Part I of II
Sometimes in reporting an article, those holding the notebook and pen might want to hurry along an interview to get to the next subject.
They haven’t yet met Marge Kohlhagen.
I stand grateful that I have.
Granted, it was a telephone meeting. A long-time Bergenfield resident, Kohlhagen was speaking to me from her Boca Raton home.
In the hour or so we spoke, Kohlhagen, who co-founded Bergenfield’s Congregation Beth Abraham in her home with her late husband, Ernie, kept my ear to the phone as she told me about her amazing meeting with the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose 25th yahrzeit was in June.
The Kohlhagens moved to New Jersey in 1954. Mrs. Kohlhagen explained that she and her husband “wanted to be close to New York, but we did not want to live there. When we came to Bergenfield, we knew we could hop on the bus and go to Manhattan.”
Perhaps using the word “explained” is not descriptive enough here. Kohlhagen, a Holocaust survivor born in Austria, who spent many years as a dedicated Jewish community volunteer, speaks in such a warm, sweet voice. We are miles apart over the telephone, but it felt as if she had invited me in for a cup of tea and cookies in her living room, as she would an old friend.
She and her husband would walk from their Westminster Avenue home in Bergenfield to Teaneck’s B’nai Yeshurun on Shabbat, with her in-laws. The Kohlhagens were among the founding members of B’nai Yeshurun, she said. That was until the mid-1960s, when her father-in-law suffered a heart attack.
“So we didn’t know if we should open their home for a minyan or move closer to shul,” she said.
“My father-in-law had rescued a Torah from Germany, and we could make a mechitza out of a curtain kind of thing. It was makeshift,” Kohlhagen added. Before any movement in the direction of a kehilla happened, the couple had a moment in Jewish life that would change their lives and the spiritual lives of countless other Bergenfield Jews.
They were able to get a meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
“We had yechidus with the Rebbe,” she remembers with a joyful voice. “We went to 770 in Crown Heights. It was one of the most exciting times of my life. The Rebbe said, ‘Come in and sit down.’ He was so nice to us, so welcoming. He told us that we had to have patience, to stay in Bergenfield. He said it takes a while to grow a Jewish community. He said that when a farmer throws seeds, only the good ones come up. And sure enough, we grew a minyan. Then we bought a house and had an address and we added on. I will never forget that meeting.”
The Rebbe encouraged them to stay where they were; he was confident that a Jewish community could thrive in Bergenfield.
The time was 1965. She said the initial home minyan was a “low-key kind of thing where every Shabbos my husband would walk outside and ask passersby if they were Jewish and could they help make a minyan.
“Little by little we began to grow,” she said. “When we started the shul, because my father-in-law could no longer walk a distance, we had a few families, our kids and someone else’s kids. Now there are hundreds of kids at Beth Abraham. We did this because we had to do it. We started something and it worked.”
Indeed, the shul the Kohlhagens founded has flourished in Bergenfield with well over 500 member families under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Yaakov and Peshi Neuberger.
The shul’s first rabbi was Yaakov Goldstein, sent to Bergenfield by the Rebbe to help the then-fledgling congregation.
Now in her late 80s, Kohlhagen jokes that her son “captured me and brought me to Florida to Century Village.”
Still, Bergenfield, Beth Abraham and the shul she and her husband, who passed away in 2007, founded, remains in her heart and mind with wonderful memories.
But it was that moment with the Rebbe to which she referred several times during our conversation.
“…Our yechidus with the Rebbe,” she said at the end of our interview. “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
Next week: A former resident now living in Israel is looking to write “Da-Teaneck: The Amazing Story of the Orthodox Explosion on Teaneck, NJ.”
