I asked Sharon Lebewohl, daughter of the 2nd Ave Deli’s beloved founder Abe Lebewohl, what Abe would hope to get across today on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. She replied, “That antisemitism is serious today, and Jews need to be vigilant to make sure this never happens again.”
Abe was 10 years old when World War II broke out. He grew up in Lviv, Ukraine, and had a middle-class, religious upbringing. His father had a lumber yard and was arrested as a capitalist. When Abe’s father was arrested, his mother did not know what to do to take care of her child. She and Abe went to Kazakhstan, where she waited tables and hid Abe in the back of restaurants so she could sneak him food. Money and food were scarce.
Eventually, Abe’s mother heard rumors that prisoners were being released; and if she would go back to Lviv, there was a chance she could reunite with her husband. They did reunite, but they also discovered that everybody else in their Jewish town had been killed. They had no family left. Had they remained in Lviv they also would have perished.
After the reunion with his father, Abe and his parents went to a displaced persons camp in Barletta, Italy. The plan was to go to Palestine. At the very last minute, however, Abe’s mother said no. “They lost everybody in the war; she couldn’t afford to lose her son to the War of Independence,” Sharon explained.
Abe was 18 years old when he and his family came to the United States. His parents wanted him to go to Yeshiva, but they were older with a newborn baby so Abe felt he had to work. “He did a little bit of everything - he went door to door selling vacuum cleaners, he sold encyclopedias (he couldn’t read English, but he sold encyclopedias), he worked in Coney Island at a soda place, and he went to school at night. He sat there all night with the New York Times and a dictionary trying to learn as much as he could.”
He was in this country for only three and a half years when he opened the 2nd Ave Deli.
On one of Abe’s first dates with Sharon’s mom, Abe told her that he owned a restaurant. She could not believe that at 22 years old this was true. Sharon said, “She figured that the next day she would go to the restaurant and make a fool of him. And there Abe was, sweeping the floors. So she went over to someone and said ‘Excuse me, can I please speak to the owner?’assuming it certainly wasn’t the one sweeping the floors. But they pointed to my father.” While Abe could be found throwing a slice of pastrami - his favorite - into his mouth, he made a point to know every part of the business, and taught his children how to do everything in the deli too.
The 2nd Ave Deli was originally a 10-seat restaurant located a few blocks away from where the Yiddish Theater District, or the “Jewish Rialto,” once was. While the Jewish theater no longer existed when Abe came to the area, it meant something to him that it had been there.
At the time that the 2nd Ave Deli opened, there were lots of delis in the Jewish parts of Manhattan. So what set the 2nd Ave Deli apart? “I think that people felt that they were eating in my father’s personal dining room,” Sharon said. “Someone from the family was always there - my father was there from 5 in the morning to 10 at night. From 10 until closing my mother was there. I grew up in the deli after school - my sister and I would do our homework there. My children grew up in the deli. Thanksgiving to us was delivering orders and then sitting down to a Thanksgiving meal and having someone wait on us. Someone was always there, so if there was a problem, it was immediately taken care of.”
Abe’s love for food was shared by his parents, Sharon’s grandparents. Sharon said, “We used to joke that there was a man in my grandparents’ refrigerator, filling it up from the back, because no matter how much we ate it was like the amount of food would multiply.” The chicken soup recipe at 2nd Avenue Deli is Abe’s mother’s.
While Abe never really talked about his hunger during the war, Sharon said “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my father loved to feed people.” Whenever Sharon would leave a piece of fat off of meat, Abe would tell her “If only Grandma Ethel had a little piece of fat to put on a piece of bread for us, life would have been good.”
A graduate student used to go to the deli, order a soup, and sit there all day doing school work. One day the waitress brought over a sandwich and the student said “I’m sorry, I don't really have money for it.” Abe responded that it was on the house. Every day he brought something else over and said “nobody can learn on an empty stomach”.
In speaking with Sharon about her father’s life and legacy, it became clear that there are two main ways in which Abe would combat today’s antisemitism: activism and generosity.
If anyone asked Abe for money, he gave them money, and always gave them the benefit of the doubt. His attitude each time was that they clearly needed the money more than he did. He always felt that nobody should ever go hungry. He was very active in the Jewish Defense League. He brought food to demonstrators. He always said “never again”.
Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember Abe’s story, the stories of other Holocaust survivors, and the 6 million stories that were silenced by the Holocaust.
