The Columbus Jewish Historical Society

Interviewer: Hello.  This is Bill Cohen for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society and the date is December 5^th, 2022.  We’re in the home of Al Budin in Eastmoor, the Eastmoor neighborhood of Columbus and we’re going to interview him especially about his younger years in the Jewish community in Mansfield, Ohio. Al, as we start, how is it that you, a Jewish person, wound up in Mansfield, Ohio? Was it your parents or your grandparents who moved there?  How did that work?

Budin:  Well, it actually started with my grandparents, maternal grandparents, who started in Cleveland as a, from Europe and then made it to Crestline first, opened up a small factory and then moved it to Galion and my mother actually graduated from Galion High School. At the time there were probably more Jews in Galion than there were in Mansfield at that time because of the two garment factories that were there in Galion and so they had a lot of people that worked there that were schneiders in, in Europe.

Interviewer:  So, “schneider”…

Budin: is a, I’m sorry, is a Jewish term for tailor.

Interviewer:  Oh, okay, and uh, so your relatives, your ancestors you say were from Europe.  Can you be more specific?

Budin:  They were from the Austria-Hungary.  They were Galitzianers and my dad’s parents were in Cleveland and they were Litvaks. My two grandmothers couldn’t speak to one another because their accents were different and they didn’t understand each other, so they said.

Interviewer:  Their accents or their language was totally different?

Budin:  No the accents in the Hebrew, I mean in the Yiddish, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with, some would say “Ameyn.” Some would say “Umayin,” so it was a lot of difference.

Interviewer:  Their accent was that different that they could not …

Budin:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  …understand each other,

Budin:  Correct.

Interviewer:  …and you say there were two garment factories in Galion and that was the factory that your…?

Budin:  My grandfather was the principal in one of the factories and that last, then during the War, my dad who was a lawyer, ended up coming to Galion to work and help out in the factory and he commuted to, he stayed with my grandparents and then came home on weekends.

Interviewer:  Now when you say the War…

Budin:  World War II.

Interviewer:  World War II.

Budin: and then he would take the train back to Cleveland on Friday night and go back on Sunday night.

Interviewer: So, your father was a lawyer.  Your grandfather on your mother’s side was involved in the garment industry.

Budin: Right. And then my dad got in to the management end of the factory, so, that was in 1946, we moved to Mansfield because we didn’t want to be stuck in Galion.  It was a nice town but rather small and limited.

Interviewer:  And you were born what year?

Budin:  I was born in 1936.

Interviewer:  In 1936, in the middle of the Depression.

Budin:  Right, and during the War, my dad’s parents and uncle had a delicatessen in Shaker Heights.  I worked there and worked, one of my jobs was sorting the pop bottles that were returned in the back.  Also, I was, I dunked salamis in paraffin to be able to ship over to the troops in, out of the country and it preserved them so they didn’t get as hard as they would have had it, you know, it took quite a while for the package to get there.

Interviewer:  And you remember, you remember doing that, dipping the salamis.  Did you manufacture the salamis?

Budin:  No.  No-no. We bought the salamis and then we sent them out.

Interviewer:  And was this part of a contract with the government or this was charitable?

Budin:  No. This was more charitable and I’m not quite sure.  I was, well at that point, 1946 I would be ten, so it was before I was ten years old I was doing this, and we then moved to Mansfield in 1946.  At that time, there were two temples in Mansfield, one Reformed, one Orthodox, and the Orthodox one was downtown, nearer downtown, on Sturgis Avenue.  It was an old home that they had converted into a synagogue.  Most of the Jewish population of Mansfield lived in Woodland, which was to the south and that was a trip to get down there but everybody went.  We had a few people that kept, were shomer Shabbos or kept Shabbos but not that many.  At one point, they actually had a butcher in downtown Mansfield who set aside a cutting table and an area and on Thursdays he would get kosher meat in and with the help of the rabbi, would properly cut the meat and so-on and so-forth, so that we did have some balanced, place to buy kosher meat if you so desired.

Interviewer: Now you were, your family was a member of which of the two synagogues?

Budin: We belonged to the Orthodox.  At that point, very close to after we got there it became Conservative and we had a real parade, so-to-speak, of rabbis over the years because they were young men out of the Seminary and they didn’t want to stay there.  I mean, I could, we had Goldblum, Chinitz, Botwinick, who else was there ..I don’t…and they stayed maybe two years,  four years at the most.  Then we got Rabbi Hartstein, who at one point, who was there for many years.  In fact, I went to school with his oldest son and he then went to Zanesville and he was the rabbi that was there when it closed, when the temple in Zanesville closed.

Interviewer:  Okay, now the name of the Orthodox synagogue in Mansfield that later became Conservative, what was the name of that?

Budin:  That was B’nai Jacob. The other one was, what was it, Temple Emanuel, and then Temple Emanuel and B’nai Jacob combined in later years.  That was after I was living here in Columbus, or right around that area.

Interviewer:  And what, about, about when…

Budin:  About maybe ’90, in that area, and then it became Emanuel Jacob.

Interviewer:  And that was then a Reform?

Budin: Reformed. Right.

Interviewer:  That’s interesting.  In other words, first there was an Orthodox synagogue.  It moved toward the center and became Conservative and then, at some point, in, around 1990, you’re saying, merged with the Reform synagogue and it became a Reform, totally Reform.

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  That’s an interesting, an interesting movement.

Budin:  And, well, I mean it was going toward the majority of the people.  Today, I understand they’ve sold the building that they had.  They had, after I left, they built, or at the end of, when I left Mansfield they built a new building closer to where the, most of the population of Jews were, and they just sold that building.

Interviewer:  So, let me get some of your earlier memories.  You said that you moved.  It was 19..,

Budin:  ’46.

Interviewer: ’46, that you wound up in Mansfield.  You moved from Galion.

Budin:  No. We moved from Cleveland.

Interviewer:  From Cleveland to Mansfield.

Budin: Right.

Interviewer:  …and so, you were about ten years old, and I’m interested in how, what was it like being a Jew, a Jewish child in Mansfield?  You must have been a pretty small minority.  What was…

Budin:  We had about a hundred families, most of the time I was there, I mean, so it had a population of 50,000.

Interviewer:  Fifty thousand in the whole area.

Budin:  No, 50,000 population in Mansfield, period.  That was everything. Then Jews were a hundred families so, maybe 400, 500 people at the most?

Interviewer:  Okay, I think that, I think using my bad arithmetic that’s probably one percent…

Budin:  yeah.

Interviewer:  …or less than one percent.  What was that like?

Budin:  Well, it was different than we had moved from Cleveland where we actually were ahead of the Jewish migration you might call it to the further east, so…

Interviewer:  To the suburbs.

Budin:  Well,

Interviewer:  From Cleveland, from…

Budin:  In Cleveland it went from, there were two distinct groups.  One was on Kinsman and one was on, in the Heights, Cleveland Heights, they called it and so on.  We were in Shaker, and, because my dad opened up a delicatessen in Shaker Heights in 1936, [corrected himself] ‘er ‘34, and, in fact, he had a corned beef stand in Cedar Point before that, and Cedar Point, at that time, was actually, all the games of chance, were actually gambling and so on.

Interviewer:  Cedar Point, the amusement park…

Budin:  Right,

Interviewer:  …also had some gambling…

Budin:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  …in addition to the rides…

Budin:   Yeah.

Interviewer:  …you’re telling me.

Budin:  Yeah, well, all the, when you go there to hit the ball or do something and you win a, the stuffed animal.  Okay, most, well, there was a lot of cash payouts on a lot of those.

Interviewer:  Oh, you could win cash or a stuffed animal?

Budin:   Yeah, at that time.

Interviewer:  Wow.  Interesting. And so, a corned beef stand?

Budin: Yeah.

Interviewer:  And not just we think, when we think of an amusement park we think of a hot dog stand, a lemonade stand, and you’re telling me they had corned beef…

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  …sandwiches.

Budin:  Yeah.  That was before my time but, I mean, you know my dad told me.   Then living in Mansfield and going to school there was different.  One of the things that I experienced was they had a woman come in once a week for Bible study which…

Interviewer:  In the public school?

Budin:  In the public schools.

Interviewer:  Okay.

Budin:  The only thing, my biggest advantage was, that prior to moving to Mansfield, I had gone to public school plus I went to Hebrew School after every afternoon and I went to Sunday School so I had a pretty good knowledge of my religion so I could hold my own, but, we had, I had, I remember my American history teacher kept putting these Bible verses on the blackboard and I was good in [?] so, I could say something to him. I said, “You know I don’t see what that has to do with American history.” And course, you know, I also did speaking with, in my younger years I went with the rabbi and we’d go to churches and talk and this and that.  One of my, later on I was running a restaurant and had friends and they asked me to come to speak at their church and “Fine,” and I went to this church in a large gathering and so I got up there and I can hold my own and putting the banner out, the baloney, whatever you want to call it and I said, “Well, before we start, I want to explain, get one thing straight. You say the Messiah has come.  We say, he’s coming.  You say you have given him a name.   We’ve not given him a name but we probably are both looking for the same guy to come, so let’s leave it at that,” because I didn’t want to get into why we didn’t believe in Jesus. And the minister, of course, “Well I’d like to debate you on that.” And I said, “That’s not quite why I’m here.”  And I tried to explain to him the evolution of say, some of our practices like the kippot, which continues on if you look at the Catholic Church.   They wear yarmulkes quite a bit and that was one of the experiences.

Interviewer:  You did this.  You went to churches to basically explain what the Jewish religion is about…

Budin:  That’s right.

Interviewer:  And you were approximately how old when you did this?

Budin:  Well, I did it before I was, I graduated high school I went with the rabbi and afterwards I did it on my own when I had a family there.

Interviewer:  This was in Mansfield.

Budin:   In Mansfield, yeah.

Interviewer:  And did you usually get an okay reception?

Budin:  Oh yeah, I was, but everybody knew me. I was like pretty well known in town there ‘cause I had gone to school there and then I came back and had this restaurant. So.

Interviewer:  Tell us about this restaurant in Mansfield.

Budin:   I had a, what I called white-table-cloth-supper-club, similar to what The Top is, but we had dance, music and this and that and the other thing. I was fortunate.  I got a Mobil Four-star Award which nobody in Columbus had at the time. I was with the, couple places in Cincinnati had it and it was really an honor to get that.

Interviewer:  A top rating from a…

Budin:  Mobil

Interviewer:  …restaurant reviewing…

Budin:  They put out a book in those days, Mobil Oil, and …

Interviewer:  What was the name of your restaurant?

Budin:  The Gourmet Room.

Interviewer:  The Gourmet Room.

Budin:  Yeah, and I did weddings and bar mitzvahs and one of the experiences I had there was a Jewish wedding. I had the doors closed, you know, and the bride was supposed to go down the aisle and she says she doesn’t want to, she wants to, she, maybe she’s changing her mind.  I says, “Madeline, you can’t do that. I’ve got too much chicken cooked. Boom. You’re going.”  She got divorced. You prodded her into going ahead with the wedding ceremony.

Budin:  Well, what was I going to do with all that chicken?  Anyway…

Interviewer:  Oh my goodness. That’s a great story.

Budin:  …but we had a lot of anti-Semitism in Mansfield.  There, I used to take two buses to go to a swimming pool, the city pool which was, we were on the south side and this was on the northeast side of town.  I could have walked to a pool, private pool, from my house, but we were not allowed to join that.  We couldn’t go to the Country Club, couldn’t no matter what.

Interviewer:  Both of those places you could not go because you were Jewish.

Budin:  That’s correct, and then, we, at one point, they bought some land, my parents and some others and they were going to try and build one but it never got anywhere to fruition.  I think the, then another time in another area, basically the town was split up by the elementary schools, so the elementary school just to the north of where I lived decided they were going to build a pool and all of a sudden, boom, they, well the allowed the Jews that lived in that school district to join but they were afraid of getting too many to come from the school that I went to, so they, we weren’t allowed to join, and clubs, I remember my sister did, they had a cotillion or something.  My sister wasn’t invited [corrected himself] was invited to be in that. Mansfield had probably, well, big, they had a couple, at least two scrapyards.  They had one manufacturing company, Dominion Electric, that made appliances.  I’m talking about Jewish-owned things.  If you went downtown, there were two men’s stores, Jewish-owned.  About three or, at least three jewelers, one pawn shop, couple small men’s store, [corrected himself] mixed store, like a general store.  They had a Kobackers which was Jewish owned out of Pittsburgh. I think, and ladies’ stores. Well, Madison’s from Columbus had a branch there, and Golden Russell, I think, was, had some Jewish ownership.

Interviewer:  So, you’re saying that Jews were very active in retail business.

Budin:  That, a lot, yes and plus some manufacturing to a point.

Interviewer:  This would have been in the 1950’s and ‘60s.

Budin:  Right.  Well, it started, they went back to long before that, and oh, and there was one big, there was a supermarket chain that was owned by Jewish people, and that was misfortune because they sold it to another company, because of family, I don’t, I never knew what really happened.  I was too young to follow it, but somebody got murdered, and something that, and that was one of the things in Mansfield.

Interviewer:  You were talking about anti-Semitism where Jews couldn’t belong to a country club or go to a particular swimming pool.

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  Were there any other, you didn’t, did you ever face any violence or fighting between Jewish kids and non-Jewish kids?

Budin:  Never really that.  I was fortunate because I was always bigger than everybody else and so they didn’t mess with me.  I don’t know of any instances where they, people were involved in any actual physical, you know. You still got the thing of, I just read an article about this woman who wrote an article or book or something, Reynolds, and she said she Jewed, she tried to “Jew ‘em down.”

Interviewer:  Oh, that was a Columbus…

Budin:  Yeah, that happened here in Columbus, but in Mansfield that was a common term.

Interviewer:  Oh, you heard people in Mansfield who often used the term…

Budin:  Oh yeah, they used that quite a bit.

Interviewer:  …“He Jewed me down.”

Budin:  He Jewed me down,” or they just, I had people say to me, I had one man get almost violent because I was lying to him because I said I was Jewish and I couldn’t be because I was so nice, and…

Interviewer:  Oh, a back-handed compliment.

Budin:  Well, it wasn’t back-handed.   I mean, he was, he believed.  He really felt that, I mean that he was, and those are the kind of things that you, you know, it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good. Basically, our life, this was pre-TV so our life was basically at the synagogue.

Interviewer:  Does that mean that all of your friends were Jewish or did you have some non-Jewish friends?

Budin:  Oh, I had lots of non-Jewish friends, but, you know, it was like, “Okay, we’re alright to play now but we can’t, but we’re going to the Club, so bye,” or you know, “but we’re going to the pool. Bye,” and things like that.  Other than that, no. I didn’t experience, I mean, I dated some non-Jewish girls but not, nothing to, took one to a prom but in my class of over 400 there were three Jewish kids.

Interviewer:  Your high school class, and you were the Class of, what year?

Budin:  1954.

Interviewer:  You were the Class of 1954, 400 students altogether in the class and three…

Budin:  Three Jewish kids and my sister was probably in a larger class and she was the only one in her class, so I mean, it was, funny in that she was, I think, the only girl because, in that age group or wait a minute, that was my daughter.  Then I went to school in New England, stayed there for a few years, then came back to Mansfield, so actually my kids grew up in Mansfield and they actually did very, very well in their educational pursuits after they left Mansfield or you know, because of me or because they had one I…, well of my three kids one went to Ivy League school.  One went to Little Ivy in Boston, Tufts, and then my oldest son went to Lehigh so, that was, it didn’t hold us back but it didn’t make it easy.

Interviewer:  So, you yourself, you came to Mansfield in 1946 and you were there until when?

Budin:  ’54. Then I went to college. I graduated college in ’58 and in ’63 I came back to Mansfield and then stayed there until ’89 and then came to Columbus.

Interviewer:  And can I assume you didn’t have a big enough Jewish population in Mansfield to have something like we have here in Columbus, a Jewish Center.

Budin:  No. No. No, nothing like that.  We did have an AZA group of kids, and don’t forget when you talk about Mansfield, you’re not just talking about Mansfield proper because we had members from Galion, Crestline, Ashland, Shelby, Mt. Vernon.  Mt. Vernon split.  Some of the people would come to Columbus and some came to Mansfield.  There was a temple, I think, in Marion at the time and then some of the, there was actually a family in West Salem.  They had a farm there and the guy was really a scrap dealer but his family lived there.  In Shelby there was one family and Crestline had maybe one or two families.

Interviewer:  Yes, those of us here in Columbus, we often forget that there were Jews and have been Jews in medium size towns like Mansfield and then in even smaller towns.

Budin:  Correct.  Mansfield, well, in Galion there was the coat factory.  Then there was Perfection Manufacturing which made dump bodies and things.

Interviewer:  They made what?

Budin:  Dump bodies for dump trucks?

Interviewer:  Oh.

Budin:  And the man actually, he started as a retailer at a retail store and then this factory probably during the Depression ran into financial difficulties and then he bought it and he got it and did very well during the War and so on and that was the Cobey family which was, had roots here on the, I don’t know what it’s the Jewish Federation building on College Avenue?  It’s named the Minnie Cobey…

Interviewer:  That name is familiar.

Budin:  Right and she was from Galion, so it’s, there’s a lot of crossing. Actually, right now I probably know of more Jewish people from Mansfield that are here in Columbus than there are left in Mansfield.

Interviewer:  Wow.

Budin:  I think that of the people of my generation, age, there might be one or two left. Most of them have left, mostly, the kids never came back which was no different than most other towns.

Interviewer:  So, when you were a small child, you were there near Cleveland…

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  …and you were probably surrounded by a lot of Jews…

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  …so Mansfield was a change for you.

Budin:  Yeah, it was a change, but I was fortunate to have the ability to mix.  It didn’t, you know, I could hold my own with everything, and going to Galion all the time with my grandfather being there and so on, and I always was dealing with the non-Jewish people, you know, and I learned to swim in Galion. I’d spend, actually go to summer camp at my grandparents’ house in Galion.  It was interesting.  Galion ended up, I think, I don’t know that there’s anybody left there now and they, let’s see, I remember a lot that lived there when I was growing up.

Interviewer:  Yeah, now we talked a lot about Mansfield, but your first ten years, oh, your first ten years, yes, you were near Cleveland but you did come to Galion sometimes.

Budin:  Oh, yeah, a lot, yeah, and all these towns have lost. Shelby, none left. Ashland, has, I don’t know, maybe one or two people there whose families had businesses or something.  I know that, what’s her name, Clemy Keidan, who lives here, her brother is there in Ashland, ‘cause, her, I think it was her father that had a men’s store in Ashland.  In Galion, nobody’s left there. Where else was there?  Shelby, there was one family.  They ended up with, like, two or three of that family.  They had a scrap-yard and a tire factory, store but they’re gone.  They actually moved from Shelby to Mansfield and then they’re not there.  Dominion Electric closed.  That had a Jewish ownership and there were about six or eight families that were involved in that factory and none of them are there.

Interviewer:  Now, you said that you had a restaurant in Mansfield, a successful fine dining restaurant.  Was that your only job or did you have other jobs in Mansfield?

Budin:  Well, I started off when I came back, my degree is in textile engineering, which is because my grandfather’s factory.  By the time I got out of college, we got bumped out on a minority stockholder thing, so my father then went to work for somebody else, but there are no more clothes made here in this country, so it wasn’t just them.  I did stay in Mans…, I went to school in Lowell, Mass.  I went to work for my father-in-law who had a shoe factory there and stayed there for about four or five years.  I just wasn’t, different, different life, living in the Midwest and living in the East and so on, I just, so I went back to Mansfield.

Interviewer: And then is that when you did the restaurant or…?

Budin:  Yeah, well, I started off I with a Dunkin’ Donuts and…

Interviewer:  You worked for Dunkin’ Donuts.

Budin:  I owned a franchise.

Interviewer:   You owned a franchise.

Budin:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  This would have been in the 1960’s?

Budin:  ’63 and then the fella that owned this golf course, a Jewish fella, had a restaurant, had put a restaurant on it and the fella that was running it didn’t know how to handle people on that level and so he came to me and I ended up having that restaurant, owning, you know owning, basically I was the owner of the restaurant leasing the facility and so on.

Interviewer:  You turned it into something good.

Budin:  Right. Right. And…

Interviewer:  And how long did you have that restaurant?

Budin:  ‘Til about ’87 and then we decided we were going to move to Columbus, be with, near our kids.

Interviewer:  And did you work then in the ‘80’s and beyond or were you done working?

Budin:  No. No.  We came down here and we opened up a retail store in Worthington.  It started off as a, a hobby became a business and…

Interviewer:  What was the hobby?

Budin:  We were collecting Royal Doulton figurines, the old ones.

Interviewer:  What kind of figurines?

Budin:  Royal Doulton.

Interviewer:  Royal Doulton. They’re collectible.

Budin:  The balloon lady and all, so we opened up this store in Worthington and it was the oldest brick building in Franklin County and the building had been in commercial use longer than any other one in the state, and we started with two thousand square feet and when we sold it in 2006, we had eleven thousand and we also had a Christmas store, all-year Christmas store.

Interviewer:  All year.

Budin:  Yeah.  It was different, I mean, but a lot of people don’t understand, but a lot of the Christmas manufacturers or, or spear leaders and so on, were Jewish.

Interviewer:  And how do you view the irony of that?

Budin:  I always…

Interviewer:  Maybe irony isn’t the right word. How do you view that?

Budin:  I, to me it was, you know, nobody ever said anything.  We never had a problem with that and it was like, to me it was one of our boys that made good, the hard way. That’s not a nice way of putting it but, you know, it, I know that a lot of our, Helen had a friend whose husband imported a lot of the things like light sets and things like that, in Cleveland right? and then, it’s, Adler was Jewish, just in the toy business a lot of them were Jews, so it wasn’t just the garment industry.  I mean, like Columbus has a tremendous number of people that came here because they were salesmen sent from New York to here so, that’s how they got here.  It’s interesting the flow of how it works.

Interviewer:  And interesting that your relatives, your ancestors started clothing factories, I’m sure, with no college education…

Budin:  Oh, no.

Interviewer:  and you went to school, you went to college and actually got a degree in textiles.

Budin:  Right, and I never used it, and the, it’s just the evolution of what goes on with, in business or in life.   I mean, look at how many stores are not involved, are not here anymore, the discount stores.  I mean, it’s fun to name all the different discount stores that are not here now compared to, you know, what there were.  That’s just one of the industries that have been affected quite a bit.

Interviewer:  Your wife is here with us.

Budin:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  Tell us how did, what is her name and how did you meet?

Budin:  Helen. Well, we are not married but we’re committed and we met on J-Date which was, my wife passed away in 2006, and so then…

Interviewer:   So, okay let’s talk about your wife, your original wife is, and who was she and how did you meet her?

Budin:  I met her when I went to school.  I was a good boy. First week of school was High Holidays and I went to temple and the, what we called them, the Townies, were always on the lookout for new blood coming into town because of the school and so, I met her, I think the first week I was,  I went to school.

Interviewer:  And this was in college?

Budin:  In college. Yeah.

Interviewer:  That was…

Budin:  …back in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Interviewer:  And again, her name was?

Budin:  Nicki.

Interviewer:   Nicki, and her maiden name was?

Budin:  Sherman.

Interviewer:  Sherman. Okay and you met her and you were married for how long?

Budin:  Forty-six, seven years, something like that.

Interviewer:  Wow.  And you have how many children?

Budin:   I had three kids and the, my oldest son is, right now he’s an 18-wheel driver.  He’s, he goes by a little bit different drum. He…

Interviewer:  He drives one of those big semi-trucks.

Budin:   One of the big… It’s, he has more, he keeps his mind active because, with that, because he figures out where it’s going to be the flattest and how he can almost beat the government on how much time he can spend behind the wheel. You know, they are regulated.  My daughter went to college, worked for companies and then worked for us for a number of years in the stores and then once we closed it, she switched industries and started working for the insurance industry and right now she’s a vice president at Liberty Mutual and so is her husband who, she didn’t, he was two years ahead of her in school but they didn’t really know each other, meet, you know, as far as socially and they ended up getting married so…

Interviewer:  And that’s your daughter.

Budin:  That’s my daughter and her husband works for Liberty Mutual also and my third one, son, just passed away.  He was a physician and he ended up as the chief medical officer of Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, and he’s got…my daughter has three kids all involved in medicine. My oldest son has three kids.  One’s an engineer who actually, I consider to be, he did more for himself than any of the others because he has a form of autism and he’s got this perfect job.  He runs the robots for this car-parts manufacturer so he doesn’t have to be socially interactive that much, and then my youngest son has four kids and I guess I can say, I’ve got ten grand-children, nine of which have graduated college and eight of the nine have advanced degrees.

Interviewer:  Wow.  So, your wife died…

Budin:  Ovarian cancer.

Interviewer:  And she died many years ago.

Budin:  In 2006.

Interviewer:  Now, sitting with you here you have a new companion.

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  And tell us about her.

Budin:  Helen has three boys and she’s, actually, she was a single mother for thirty years, and it was a great thing that I just walked in.  I tease her and say that, “The little guy at Panera did something to me and that was it.”

Interviewer:  The guy at Panera.

Budin:  Well, we, I met her at Panera.

Interviewer:  Oh.

Budin:  She, you know, it was like, well, it’s a safe place.  It’s a public place and so, she’s safe, and that’s another story.

Interviewer:  So, but did you say that you met on J-Date?

Budin: Yes.

Interviewer:  Which is a Jewish dating service …

Budin:  Dating service, online.

Interviewer:  …that uses the computer.

Budin:  Yeah.  That’s another whole subject.  I mean, it was interesting because I had one woman and I said, “You’re not Jewish.”  “No, but I relate to the Jews.”  [laughter] There were different stories.  Like I said, we met at Panera because she didn’t know me and she was afraid of her safety and so on.  She checked me out with some friends who did know me, and…

Interviewer:  You’ve been together how long?

Budin: Twelve years.

Interviewer:  Twelve years.  Wow. Okay.

Budin:  And yeah, it’s been fun.

Interviewer:  So, you’ve seen an awful lot.  You’re how old?

Budin:  Now? 86.

Interviewer:  86.  You’ve seen a lot of life.  You started in Cleveland.  You spent some time in the very small town of Galion. You spent a lot of time in the medium size town of Mansfield.  You were on the east coast in Massachusetts.  Now you’ve been in Columbus for many years now.  Just over-all, do you have some, some analysis of especially the Jewish communities as you look back on all this?  What are your feelings about the Jewish community in general?

Budin:  I think that in hindsight, I think that we as Jews are helping Hitler accomplish what he started doing because of the amount of assimilation.  I believe we should assimilate in social action and so on, but it’s still very hard to have a mixed marriage and be successful.  I know that I had an uncle who married a non-Jewish woman and it was hard for us because we’d go to his house and he’d have a Christmas tree.  Well, as a kid growing up, we didn’t have a tree. Then I would get from, I guess his wife would send Easter baskets. Well, they always came at Passover so we couldn’t eat it. Those were some of my trials and tribulations of being Jewish.   I mean, that physical side of it, and, but, it’s, and yet my grandkids, the ones that were basically the most involved in Jewish organizations in their pre-college days and at college, I mean, I had one granddaughter who wouldn’t go to a college that didn’t have a Hillel, and the ones that were the most Jewish were the ones that married out of Judaism, so I mean, it makes no sense.

Interviewer:  I see.  Your point is that you would think that the kids who had the most Jewish background and Jewish schooling would be the ones who…

Budin:  Well, or that were involved with Jewish kids more, because they were in the clubs like the AZA/BBG, whatever else, the different temple groups, would be more inclined to do that…

Interviewer:  …would be more inclined to marry Jews …

Budin:  Right.

Interviewer:  …and in the end, at least, your experience has been…

Budin:  …that it doesn’t mean a damn thing.  It doesn’t. It’s just unbelievable.

Interviewer:  So, what you draw from that is that there’s nothing that can be done about intermarriage or assimilation.

Budin:  I don’t, I don’t what you could do.  I don’t think the, I mean, I had one friend who disowned his daughter on the one side, and then others that accepted, you know. They’re not happy abut it, I mean, it’s, what is it? As far as people that have converted, I’ve found growing up and the people that I know that did convert and say the Jewish half passed away, they went back to what they were, so it was, the conversion was done for love and respect of their partner but then was not a religious commitment.

Interviewer:  They went back to their Christian roots.

AL:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  Yes. You, yourself, you have strong Jewish identity and strong Jewish feeling.  What are your thoughts as you get older and older here, as you look back on your life as a Jew in Ohio?

Budin:  I like what I had.  I like what I’ve got.  I am confused as to a lot of the, what I call, I don’t want to call this, the people who don’t have an open mind to change and so on.  1958, when I got married, I was at a Conservative synagogue, the wedding was at, and they had an organ at that Conservative synagogue, not that that is the only thing but they were being quote unquote “modern.”  One of the synagogues here, they were interviewing a new rabbi and then, well he plays the guitar. Wonderful, but he has never touched it on the bima you know since he’s been here, because, you know, that temple doesn’t…

Interviewer:  …doesn’t believe in having musical instruments in the synagogue.

Budin:  Right. Right on the, as part of the service.

Interviewer:  And your point is that you, you like to see some change, but…

Budin:  I think that a change is basically necessary, or, it’s important because if you just have a completely Hebrew service, and there are, how many people can translate, you know, what they’re or whatever, and so, I just, in fact, we just switched from a Conservative to a Reform temple because I just couldn’t stand the lack of, the Conservative even bending a little bit and they, to me it was more of an Orthodox shul that didn’t have a mechitzah. Well, there’s a couple of those here.

Interviewer:  So, you began your life in an Orthodox Jewish family…

Budin:  Right.  We, my parents kept kosher and so on for a while.

Interviewer:  …and as the years, as the decades have gone by, you have moved to a Conservative sect of Judaism and now more Reform.

Budin:  Well, and Reform today is what I grew up in Conservative.  I mean, they’re going, also going though, toward a more secular of a, Hebrew oriented service.  I think the Reform temples, of some. There are others that they joke about “this one in Cleveland that closes for the High Holidays.” I mean, you know, but this is, that’s something else. I mean, you know, but it’s hard. I mean, what, you get three Jews together and you got three shuls.

Interviewer:  I thought you were going to say, “You get three Jews together and you have four opinions,” but that’s, it’s the same joke.

Budin:  Uhm hm.  Well, all jokes are basically actual experiences that happened and as it gets told, it becomes a joke.  You know, over the different slants on the same joke.

Interviewer:  Humor is based on truth, a grain of truth.  That’s your point and that’s a good point because we know how prominent Jews have been in the industry of comedy.

Budin:  Uhm hm.

Interviewer:  So that’s sounds like a good place to end our interview here…

Budin:  Thank you.

Interviewer:  …with Al Budin and we’ve been at his home in Eastmoor and Al has been telling us about Jewish life, not so much in Columbus, but in other towns here in Ohio.  We thank him very much.  This is Bill Cohen for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society.

 

Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein April 2023