From the day Frank took me aside in his and Beri’s charming home in Sommers when my wife Brenda and I stopped by for a visit on our way to our summer home in the Berkshires several years ago and made me promise that I would officiate at his funeral, I have dreaded this day. I knew that it must come sooner rather than later for he was already 90 at the time.
Yet, while I take second place to none in my admiration and love for this extraordinary man, I feel somehow unworthy. Surely there are those who know him so much longer and better than I. But as those who did know him will attest, one does not say no to Frank. So here I am, together with the rest of you to say goodbye and to speak words about a man of whom it can only be said, as King David said, standing at the grave as his son Abner was buried: Halo teyd’u ki sar v’gadol nafal hayom hazeh- Surely you know that a prince and a great man has fallen today…
The inevitable has happened. A prince and a great man has died and we are grieved at the loss. We all share it, together with Bobby and Marcy and their children and grandchildren, as with Beri and her children who became his as well. What began as a working relationship became a romance which turned into 43 years of married life. Frank’s love for Beri was profound. One was struck by his caring and attentiveness, qualities which only seemed to strengthen during the challenges of recent years as the aging process set in.
But though we grieve, we must also give thanks that the terrible travail of the last year has ended – the intos and outs of hospitals and rehab facilities and the loss of strength and dignity. Like the words made famous by Martin Luther King, Frank is finally free at last: free of the physical pain and mental anguish that so marred the final days of his life. And we are left to say: Baruch Dayan Haemet- Blessed is the Judge of Truth, giving praise to the Source of Life in time of sadness as we would in time of joy.
As I reflect on Frank’s life- and what a life it was so rich in achievement and so intertwined with people and righteous causes- I find it painful to think of a world without Frank Harris. He was a person unlike any other whose mind was the repository – or so it seemed – of every Jew in the world who had any connection whatsoever to Nuremberg or Furth. Oh, he had some help to be sure but it was he, who beginning in 1978 and every few years thereafter until as recently as 2012, managed to bring hundreds of us together in the Catskills to study, schmooze and enjoy each other’s company: to learn from the past and to dream of the future, as he liked to say, even as we live in the present.
He somehow knew I was a geborner Kissinger, a distant cousin of his schoolmate and friend Henry with whom, incidentally, he kept in regular touch. There was always a polite letter from Henry to Frank thanking him for the invitation to the Reunion and apologizing for not being able to come. In 2002, he asked me to please come to the Reunion and to conduct a Memorial Service- a regular feature at each gathering led in prior years by my late colleague, Rabbi Robert Lehman z”l – another Yekke. That is how we met. I jumped at the opportunity and did so at each succeeding Reunion reconnecting with my own past in the process.
Some of us knew each other; many did not. But Frank knew us all: where we came from, who we were married to, our children and on and on. And each fall, after Rosh Hashanah, as recently as 2016, there came the ever growing Newsletter with correspondence and tidbits and morsels about each of us, now to the fifth generation. It is only the last few newsletters that were finally computer generated. Before that they were typed, hand addressed, stamped and mailed by hand as well; each one at Frank’s expense. He never took a penny. It did what Facebook now does on line long before there was a Facebook. It helped put us in touch with people we had lost touch with and reconnected us to a past we might otherwise have left behind as well as keeping us posted on the present.
For Frank, life meant being involved with people, especially those people of whatever age who were vulnerable by virtue of their station in life. It meant especially the children about whose proper nutrition he was so concerned during his lengthy tenure as Director of Food Services in Norwalk CN. Frank, the social activist tried so hard to achieve a program of Universal Feeding not only to alleviate the hunger that comes from poverty but believing that learning cannot take place on an empty stomach. That his dream was not realized was not for lack of trying. One prays that others, inspired by his efforts will achieve his goal.
It meant, also, the aging Holocaust survivors who are helped by a wonderful organization called Blue Card on whose board he served to his dying day as well as the disabled residents of Freedom Gardens whose welfare he championed- again, almost to the end of his life.
It is no exaggeration to say that Frank’s life was informed by the events that arose from the fact that the world was silent on Nov. 9, 1938 when his life at age 16 was turned upside down as were the lives of thousands and ultimately millions of others. It didn’t all begin with Kristalnacht but that was a turning point. Oh how sorely his voice will be missed during these times when all that he and others among us had come to believe were the important values of life are under attack.
At the last N/F Reunion in 2012, a gathering combined with that of my Kissinger family- we joined forces that year- I said the following: One would like to believe that happy times we spend together with each other and with our memories might last forever, but of course that is not possible. So we learn to live with our losses.
This is such a time when we must learn to live with our losses. But it is also a happy time in that our memories of Frank Harris- our Franzele– are so rich and filled with substance. Such an inspiration! And truth be told, he always enjoyed a good party and disdained sadness. So let us rejoice in the richness of his life and what it meant and will continue to mean to so many of us. Zichrono L’vracha; may his memory be an everlasting blessing.
Frank A. Harris 