Attorney, family man, humanitarian, loyal to Weequahic High School, Temple Sha’arey Shalom – and the New York Mets

Hal Braff learned early in life that being Jewish meant more than just religious observance. “Going to service was not sufficient,” he said. “Make the world a better place, that is your responsibility.” That statement became the mantra reflecting his remarkable life. On Saturday, Dec. 1, 2018, Harold I. Braff peacefully passed away following a long illness.

In a lifetime spanning 84 years, Hal’s personal and professional accomplishments were bountiful. A leader, visionary and humanitarian, he was passionate about his family, career, and volunteer endeavors. And he cared for people who lacked the opportunity to improve the quality of their lives resulting from inequality and intolerance.

Phil Yourish, the founding director of the Weequahic High School Alumni Association and a close friend, described Hal as “a kind, generous, thoughtful and dynamic individual, always available to help those in need. He was a ‘doer,’ not afraid to take on challenging situations, and always addressed difficult issues creatively with enthusiasm and optimism. As a mentor, adviser and friend, he impacted the lives of others in so many wonderful and meaningful ways.”

Hal was born in Newark, N.J., and raised in the Weequahic section, attending Weequahic High School, which he described as “one of the best times in my life.” His love for his high school inspired him later in life to provide opportunity to the current students at his alma mater.

Longtime Weequahic classmate and friend Dr. Noah Chivian said Hal Braff “was erudite, articulate, and totally committed to the many missions of repairing the world he adopted,”

Hal graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1956, was an active alumnus, and continued to be an ardent Badger football fan. Returning home, he received a law degree from Rutgers University in 1959.

He practiced law for 59 years, first at Braff, Harris and Sukoneck, and then as counsel to Margulies Wind, where he was a well-respected mediator. Bob Margulies explained that “Hal lived his daily life helping all comers. He was selfless. He was the ultimate professional and the consummate mensch, a man for all seasons. He unconditionally gave of himself, his talents and love to all whom he touched.”

In 1997, Hal and his friend and colleague Sheldon Bross established the Weequahic High School Alumni Association. He served as co-president for 18 years; the organization grew to be one of the largest and most successful high school alumni groups in New Jersey. Sheldon declared that “the Alumni Association has raised more than one-half million dollars for scholarships and student activities.”He added that “the word love was a part of Hal’s everyday vocabulary. He was one of kind! Everybody loved Hal. You’re not going to find another person like him”

Hal was an adjunct professor of negotiations at Rutgers Law School, the University of San Diego Law School, and for the MBA students at Peking University in Beijing.

Hal was president of Temple Sha’arey Shalom and developed a lifelong friendship with Rabbi Seymour Dresner. In the early 1960s, Hal served as counsel for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

For over 20 years, Hal and his wife, Elaine, were master teachers for PAIRS, a marriage education course. Hal had varied interests, including community theater, opera, religion, justice, politics – and the New York Mets.

Hal was literally a Johnny Appleseed in the American Inns of Court movement, an organization dedicated to teaching ethics, civility, and professionalism to young lawyers. He established a network of 23 Inns in New Jersey, as well as Inns across the country. In 1994, as a national officer, Hal received their highest award, which was presented to him in the United States Supreme Court. Hal was a member of the IOLTA Fund Board of the New Jersey State Bar Foundation, serving as president.

Among the numerous awards Hal received were the Daniel J. O’Hern Professionalism Award conferred by the New Jersey State Bar in 2013 and Richard K. Jeydel Award for Excellence in ADR in 2015 from the Justice Marie L. Garibaldi American Inns of Court. He was also recognized on New York Magazine’s list of top lawyers.

He was involved with many other organizations, including the boards of the Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey and the Mental Health Association of Essex and Morris Counties.

Hal is survived by his beloved wife of 30 years, Elaine; his children, Adam (Michelle), Joshua (Jill), Zach, Jennifer Gelman, and Jessica Kirson (Danielle Sweeney-Kirson); 10 grandchildren, Jagger, Henry and Ella, Lila and Blaze Braff; Bryce, Jade, and Tyler Gelman; Isabella Sweeney-Kirson and Zoe Cali-Manko; and Hal’s sister, Susan Sayers (Gary). He was predeceased by daughter Shoshana.

Funeral service will be conducted on Tuesday, Dec. 4, at 11:30 a.m., at Bernheim Apter Kreitzman Suburban Funeral Chapel, 68 Old Short Hills Rd., Livingston, N.J. 07039.

Donations can be made to the Weequahic High School Alumni Association, P.O. Box 494, Newark, N.J. 07101.

Legendary N.J. football coach has died. His legacy? ‘That man saved my life.’

By Barry Carter, Star-Ledger

There’s a picture somewhere of Burney Adams wearing a white suit when he dived head first into a pile of mud at Untermann Field in Newark. His dear friend, Donald Bradley, a former Newark South Ward councilman, hoped someone might have it for Adams’ funeral on Tuesday in Irvington. Adams was wildly unpredictable when making a point to the football players he coached for 38 years – 30 as head coach – at Weequahic High School in Newark.

This rain-soaked day in 1972, right before a home game, was no different. Adams couldn’t care less about a messy suit when he made the muddy plunge to get the team pumped and to impart this lesson: “Life is dirty, but once you get down, you got to get back up,” said Bradley, recalling Adams’ motivation. “Things happen, but you get back up and keep moving.”

Friends, family and former players must do that now that he’s gone. Adams died last week, leaving indelible memories for loved ones who filled Christian Pentecostal Church to tell him goodbye. Adams, 81, wasn’t just a coach. He was a father figure and mentor with a stern, no-nonsense approach that turned boys into men. Adams embraced the role, dedicating his life to theirs. He exposed his players, and others, to opportunities outside of Newark when he started the Weequahic High School Fathers’ Club.

They visited college campuses, the United States Naval Academy, congressional offices and any venue that gave his players possibilities. Sports was the tool Adams used to stress education — the ticket he knew his players would need when football ended. Marquis Porter, a baseball analyst for the Washington Nationals on the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, who played football at Weequahic but not under Adams, said the coach’s influence on him was the same as if he had. “When you’re blessed to have coaches like this, it makes that transition to real life a lot easier,” Porter said. “It’s not often that we will have a transformational coach,” said Porter, telling mourners that Adams’ impact will live on in the players he touched.

How could they not? More than 2,500 of them received an athletic scholarship because of him.
Adams stopped at nothing to help a young person, including taking them into his home. He never turned anyone away; never gave up on them, either. “That man saved my life,” said Frank Conley, who hung on the street corner until Adams’ constant badgering got him into football camp. “I probably would have been in prison.”

Adams stayed on his players, even when they thought he should back off. Tommy Wiggins, of South Carolina, said his parents died in a fire, but Adams didn’t coddle him. He helped Wiggins with school work, an essay for which he won Youth of the Year with the Newark Boys and Girls Club, and a White House visit to meet President Gerald Ford.

In school, Adams walked the halls and checked with his player’s teachers. On Fridays, there was a curfew before games, and he’d drive around the neighborhood to make no one was hanging out. Sometimes, he took the team to a hotel with money he raised to keep them off the street. “How many coaches do you know (that) will do that?” asked former Mayor Sharpe James.

Adams saw their potential, not their flaws. Joe Hines wasn’t hardheaded. Adams told him he was persistent. That chip on his shoulder? Adams said it would be a terrible thing to waste. “With discipline he taught me to use it in a useful way,” said Hines, a retired major with the New Jersey State Police and current public safety director at Union County College.

The careers don’t stop there for “Burney’s Boys.” Some are former professional athletes, others are in medicine and engineering, social work and education, military and entrepreneurship. Selvin White worked in the Clinton White House; Leon Baptiste owns his own solar power company that did electrical work on the Prudential Center in Newark. Loraine White made history when Adams hired her as the first certified, on-the-field female assistant coach in New Jersey.

As his players moved on in life, Adams never forgot them. Donald Johnson, who has been a collegiate and NFL coach for 40 years, said Adams supported him during Super Bowl XLI when he was the defensive line coach for the Chicago Bears.

Off the field, Adams was there for Johnson again, traveling 3,000 miles to California when one of his three daughters had cancer in 2003. “That was coach,” Johnson said. “He would watch the kids or he’d go to the doctor.”

Adams was an Army paratrooper and lineman at Florida A&M University. Killer Boy was his nickname. Born in Charleston, South Carolina and raised in Savannah, Georgia, Adams came to Newark in 1963 and stayed for nearly four decades. A father of three children, Adams was in love for 30 years with Marlene Bragg, who said, “he was and will always be my best friend, and there will continually be a hole in my heart that I know will never heal.”

Adams retired in 2002 and moved to Savannah, where he will be buried. Newark was never far from his thoughts, though. He came back often, and even returned three years ago to help the next generation of students. That dedication is one reason why the football field house bears his name. It was placed there seven years ago, during halftime at the Soul Bowl, the Thanksgiving game against Malcolm X Shabazz High School. Players shouted his name, then hoisted him onto their shoulders to carry him off the field.

Ten of them lifted Adams again Tuesday night, but this time he lay in a casket they carried to the funeral hearse. It was draped with an American flag as the school’s fight song filled their hearts that Adams often led.

“So hard,” they sang. “So hard to be an Indian. So hard to be a Weequahic Indian.”

Roger León was born in the city of Newark, grew up in the city of Newark, remains a proud product of the Newark Board of Education, dedicated 25 years of service to the children in the Newark Public Schools, and still lives in Newark.

Mr. León attended Hawkins Street School from Kindergarten to 8th grade and graduated from Science High School. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences at Rutgers University and was determined to remain in Newark to teach and impact lives at both of his alma maters.

For three years, he taught 5th grade at Hawkins Street School and was the Head Coach of the Science High School Debate Team for eight years. His classes won local competitions and his students demonstrated high academic growth. The debate team won local, state, and national championships.

The 8th Grade Algebra Pilot resulted in his move to Rafael Hernández Elementary School. Mr. León taught Algebra I to 8th graders for high school credit and provided intensive professional development in mathematics to Newark teachers across the district. The success of this project resulted in hundreds of 8th graders earning high school credit in Algebra I, teachers earning dual certification in Mathematics, and the district’s highest elementary mathematics standardized test scores in years.

Mr. León earned his Master of Arts in Administration and Supervision from Montclair State University and subsequently served as a turnaround principal in Newark for ten years. Mr. Leon was the principal of Dr. William H. Horton School for four years and University High School of the Humanities for six years.

Since Mr. León believes that every child is a genius, it was his responsibility to lead and work collaboratively with all stakeholders to improve both schools. With the Accelerated Schools Project model at Horton, he promoted data driven instruction, built a strong culture of achievement, and increased parent and community involvement. Student achievement increased, attendance improved, and discipline referrals decreased.

Under his leadership at University, the school implemented its own whole school reform model, which was a return to the school’s original design, a school that is an engine of social change and social justice. As a result, the middle grades standardized test scores ranked #1 in New Jersey and the school became the top performing high school in the city, one of the top 75 high schools in the state, and ranked one of the top high schools in the country.

Mr. León has served as the Assistant Superintendent in the Newark Public Schools for ten years. His vision was to set high educational standards for everyone in every school and provide all of the necessary time and resources to effectuate change across the district. The mission was to improve the lives of our students and their families and strengthen the community.

In this capacity, he supervised the school leadership team of the high schools and a network of elementary schools, served as the Deputy Chief Academic Officer in charge of Curriculum, Instruction and Student Support Services, and directed administration responsibilities district-wide.

This ten-year experience drove national, state, and local education reforms where he led, co-led, and implemented new standards from ESEA to NCLB to now, ESSA. The reforms influenced early childhood, special education, bilingual education, and elementary and secondary education in the city of Newark. Mr. León spearheaded and organized major initiatives and community conversations influencing change throughout the entire district.

During these ten years, he led and worked collaboratively with local and state agencies, higher education, foundations, private-public partners, community based organizations, faith based organizations, elected officials, principals, teachers and staff, every central office department, community advocates, parents, and students.

As a resident, student, teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent in Newark, Mr. León has taught thousands and mentored hundreds. He has witnessed generational progress and has inspired outstanding leaders, doctors, social activists, teachers, principals, attorneys, scientists, authors, professors, innovators, business owners, artists, and countless others who he has encouraged to remain in Newark, like he has.

Mr. León is passionate about education, passionate about Newark, and passionate about progress.

The Weequahic High School Alumni Association
congratulates Mr. Leon as the new leader of
The Newark Public Schools!

Philip Roth’s Newark roots inspired a lifetime of extraordinary storytelling

By Brad Parks with Ted Sherman | For NJ Advance Media

Philip Roth spent just 17 years in Newark, growing up in a succession of rental homes in its Weequahic section, where he came of age along the shopkeepers, bookies and schoolboys who filled its neighborhoods.

It was enough to inspire a lifetime of stories and fuel a literary career that ranks among the all-time greats.

Roth, who died Tuesday night at 85, set the majority of his novels in the city of his birth, in places familiar to thousands of New Jersey residents who grew up there with him, snacking at Syds, cruising down Chancellor Avenue, idolizing an athlete named Swede.

More than any American writer, Roth located second and third generation Jewish Americans at the center of our nation’s transformation from urban rituals to suburban life and the discontents therein, observed the late Clement Price, a historian at Rutgers Newark, of Roth. “His is an essential voice on what it meant to be a Jewish American at a time when Jews, and indeed other ethnics, were on their way to becoming white,” Price said.

During the final years of his life, Roth was widely considered America’s premier living novelist. He was certainly its most decorated, having won nearly every major prize in literature, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award (twice), and the PEN/Faulkner Award (three times). Only the Nobel eluded his grasp. “He is without doubt the greatest novelist writing in English today,” author and critic Linda Grant once said. “There are times when his prose just ignites and roars into life like a match to a boiler.”

He created that fire while living an almost ascetic existence in northwestern Connecticut, writing with a discipline that became legendary in literary circles. He rose early each day and walked to a small writing studio some 50 yards from his house, a cottage with a fireplace, a computer — on which he wrote standing up, due to back pain — and little else.

There, he often spent 10 hours a day writing. He broke for a walk in the afternoon, then would return in the evening. Divorced twice, he lived alone. With no one to entertain, writing consumed him. He wrote (28 as of 2008) novels — including nine that featured the quasi-autobiographical character of Nathan Zuckerman — and remained prolific well into his later years, eschewing any notion of retirement until he was nearly 80, when he said he had stopped writing.

“To tell you the truth, I’m done,” he said.

“Philip was always on the job,” said Ross Miller, his biographer and one of Roth’s few close friends. “He looked at everything differently than an ordinary person, literally experiencing life in a novelistic level of detail. It was really astonishing to be with him sometimes when you realized everything that was happening to him was being stored for later use.” He challenged the literary notion that the main character of a book had to be likeable, inasmuch as his characters were inevitably deplorable: Sex fiends, deviants, liars, cheaters.

Roth himself was not always viewed as the most likeable of men, at least not to outsiders. He was often dismissive of his public. He was not one for book tours or signing autographs, the kind of things other authors do to patronize their fans. He seldom granted interviews.

Mostly, he wanted his work to let it speak for itself. It came at a cost — through the years, Roth’s critics accused him of being anti-woman or anti-Semitic. Roth responded in his own way: For years, he kept a drawing next to his workspace depicting a pipe-smoking critic, stabbed and bleeding.

Still, his genius was widely recognized in literary circles. In 2006, the New York Times Book Review sent several hundred letters to prominent writers, critics and editors asking them to name “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” Seven of Roth’s books were among the top finalists. “If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years,” the accompanying article noted, “(Roth) would have won.”

His Newark roots

By the itinerant standards of Newark, a city that was home to successive waves of immigrants, the Roth family had roots here, having first arrived in the 1890s. The second of two boys, Roth was born March 19, 1933. His mother, Bess, was a homemaker. His father, Herman, first had a failed shoe store, then sold insurance for Metropolitan Life. “The stories he brought back — it was great training to be a writer,” Roth once said of his father. “He brought the city into the house. He’d talk about where he’d been and the people he met. He was a very good storyteller.”

Roth spent most of his formative years on or near Chancellor Avenue, which he later referred to as “the big, unclogged artery of my life.” It was a place full of characters to fill a burgeoning writer’s imagination — the shop owners, the hustlers, the numbers runners — and Roth described an idyllic childhood spent with other children in the neighborhood, playing sports, shooting craps, and bragging about sexual exploits.

As a student, he displayed considerable aptitude, skipping two grades. He attended Weequahic High School, then considered among the finest secondary schools in the nation. Still, his homeroom teacher remembered Roth’s interests lying outside textbooks. “He was very eager for experience, especially sexual,” recalled his high school teacher Robert Lowenstein in 2008, when he was 100 years old. “He was very interested in the girls.”

Roth was only 16 when he graduated, and his parents did not want to send him away to college immediately. So he spent a year working at the department stores downtown, attending classes at Rutgers-Newark. He then transferred to Bucknell University in rural Lewisburg, Pa., with a primarily white, upper middle class student body.

Roth found the school’s homogeneity stifling, though he found — or, at least, later imagined — angst underneath the seemingly placid surface, a theme that would late be found throughout his work. He graduated magna cum laude in 1954, then earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1956. After graduation, he got a job at the university teaching writing. But it was as a practitioner of the craft he first earned fame.

An angry backlash

The short story was called “Defender of the Faith,” and it was published in the New Yorker in 1959. The story featured a protagonist who was obsessed by wealth and did not mind conniving to get it. He was also Jewish.

That combination — and the implication that Roth was forwarding the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew — set off a spectacular reaction, most of it negative. The magazine received letters from Jewish readers by the sack full. Rabbis blasted Roth in their sermons. The Anti-Defamation League formally protested it. There was positive feedback as well: The story was included in a collection called “Goodbye Columbus,” which won the National Book Award in 1960, when Roth was still just 26, making him something of an instant sensation in literary circles.

Nevertheless, the backlash — in particular, a panel at Yeshiva University where he withstood withering attacks from students — seemed to scare Roth off writing about Jewish subjects for a time. His first novels, “Letting Go” and “When She Was Good” delved far less into Judaic themes.

But that didn’t seem to change his reputation. So, figuring he couldn’t please his Jewish critics, Roth wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint,” an outrageous monologue, set on a psychiatrist’s couch, from a Jewish protagonist who recounted his sexual frustration and his fondness for masturbation — most memorably into a piece of liver that was supposed to be the Portnoy family dinner.

Published in 1969 and set against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, it was a sensation, selling more than 400,000 hardcover copies and turning Roth into a celebrity. It was also fodder for comics — Portnoy became shorthand for sexual deviance — and even fellow authors. Jacqueline Susann, who wrote Valley of the Dolls, once joked she would like to meet Roth but, “I don’t think I’d shake his hand.”

The response stunned Roth, who hated the attention. “I felt visible and exposed. Somebody who had just ready Portnoy’s Complaint’ would come up to me and say, I don’t eat liver anymore,’” Roth once told The New Yorker. “It was funny the first seven thousand times I heard it.”

During the early 1970s, Roth left New York City, seeking the solitude of rural Connecticut. “The reaction to Portnoy really determined the trajectory of his career,” said Derek Parker Royal, president of the Philip Roth Society. “That was the No. 1 selling book for all of 1969, which is unheard of for a literary novel, and it really make him a celebrity. Those experiences really shaped the rest of his career. I don’t think we would have had Roth we know today were it not for Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Finding himself as a novelist

Roth followed Portnoy with a period of experimentation, during which he recovered from Portnoy and began finding himself as a novelist. In “Our Gang” (1971) he caricatured President Richard Nixon. “The Breast” (1972) was considered a nod to Kafka. In “The Great American Novel” (1973) — a farcical work narrated by “Word Smith” — he tackled both literature and baseball. “My Life as a Man” (1974) was among the first of his quasi-biographical novels. It also introduced a character named Nathan Zuckerman, although the first true Zuckerman novel — “The Ghost Writer” — appeared in 1979. Like Roth, Zuckerman was a Jewish man born in New Jersey in 1933. Like Roth, Zuckerman was a celebrity author who wrote an explosive and sometimes vulgar novel that delved into sexual themes — Zuckerman’s was called Carnovsky.

In 1990, he and Bloom married. For Roth, it was a second marriage — his first ended in divorce in 1962. This one lasted only four years. After the divorce, Bloom wrote “Leaving a Doll’s House,” an unflattering portrait of Roth as a self-centered, crotchety, mean-spirited and utterly vain man who suffered illness as if no one had ever been sicker. Roth countered in “I Married a Communist” by creating the character Eve Frame, an evil, anti-semitic Jewish woman who seeks to destroy Ira Ringold, the main character.

Despite the private upheaval, Roth kept churning out top-rate fiction throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Although the question of when Roth hit his prime is fodder for a debate among his fans, many critics say it began with “The Counterlife” in 1986 and continued through “The Human Stain” in 2000.

“Philip was on an ascending line for a 14- or 15-year period where all his does is write these great books,” said Miller, the biographer. It’s really one of the most remarkable runs in the history of American literature.” The run included what is perhaps his most critically acclaimed work, “Sabbath’s Theater” in 1995, and his most popular, the Pulitzer prize-winning “American Pastoral” in 1997.

In many ways, the books, while both tragedies, stand as opposites of one another. “Sabbath’s Theater,” which centers around an adulterous puppeteer who is so miserable and filled with hate he can’t bring himself to commit suicide, is perhaps Roth’s darkest work.

“American Pastoral,” describes the life of Swede Lavov, a star high school athlete — based loosely on Weequahic alumnus Seymour “Swede” Masin — who becomes a successful businessman but is ultimately undone when his teenage daughter blows up a post office as a protest of the Vietnam War. In classic Roth fashion, Sabbath is too pessimistic to die while Lavov is too optimistic to live.

Back to the city

Through it all, Roth’s settings and characters kept returning to New Jersey in general, and Newark in particular.
His 2004 “The Plot Against America,” was a speculative history novel in which a boy named Philip must grow up in Newark under an anti-Semitic and isolationist , Nazi-allied regime led by famed flyer Charles Lindbergh, which some later viewed as eerily prophetic of Donald Trump.

“It’s precisely the tragic dimension of the city’s that’s brought the city back so strongly into my fiction,” Roth once said. “How could I fail to be engaged as a novelist by all that’s been destroyed and lost in that one place on Earth that I know most intimately?”

Roth himself came back to the city on occasion, to speak at the library or to accept another honor. In 2005, then-Mayor Sharpe James unveiled a plaque renaming the corner where he once lived, “Philip Roth Plaza.”
Genuinely touched, Roth — who had recently been spurned by the Swedish-based Nobel Prize for literature — told the crowd, “Today, Newark is my Stockholm and that plaque is my prize.”

As Roth aged, so did his characters. Even Zuckerman, his old standby, suffered from prostate cancer and impotence. Roth’s 2006 novel, “Everyman,” was one long chronicle of the character’s illnesses — including detailed descriptions of several procedures Roth had undergone himself. Roth started writing the book the day after attending his longtime friend and contemporary Saul Bellow’s funeral.

“Old age isn’t a battle,” he wrote. “It’s a massacre.” Still, he remained relevant an even inspiring to a subsequent generations — and not just writers. “Those recent books just knocked me on my ass,” Bruce Springsteen told the Times of London in 2007. “To be in his sixties, making work that is so strong, so full of revelations about love and emotional pain, that’s the way to live your artistic life. Sustain, sustain, sustain.”

Roth often said that he’d like to start a novel that would take the rest of his life to finish, then hand it in just before he died — all so he wouldn’t have to bear the agony of starting over again. “The work is difficult in the beginning,” he once said. “It’s also difficult in the middle and difficult in the end. Nevertheless, Roth admitted, “Without a novel, I’m empty and not very happy.”

He wrote often of death and dying — other than sex and Judaism, they were arguably his favorite topic. In “Dying Animal,” Roth wrote, “one is immortal for as long as one lives.”

But perhaps his favorite quote on the subject was not one he wrote. It came from the 16th century mortality play “Everyman” — from which he borrowed the title of his 2006 work — where one of the characters mourns:

“Oh death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.”