(Courtesy of Temple Beth Shalom) Livingston’s 36th annual Veterans Day observance at Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston on Nov. 12 featured a tribute to two World War II veterans – “bookends” with a local connection. Louis Schleifer and Murray Sklar were contemporaries growing up in Newark but probably never knew each other.
Schleifer enlisted in the army shortly after his graduation in 1938 from Newark’s South Side High School. Long interested in aviation, he was assigned to an intelligence unit in the Army Air Corps, which in June 1941 would be redesignated as “the Army Air Forces.” By that time, he was serving in the 4th Reconnaissance Squadron, 5th Bombardment Group, Hickham Field, at the entrance to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and he loved his work.
He also loved poetry and literature. At one point Schleifer wrote an ode to his air unit, which he likened to the mythological winged horse, Pegasus, guarding a nation still at peace:
Wings of Pegasus upward
O’er Mauna Loa’s peak,
Above Oahu’s plains unconquered
Protect the old and weak.
Guardians of the upper regions,
Strike the foe below,
Silence all the siege guns
And cease the bloody flow.
Wings of Pegasus onward
Seek out the lofty stratosphere
Nearest to the Lord
Where our ideals soar clear!
Guardians of the upper regions,
Eagles o’er Hawaii’s heights,
Permit no enemy legions
To blacken out her lights!
But that peace was suddenly shattered on that infamous Sunday morning in December 1941, in an aerial assault that killed more than 2,400 American servicemen, destroyed much of the U.S. fleet and the army’s air assets in the Pacific, and drew the country into war.
Most of the airplanes at Hickam Field that day had been clustered in the open near the runway, because it was felt that the most serious threat to those assets was sabotage, not foreign invasion. Grabbing a helmet and his.45 caliber sidearm, Schleifer raced outside to help move the planes into their hangars. As he did so, Japanese Zeroes strafed the field. Standing his ground, he fired his handgun at a low-flying plane coming straight at him until he was mortally wounded.
Schleifer became the first son of Newark – and possibly the first New Jerseyan – to die in World War II. For his gallantry, he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s fourth highest military decoration.
At the other end of that “bookshelf” stands Murray Sklar. Sklar joined the Marine Corps after graduating from Weequahic High School in 1943, and was deployed to the Pacific in time for the Battle of Saipan. Soon after, he participated in the final – and perhaps bloodiest – battle of the entire war – Okinawa, in which more than 12,000 American servicemen died and three times as many were wounded. Sklar was then tasked for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands, which, it was estimated, would extend the war well into 1946 at a cost of a half million more American casualties and many millions of Japanese lives. But President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons brought the war to a sudden and decisive end in August 1945, and Sklar returned home the following year.
At about that time, the Jewish War Veterans commissioned a monument to the memory of Lou Schleifer to stand in a memorial park named for him in Newark. On a stone base, with his ode engraved, would stand a sculpture of Pegasus.
In succeeding years, as the neighborhood changed and the meaning of the memorial park faded, Schleifer’s family looked for an appropriate new home for the monument. Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston raised its hand and the monument was moved to its courtyard, probably during the late 1970s. The president of Temple Beth Shalom at about that time was… Murray Sklar.
Sklar was a leader in the local Jewish community and active in veterans organizations as a member of the JWV and the Marine Corps League. He initiated Livingston’s Veterans Day ceremony in 1988 and personally conducted it until his passing nearly 30 years later.
These two “bookends” to World War II were born in Newark about four years apart in the early 1920s. Schleifer died young, just four days after his 21st birthday, on Dec. 7, 1941. Sklar passed away 75 years later, almost to the day, on Dec. 12, 2016. Each, in his time, was laid to rest with full military honors at the same Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Iselin, New Jersey. Two brave Jewish sons of Newark, now reunited for eternity.
