Like a real life version of the Woody Allen character Zelig, who seemed to turn up whenever something important was about to happen, Yankle Gladstone has been in the middle of some major events in recent Jewish history.
For example, in 1950 he was in Marseilles to help prepare young Moroccan Jews for aliyah to the nascent State of Israel, and shortly afterwards he was in Genoa, doing the same for Ashkenazi displaced persons. In the mid-1960s, he was in New York where he joined many of his co-religionists marching side by side with blacks in the civil rights movement. A few years later, he was an activist in the Soviet Jewry movement, and in the mid-1980s he helped integrate Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to freedom in Israel as part of Operation Moses.
Of course, that is only a partial list with a focus on political activism. During much of his life as a teacher and innovator, he was in the educational trenches working with youngsters – particularly people of colour – in danger of being left behind.
Highlights from Gladstone’s remarkable 92-year-old life story can be viewed at a display he has assembled on the main floor of the Terraces of Baycrest.
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The display features vintage photos of a young Gladstone on a kibbutz in Israel, in a New York classroom and with young Ethiopians in Israel. There are also mementos from his storied career: a woven Ethiopian bowl, a beautifully embroidered seat cover from Ethiopia with Judaic themes, and a gorgeous challah cover made by Ugandans who have embraced Judaism.
Gladstone said his life of activism began at age 12 when he defied his father – an ardent Communist who admired Joseph Stalin to the day he died – and refused to attend the Morris Winchevsky School in Montreal. He preferred instead the Peretz School where they celebrated Chanukah and the land of Israel. Now 92, Gladstone can recall with precision the conversation he had with his teacher at the Communist school. When he asked why they didn’t celebrate Chanukah, the teacher said “Chanukah is not our holiday. The October Revolution is our holiday.”
That was enough for Gladstone, who along with his sister defied their father’s wishes and attended Peretz School. He felt the warmth there and he appreciated their love of Israel and of the Jewish people, he said.
Though he didn’t go beyond Grade 8 in the public school system, Gladstone managed to graduate from Yiddish teacher’s college. He taught at Peretz School and when the offer came in 1950 to travel to Europe to help the Jewish Agency in the mass migration of Sephardi Jews to Israel, he leapt at the opportunity.
He and a friend moved to Marseilles and set about helping them learn Hebrew and adjust to the norms of a western society. The Moroccans youths – most were still teenagers – recoiled at the thought of doing laundry or preparing meals. That’s what girls are for, they told him.
From Europe he moved to Israel, where he spent 3 1/2 years. Early in his career, he taught new olim to speak Hebrew and how to adapt to their new lives. He recalls fondly an incident in which he was teaching recent immigrants about traffic lights. A new olah from Yemen misunderstood him when he said red means stop. “This is my country, not Yemen” she said angrily, “I can go where I want.”
By the 1960s he was living in New York City, where he at first taught Yiddish in local Hebrew schools. In 1964 he founded an organization for black Jews – mostly of Caribbean descent – called Hatzaad Harishon, The First Step. Using folk dancing, holiday celebrations and song, along with more traditional instruction, his goal was to bring them closer to the established Jewish community, Gladstone said.
In 1970 he got a job in an East Harlem public school that served a largely black and Puerto Rican population. He was assigned a class of “trainable kids,” youngsters with severe learning disabilities. He had no idea what to do, but through trial and error he found ways to get through to the kids, to such an extent that officials of the board of education came to see him in action.
He spent nine years at the school. “It wasn’t easy,” he said. “That’s where I learned about racism.”
Ironically, it was the anti-Semitic attitude of teachers and the school principal that he was referring to. Early on, fellow teachers said to him “white Jew boy, why did you come here. Why not go work where the rich Jews live.” Even the principal referred to him as a “white Jew boy,” he recalled.
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By the mid-1980s, Gladstone was back in Israel, working in the psychology department of the Ministry of Education. He was at the airport when flights of Ethiopian Jews arrived. He witnessed and was moved by the sight of new arrivals deplaning and immediately kissing the ground, he said.
He was an advocate for many, trying to ensure the best students could go on to attain a higher education. One of his favourite students, Moshe David, was promoted into Grade 11 in the regular stream in a school in Haifa. He went on to become a mechanical engineer with a career working in a major Israeli hospital.
“It’s a success story for an Ethiopian who would have been left behind,” Gladstone said.
From Montreal to Marseilles to New York to Israel, Gladstone has been there, done that.
But why not settle down in one place and teach there, he’s asked.
“I always felt to go where I would be needed. Where I could have an impact. Where I could help,” he said.
And been in the middle of momentous events in modern Jewish history, he might have added.