Nancy Jellinek
Nancy Jellinek was born in Dallas at Florence Nightingale Hospital, an only child. Her father came from New York, where his family had deep and varied roots. Her paternal grandfather Max, a reform Jew and an elegant American, served as president of the Diamond Dealers Club in Manhattan, and her grandmother's family had come from Antwerp, Belgium, as jewelers, arriving speaking French, Flemish, and Yiddish. Her mother came from Tyler, Texas, where three synagogues then existed, and her grandmother had emigrated from Ukraine, once supporting her children by working in a Lower East Side sweatshop before divorcing and remarrying a Tyler grocery store owner. Nancy's grandmother later moved her unmarried daughters to Dallas in hopes of finding them husbands, and they all did.
Some of Nancy's happiest early memories were summers spent with her grandparents Max and Kitsy at their home in upstate New York near a lake, where her father and grandfather taught her to swim as a toddler. After her grandfather died, she was sent to a Texas sleep-away camp, where she especially loved archery. A dancer from childhood, she treasured music from Scheherazade to rock and roll and swing. She attended the University of Texas and lived in Austin for many years, running her own pottery studio and shop on Fifth Street, before returning to Dallas.
Raised at Temple Emanu-El, Nancy was confirmed there, sang in the junior choir led by composer Sam Adler, and studied with Rabbi Olan, who delighted in speaking French with her on campus. Her parents, married by Rabbi Lefkowitz in her grandmother's Dallas home, grew more spiritual with age. Returning to Dallas, Nancy went synagogue hopping before choosing Temple Emanu-El for its music and commitment to social justice. She sang at Lefkowitz services with Rabbi Diamond, later joined the choir under Cantor Kohn, and helped lead music and services for about fifteen years. She is proud of her Bosnia mission trip and hopes to be remembered for her commitment to justice and to people living great lives.
Full Transcript
this is mae siebel and i'm interviewing nancy jelinek for her oral history on saturday august 1st 2020. so where were you born i was born in dallas texas at florence nightingale hospital okay all right how did your family was your family from here uh my dad was from new york and my mother and her remaining unmarried siblings girls and my grandmother moved here from tyler texas yeah when they when they were growing up in tyler texas there were three synagogues there there was reform conservative and orthodox that's right and which one do they belong to my grandparents belong to the orthodox and my mother and her sisters belong to the temple because apparently that's where the boys were what can i say okay
that's not quite more by the way all the boys are over in the orthodox world oh have you ever noticed uh anyway so um how far back do you know of your family's history i know i probably know where my i know into my grandparents lives for sure and and that being said they're um a little bit of their parents so that would be my my great-grandparents and that's as far back as i know tell me about them um my mother's mother was born in ukraine and uh they emigrated you know turn of the century she married and had two girls and um she was
literally working in one of those sweatshops and on the lower east side and apparently that that husband didn't work and she supported them with what she made in a sweatshop and um so she divorced them my grandmother was a modern woman and she divorced him and her brothers ended up in texas and they said you need to move here we know of a widower that we think you'd really like and she came to tyler and she married my grandfather and he owned a grocery store in tyler texas he died before i was born like a couple years before i was born so i never knew
him um he was from he was a klein he i think they were from poland and um so that's my mother's side of the family my dad's side of the family um who i think is really interesting um my great-grandfather actually my grandfather's father immigrated here in the mid-1800s and he was a furrier and then and then he moved to new york later but um his my grandmother her people came you know at the typical time early 1900s and my great-grandfather was a jeweler so when they came they came from belgium and um from antwerp and when they came my grandmother spoke french and flemish
and yiddish she was little she was four but she spoke three languages because that's what they spoke at home and um i mean they came over i think i think they brought a nanny with them that all went away pretty quickly but um so they had kind of an interesting background too my grandfather the one that whose father immigrated here he was actually a reformed jew he didn't he he was born and raised reform and um he they lived in manhattan and he was the president of the diamond dealers club in manhattan and i think the reason he he had that job because you know
the diamond industry was filled with hussets and my grandpa max was a very elegant american you know he was not a black coat black cat and so he could talk to the community at large not just the jewish community um so he had that job until he passed away he was adorable i adored them those were my grandparents very interesting what is your earliest childhood memory my earliest memory my gran my newer grandparents max and kitschy they lit they had an apartment in manhattan but by the time i came along they had a house and upstate um in a place called maypac new york and
there was a lake right down the hill um my earliest memory and i don't know if it's because it was traumatic because it was so much fun probably because both but my father and my grandfather wanted me to learn to swim and so one of them would stand on the dock and toss me to the other one who was in the water and so i got unafraid of the water in no time and they taught me how to swim i was swimming by the time i was probably a year and a half old and i loved it so that's the earliest thing i remember um
what was your favorite thing to do for fun as you were growing up oh no doubt about it i would go i would just spend all summer with kitsy and max all summer until my grandfather died so that was like the first 10 years of my life and i would go up there and i had a whole set of friends there and i had some family my mother had uh some sisters who had kids and lived there i'm putting the dog down he's falling so i had cousins and i just i waited for the summer i just loved summers there um i was kind of
surprised when i was when my grandfather died and suddenly we were stuck in texas for the summer and i had to deal with texas summer i didn't know what that was all about because i had never had to do that before um so they they put me in a sleep away camp real fast so that at least i had something to go do where did you go to sleep away camp i went to trace rios which was a y camp uh outside of close to granberry did you like i loved cam you know i i i my cousin went to camp the same time i
did and she cried the whole time and she's older than i am but um i loved it i would have stayed all summer but i don't know why what kind of sports did you get into at camp um you know what i really loved was archery i really just loved archery i mean we did the whole thing we did all the the races and everything else but um i was i was never fast you know so that wasn't anything for me but um i was okay at the hop skip and jump i think i won some some ribbons for hop skip and jump because i'm
a dancer so of course i could do hop skip and jump what were your favorite songs in music um my favorite songs you know my earliest favorite song was sahara zod my dad was in the classical music being a new yorker who grew up going to the met and um one of the first things he bought me on an album you know that was back when you had the little uh aqua record players and he bought me a 33 and it had shaharazad and i love to dance and so i would dance all over my room i played that record i mean i just destroyed
it after years of playing that record but that was my favorite and then of course rock and roll um i know all the words to all the songs loved rock and roll my mother liked like swing and big bands so i knew a lot of that uh because she loved to dance that's where i i got the voice and the the dancing my dad was a good dancer too um from them but it wasn't jazz i know people that actually grew up in their parents like jazz i think that is very avant-garde uh i know you have pets now and you love them did you
have pets growing up we got a pet when i was 10 we got a beagle that was back in the everybody had to have a snoopy and um his name was buttons i named him and he was not the nicest little dog but i loved him and um after he passed away which was i guess i mean he lived a while i mean i'd gone off to college by my last year of college i got my own dog which was just crazy because i got a dog i didn't have a fenced-in yard it was in austin and i would everyday ask my dog if she
wanted to go to college with me and we would just walk to school and she would hang out and wait for me to get out of class so i think of that now and i have ajita let's switch gears here what was your religious life growing up um you know i was born and raised at emmanuel and i went through religious school and was confirmed and was in the junior choir that sam adler conducted and um you know that girls didn't get about mitzvot in those days they they really didn't so i never did that um but you know i always liked it um and
my dad would take me my cousins i lived near the plums and he'd pick them up and he'd take us all to religious school and um and he would go to rabbi olin's bible study class while we were all in regular religious school um they were not they were not all that religious but um i remember one after i came back from washington i was in austin a long time but when i came back you know my family would have a first night seder the big the whole family and then after that i said why don't we do a second night seder and we could
do it wasn't the 10 minutes started let's see kind of seder that my family always did and so we did a real seder and my folks loved it so as is happens to a lot of people they got more really more spiritual and more religious as they got older and um and that was nice that was really nice but i always loved music and i always sang so i was always kind of going that route so that's that's what we did you know i love i am someone who loves the way judaism has uh reformed judaism has grown because it's so much more heartfelt i
think and um but then i'm not i'm not just into the taurus study kind of person so um i'm more experiential but that's what i did i loved when i went to texas rabbi olin was a trustee and every once in a while i'd be walking across campus with my friends and i would hear a booming voice say mademoiselle jelenek because you know you told rabbi olen anything and he was like an elephant he never forgot so he knew i had taken french in high school so he would talk french to me because i don't even know how many languages that man knew but i
always loved him and loved listening to him and studying with him and i know he scared some people but not the kids that grew up with him he didn't scare us so it was really great i feel so blessed to have studied with such giants in music and in theology you know when i was growing up because sam adler is still huge in the in the jewish liturgical uh music world composer so that was perfect for you that that was wonderful yeah um what world events had the most impact on you when you were growing up i think well i saw john kennedy the day
he was shot i mean i i i was my my gran we were on the route and my grandmother was with me and i the car came very slowly by me on lemon avenue and it was so close my grandmother kind of had to yank me out of the way because she was afraid it would run over my foot and um and john and jackie saw that and they smiled at me that was a huge oh my gosh it was huge and and then finding out he was shot like an hour later just broke my heart so a lot of things impacted me that were
sad so when i graduated was the year that bobby kennedy was shot and martin luther king was shot and it it it put this whole spin on the world kind of like i'm going through now you know of what is going on here you know how could it be like this um so those were big world events i think i guess so um did your family have special traditions with holidays like birthdays or the high holy days well you know i my mother had three sisters here and um so we always did holidays with them and um and those families we did birthday i mean
we really saw each other every sunday that was that was in the old days and and that was nice it was nice having that you know because i'm an only child so having that kind of extended family was really reassuring and good and we did you know we always did dinner before rosh hashanah and uh dinner before yom kippur so that you know we could fast the next day and um we did passover as with any jewish family passover is a big deal um i don't think i knew how to celebrate sukkot i didn't know that to shivuot existed or if it did why um
you know it was not the most knowledgeable jewish family but i learned you know it's okay that's what adulthood was for for me is learning um but yeah there was a lot i just learned something today at services um you know tisha b'av was started wednesday night was wednesday and thursday and then there was a two bit two but two bishop anyway it's a hot it's a celebration of love so and it's no mistake that they made it three days or two days after tisha b'av which is all about sadness and loss and then this holiday is all about love which i mean it's like
not valentine's day it's like people um like married couples would go in the fields and dance in white robes together i mean just a lovely holiday i'd never heard of it before so that it's still learning still learning and when i moved back to dallas i did what i called synagogue hopping i went from [Music] synagogue to synagogue i went to conservative i went to the other reform i didn't go to well actually i did go spend a shabbaton with the orthodox family which was um but i was looking for what would be my spiritual home and i came back to temple because they offered
so much of what was important to me in social justice and in um let's see who was up rabbi zimmerman was there then and somebody who um someone who could inspire me and and the music it's always been a great place for music i didn't join the choir though until uh cantor cone came so i participated in leftwits with rabbi diamond you know it was rabbi diamond and i singing at lefkowitz for years before sharatha love even started and um so yeah that was good um are there any stories about famous or infamous relatives in your family oh god uh you know there there was
there are and there there are i don't know about was there could have been i kind of hesitate to say anything because i believe they're still alive my grandmother there's some people my grandmother's family one of them hired a fbi he thought he thought it was a hitman to kill his wife and he's a big real estate developer at the time and he wanted out of that marriage had he ever heard the word divorce i mean seriously we didn't really hang out with that family but um he wasn't an actual hit man it was an fbi guy so he went to jail for a long
time um he was the one that built that that really pretty uh mid-level thing on on was it on loma alto that never opened do you know what i'm talking about may no i don't it was it was a real pretty building and it was multi-story probably seven or eight stories and it was gonna be uh apartments and um not apartments condos and this is about 20 25 years ago but it never opened because he didn't build it to code so not only he was just not only was he immoral he was stupid um we all have some interesting stories in our families about relatives
yes are there any special heirlooms or photos or other memorabilia that's been passed down in your family i have a lot because my grandmother's people were jewelers so i have some amazing jewelry that some of which i actually took took it to the antiques roadshow to get and i told them i think my great grandfather made this and he actually could say he probably made this and he probably bought this here because and i was like how do you know that and he said because of the of the techniques they use in creating the piece they use different ones in europe than they did in
america so i learned a lot there but so i have the jewelry and i have i my father was an only child and i'm an only child and my grandmother wasn't only his mother was the only daughter so a lot of stuff went down through her to my father to me so i have i have the silver and i have the wonderful ornate silver uh bowls i have i have amazing china and i have all that because i it that it landed on me you know so um when people say you know they say your kids don't want your stuff i'm like i don't even
have kids so you know i have to figure that out um i do have remarkable stuff i have great photos in fact you want to see a photo real quick sure okay because it's right here i just went and picked this up vicki redden is moving her office and i don't know how the hell this got there is that too reflective can you see that no now we can see it now so who is this tell us who this is the one in front that's my aunt dorothy boris and the one behind her is my mom i think dorothy was 15 and my mother was
17 at the time isn't that gorgeous oh it's beautiful i thought so thanks for sharing that with us that's just beautiful very well i don't know how they ended up in vicky's office we were trying to figure that out and i said well i don't know maybe maybe dorothy maybe i gave it to aunt dorothy and i don't know anyway i'm glad i've got it absolutely but i have a lot of stuff like that so um of all the things you learn from your parents which do you feel is the most valuable i think my dad i mean my dad was such a kind person
he was just amazingly kind and he was so smart so i learned a lot of stuff from my dad because he just remembered everything and he was so brilliant and my mother was so her commitment to people and her energy and her commitment to i mean she was the first person to take food if someone was sick i haven't lived up to that by the way i mean she was remarkable with that but just the whole idea of you take care of people when they're having a hard time that definitely came from my mother though and plus she just loved to laugh you know she
about me she worried all the time that she was just loved to laugh and love to talk to people so i think i inherited that from her um what did your dad do by the way my dad um was a manufacturer's rep in the clothing industry it's probably not what he should have done he probably should have been a teacher i mean he he could there's a whole thing about medical school and and he was in new york and there were quotas for jews he would have been a good doctor but that not that being taken off the board not because of his grades but
because of quotas he uh he probably should have been a teacher because he loved to teach and um he would have been real happy but i don't think he thought mother would have been happy there's a lot of competition among the girls so um but he taught a lot i mean he got rabbi richard bernholtz has told me several times i wouldn't be a rabbi if it hadn't been for your dad because your dad got me through math and i i couldn't have i wouldn't have had the grades i did had he not helped and um so he would have been just a wonderful teacher
but so that's what he did my mother loved to work and she was an assistant loan officer in highland park and um she loved to work i mean she worked way past when she could have because she just loved to work that's great what accomplishments are you most proud of oh a few i'm i'm really proud going back i had my own studio and shop pottery studio and shop in austin on 5th street and i'm very proud of that i'm proud of the the bosnia trip i took the mission trip for women and children i'm proud i'm really proud of sharat haleb i'm proud that
i led music and services at a major congregation reform congregation in the world for i don't know 15 years i'm so proud of that it was such a good idea yeah and um i guess that's that's what comes to mind first what is the one thing you most want people to remember about you oh what a good question um i think that i want them to remember that i'm committed to justice that i'm committed to people having great lives to um i guess that's it that that's good enough it certainly is well this has been terrific is there anything else you'd like to add anything
else let's see um well for jewish history my parents were married at at my grandmother's house when my grandmother moved her unmarried daughters to dallas in the hopes of finding them husbands which they all did she had when my mother and my father got married rabbi lefkowitz married them in my my uh grandmother's house so i had pictures of rabbi lefkowitz and my folks and so it always made me smile you know and left the witch chapel because although i never knew him and i know he was a really great man you know he married my folks that's pretty cool you know it's interesting my
parents love temple and they they're not buried in the temple cemetery they're buried across the the fence at spartan hillcrest because they wanted a place that was right next to temple so um i remember telling one of the clergy that that you know that you can't say that's not an important area that was before they put the garden and mother would have loved that um but you know they were kind of they had the trash bins out there and i was like you can't do that you can't have trash across the fence from that went to temple i mean that's why they're there is because
they love temple and and i remember rabbi robbins went wow that's a really good point so i take responsibility for moving all that stuff out now there's a garden there great nancy thank you so much this has been terrific you're very thankful oh and i want people to remember i love dogs and cats oh yes i love dogs and cats all right that's all thank you i hang on for a while because jessica has something that both of us need to do and i need to tell you a couple of things also okay okay all right hey kiddo so a couple of things yeah yeah
i won every medal that the camp archery association gives out when i was at can't mystic for six summers so we definitely have that in common and i i'm a sagittarius so me too oh steve yarcher it's perfect what was your maiden name me uh-huh i never married i had some significant others one couple of days but i your aunt dorothy boris do you recall when she lived in a duplex on berry now yeah absolutely she rented for me that was my duplex i lived in one side and she lived in the other oh she was a hoot my advice was something she was one
of the loveliest tenants i ever had because i had some that weren't so lovely that she's that interesting she was a true modern woman she was the only one in the family that actually went to university and got a degree she reinvented herself like two or three times to do something else she was and she was hysterical she was a funny lady she was lovely she was yeah you