just gave me this look like
who are you and what have you just done to my bagel and then he walked away and actually i was looking at his friend but anyway from three to six when i walked around on my own i passed him and you know i did the you know like embarrassed but what are you gonna do and then a few minutes later he tapped me on the shoulder and i turned around and he says i don't believe we've met my name's carrie shachter and his father was there from denver he was from denver and so carrie and i walked around the park and went to ride the
amusements and so that's how we met and uh every year after that we would come with our children and work the the temple beneath israel booth and we had our kids in the booth with us now even our wedding was a bit of a of a event because there hadn't been a jewish wedding at temple beneath israel and in amarillo in years and carrie and i had been dating about nine months and of course we almost broke up when he found out i wasn't actually divorced but shortly after that i was divorced and he was put into the hospital with mono and a pretty bad
case of course it would be if you're in the hospital so he asked me so i'm not doing anything right now how about we just get married and i said he had asked me before and after coming out of rather uh unhappy marriage my opinion of marriage was not too great so i would say we get along so well why spoil it and familiarity breeds contempt so i had all these sayings i would throw at him but at this point my parents had knew i was dating a jewish boy and my dad had already worked on me on one of our car rides from amarillo
to herford saying well what are you going to do if he asked you to marry him and i said well he's already asked and i said no and he says well i think you ought to think about this and i think with my father it was a matter of my husband was an attorney and i think my father saw dollar signs of free legal advice so he says well i think you need to reconsider this so when carrie mentioned that in the hospital that day i said well if you really want to marry me call my dad and if my dad says i can marry
and then i'll marry it so our saying is that he never asked and i never said yes but we got married and when did we get married 24 hours later in the hospital with a rabbi he called his parents he said mom dad i have some good news and i have some bad news the bad news is i'm in the hospital i've got a really bad case of mono but the good news is i'm getting married tomorrow at five o'clock so if you want come you better get in the car and start driving so they did make it from denver uh just enough time maybe
15 minutes before rabbi scharf who was our rabbi at the time uh married carrie and i in the hospital uh after which i went to the amarilla club with my parents his parents and some family friends and danced and had a great time and i went home and slept in my own bed it was like i hadn't even gotten married and when my husband got out of the hospital the next day my parents had left to go back to new york to market and uh we just started living together so it was it was great it was like i didn't get married i just started
to live with this guy so that's how we got married that's pretty strange yes it's really strange did you ever have another ceremony anytime later on or not we were actually going to have a ceremony for our 25th wedding anniversary and his father unexpected unexpectedly died of a heart attack and my father had come to me and about six weeks later he died of stomach cancer so we did not and as i said we just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary and so i don't think we'll be going there okay all right listen whatever works yeah so when you come to our house you'll see pictures
of our children's marriages but you won't see anything about ours but i do have a a album that the lady who was worked in our shoe department was at the wedding and she took pictures and it looks like a wake because my husband is lying in a hospital bed in a suit and i'm sitting in my st john knit next to the bed and when it when it came time after the wedding that you break the glass they put a plastic hospital glass on the ground and he got out of bed long enough to break it and then he got back in bed and he
said i'm tired we all leave please leave so that was that was our wedding it was very painless so very inexpensive right yeah except for the hospital bill well yeah but yeah that's about right so how long did you stay in amarillo as a married couple we um lived in amarillo up until 1989 when we closed the store in amarillo my mother died in 1984 she had metastasized breast cancer cancer that went into klebsiola pneumonia and after she passed away i ran the store with dad very successfully then [Music] south mark corporation had bought the mall in amarillo and we had signed an agreement to
expand our what was happening is many other specialty stores were opening in amarillo and the the problem with being in a mall is you don't have a back entrance so that people can just walk in so to get to alexander's they would have to go in the mall and come all the way around so part of our south mark corporation agreement which was a half a million dollar deal that my dad got a check was that we were going to have a back entrance with a canopy where our customers our very exclusive customers and amarillo could just drive up park and walk in and uh
on good faith we went ahead went to market and we prepared for just such an event and then as you may know southpark corporation went belly up uh they took us to court in amarillo to get their 500 000 back and i was the main witness who testified that we had signed the agreement in good faith and spent the money to which we were in hawk to all of our vendors so the agreement was that we could keep the 500 000 of which we didn't have it anymore because we spent it and uh we should uh close the store within six months and move out
so we had a going out of business sale and we involved a professional um promoter for this that brought in a lot of merchandise my dad went to market and bought a lot of discount merchandise and offshore merchandise and we did more in six months than we probably did in two years and um basically i i i was i was the one who went to the bank and paid off the sba paid off the loan at the bank because that's really what my the only thing my dad's signature was on was on the bank so i took care of of that and um i'm not
sure how much i should say but um but whatever you want or not the rest of the cash uh was kind of siphoned off and after the store closed my uh my dad moved to florida and very comfortably and i got paid off by him it took some talking to for him to follow through on our agreement but he finally did and and that's how the the store ended at the time he thought that he and i were going to go back into business together but i had been having a lot of flack from the ladies if if my dad was alive today with the
metoo movement he'd be light up against a wall and shot but i had a lot of my very good customers they put up with it as long as my mother was alive but after my mom passed away and i called these ladies oh i went to market i found this for you i bought this in your size they would tell me look i love you i love your clothes but i just can't come in the store i just don't like the way your father takes me around and so i was losing a lot of my very good lovely lady customers so when dad thought we
were going to go back in business together i told him that i had other plans so i went back to um to west texas state university and i got my degree i got my business degree in finance and management and shortly thereafter my husband's law firm this is when the um the savings and loans scandal was going on and my husband's firm was very much involved with that but they needed to be in dallas so his law partner asked if he would be interested in starting a law firm in dallas and dad had already kind of started preparing me for this my dad was always
a very you know he saw the the road ahead and i think he knew he wanted to leave leave amarillo so with him wanting to leave amarillo he wanted to know that i would be situated somewhere else well so um when carrie came home said well what do you think about us moving to to dallas i said great let's do it because i didn't want to open a store and and i certainly didn't want to go to work for one of what had been our competitors even though i had quite a book you might say but i just didn't want to do that so so
he opened the the law firm in dallas well i continued to live in amarillo and the kids needed to finish school so for a good 10 months kerry would be in dallas during the week and come home just on the weekends and my during this time was a wonderful time having you know everything's ordained you know a lot more my the rabbi at the temple had been approached there was a jewish girl from paris who needed to live with a family she was there on the international exchange forum so geraldine sevilla from paris france came to live with us and she was basically an adult
in the house i was very much into long distance bike riding at this time so having her in the house i could leave the house at six in the morning and you know do my 85 miles and then come back home and so it was wonderful and of course during this time i was also pregnant with our fourth so teddy uh hannah her real name is hannah louise shachter but she's named after my mother my mother was a harriet bear b-a-e-r but because she had red hair and big blue eyes all her life she was teddy bear so hannah we from birth we would call
her teddy bear and with bear being b-a-e-r and so now that she's in germany she's known as hannah but to us she's still the bear but um anyway so we it was just great having geraldine there to have another adult and uh and a jewish girl to boot and uh my kids are still in touch with her teddy is working on her doctorate in jewish medieval antiquities in heidelberg germany and she has to go look at the at the documents written in latin and in french at the paris museum and she stays with geraldine at her apartment while she's there so it's it's the gift
that keeps on giving it does so we're still in touch with geraldine so how many years have you lived here now dallas well we moved here in 89 and uh so you can do the math what's that 20 30 years yeah yeah yeah we've been here practically a native right yeah um getting the children in school here even that was an adventure my husband uh went through a very uh orthodox period of his life in denver where he laid to fill in and he so he really wanted our children to be able to walk into any jewish synagogue setting and feel at ease and at
home so although he looked at solomon schechter all of our kids started at akiva and akiba was it was a learning experience and i should have known after my first experience of walking up a man that i met in the in the social hall and went to shake his hand and he refused me i should have known then that maybe this wasn't the best idea but anyway it was a learning experience we did make a very good friend there the kids had to be tutored in hebrew and we had a wonderful hebrew teacher isaac butball i became very good friends with his wife rachel and
isaac belonged to an orthodox here in dallas at the time we were synagogue shopping we had hoped to join a conservative synagogue and we went to to sheriff put in our application and it had been about three months we hadn't heard from them and so anyway we were kind of open still at this time so we went to ohev shalom and they were just lovely there at this time they were meeting in the second story of a shopping center and um it was isaac's birthday which is the only way we would have gone because orthodox yeah i know i didn't think coming from hereford that
i was you know right at the right material for that situation but they were just all so lovely so we we uh we were interested and we did come back and we we made some friendships there that we still have today but at this time we did call sheriff and you know we put in an application what you know and we haven't heard it's been three months and we were told that they were the board was having a tiff with rabbi offsider and everything was on hold during this so about that time we went to temple emanuel and they were having the schlinger symposium and
the speaker at the time talked about why the rabbis at temple emmanuel should be allowed to wear kiphote on the bema and my husband was very impressed by that and he felt like here was a congregation that was really trying hard to move from the left um more centrist more centrist and that we needed to maybe join there and help them uh and about the same time we went to sheriff to go to one of their services and there was nobody there and no one had told us that once a month they had services up at solomon schechter school so here we are in this
empty parking lot on a friday night going where are all the jews you know what kind of a place is this so at that point we joined temple emmanuel and you've been involved a lot i'm very involved at temple emanuel and also at o'hare shalom i was president of their sisterhood at ohio shalom from 1993-95 and immediately finishing that i went in as sisterhood president of temple emmanuel from 1995 to 1997 and as soon as i finished that you know i have a cute story about my first sisterhood board meeting course you have to understand you've already heard about my retail background right and i
was jumping off the counter tops waiting on customers at the age of six so at my first sisterhood board meeting the woman who was running the judaica shop at the time made the announcement she was giving her annual contribution from the shop of 2500 and i was sitting there going that sucks so um after my sisterhood presidency i went right into the temple gift shop and things had changed with with jewish artistry and judaica had become an art form everyone is familiar with gary rosenthal and he was a big promoter of maybe getting that started here in dallas but the right person for the right
job at the right time and the gift shop had been in the lower level of temple emmanuere emmanuel where the youth wing is today so with the renovation during my sisterhood presidency uh the temple was being renovated and you know whereas our previous sisterhood presidents might have been a bit older than i was because i was younger i had a lot of physical responsibilities to get our things moved out of the building during this time so our current sisterhood gift shop manager made it easy for me because she decided just to close the the judaica shop uh my predecessor uh leslie bass said i'll fire
you i'll fire her for you if you want me to at the end of mine i said no these things have a way of taking care of themselves we'll just kind of wait and see what happens so as soon as she closed the shop i had the whole thing packed up i arranged for a building space in the promenade which was near my house that's at beltline and and coit and we moved everything in there we went through everything we called in all the other sisterhood gift shops we let them buy what they wanted at wholesale we cleaned it out uh having come into a
sisterhood presidency having only lived in dallas for five years i didn't know anybody so i would i took the uh the directory and i just started going through and calling people and you know you start at the front or you start at the back and i called anina weinreb and she was from new york and she had come to dallas and she had a retail background and she was in the jewelry business and she and ruth kleinman became our buyers and i had a steering committee that i set up and we divided all the responsibilities among a manager a buyer a volunteer coordinator uh display
people and a you know so we got it organized and uh louise rosenfield did all the display pieces i don't she's an artist here in dallas she does pottery and she's quite talented so when the when the gift shop opened it like a whole new place the only thing was the location was bad because it was at the very back of the building across from a cafe down from the ecec which is the early childhood education center so it was still far away from the main activity in the lobby of the building which we really didn't have a lobby of the building at the time
well now we've just finished our our next renovation of 34 million dollars at temple emanuel and the gift shop is now in the lobby so i guess you could say that my my most proud accomplishment here in dallas is is doing what my parents taught me to do which is to run a business and i have been running the gift shop at temple emanuel 22 years as a volunteer they have offered at times to pay me the sisterhood but i feel that what i do puts money to send kids to camp to educate rabbis and future cantors and provide one eggs on our shabbats and
everything else the sisterhood does at our height the gift shop has contributed sixty thousand dollars to the sisterhood budget um after the uh the crash in 2008 uh economically um we are climbing back up now that we are in the not in the lobby we're up to 48 000 and i have always felt that our shop should do 200 000 gross sales a year and uh we i hit 150 but i'm still waiting for that 200 000 as soon as we hit that 200 000 that's when i'll retire okay good so what do you think overall is the best part about you moving here to
a bigger city i think the best part about us moving to a big city is the fact that my children did have a very good jewish education they all know they're jewish we saw the handwriting on the wall when we were in amarillo the last thing i did in 1989 before we left was i had a a bar mitzvah a bat mitzvah and uh rabbi louis dovan was there and he he i sat with him and we worked when my dad found out i was doing it he he asked if he could uh give me a party and he had things flung in from from
new york it was it was wonderful but of course i was i'm always ahead of my time seems like you know i i was one of the first i was the first the named mitzvah in uh in amarillo and i still remember one of the one of the congregants a man who isn't always known for being the most you know kind person but he came up to me and he just said but anyway that's a whole lot didn't accept it did he just well whatever that's it that's bill's problem um but we left amarillo in uh in june of 1989 and our wonderful rabbi left
in august so we kind of saw the handwriting on the wall we knew we weren't going to have a rabbi at the height in amarillo we had 130 families when carrie and i left we had 89 and last i heard they they are at 59 but they are still we are still members of the temple monet israel we still send them money sometimes we double pay by accident um but they have a visiting rabbi that comes in once a month it's a student rabbi from the hec and we are members of temple emmanuel uh shalom and about two years ago we joined we had a
woman from israel that was here with a a congregation in uh israel so uh she was like a sister from another to me so we met we did a 10-year membership so i don't know what and rabbi medell was just here from that her husband died after that and i think she's now in new york with her family yeah yeah we're so we're members of four congregations anything else you'd like to add kay i don't think no you're good well thank you so much you have had a wonderful rich life and mazel tov to you for everything thank you thank you that was great you