Sally Quinn is an author and journalist who has written extensively for The Post.
I have a mezuzah on my front doorpost.
For those who don’t know, a mezuzah is a piece of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, rolled up into a scroll inside a small, decorated case. It is usually nailed to the doorpost slightly tilted in order to signify that God is protecting the home of the Jewish family inside.
My late husband, Ben Bradlee, was not Jewish, nor am I. So when we moved into our house 40 years ago, we knew what a mezuzah was but weren’t sure what it meant. We soon learned.
Art Buchwald, the late, great Post humor columnist, who was Jewish, was Ben’s closest friend. As soon as the moving vans began arriving at our house, Artie rushed over. He had brought us a present, he said, and it was terribly important that we put it up immediately. He had thoughtfully brought along a hammer and nail, and before we knew what was happening, he had attached a mezuzah to our doorsill. “Artie, what are you doing?” Ben asked. “I’m putting this up here for your protection,” he explained. “Don’t ever take it down.”
Ben, who was the executive editor of The Post, and I were both happy about this. We felt, particularly after the threats we had gotten during and after Watergate, that we could use all the protection we could get.
Advertisement
Years went by without incident. Not many people noticed the small adornment next to the door. One night, though, when we were having a dinner party, the Canadian ambassador and his wife, Allan and Sondra Gotlieb, who were Jewish, didn’t show up. I finally started dinner without them. In the middle of the first course, the doorbell rang. It was the Gotliebs, mortified. They had arrived on time, saw the mezuzah and assumed they had the wrong address. After driving around for nearly an hour, they decided to try again and rang the doorbell with trepidation. We all had a good laugh about that.
At some point, we needed to have the woodwork repainted. The painters removed the mezuzah from the doorsill and discarded it. We didn’t realize it at first. When we did, I intended to get another one, but it slipped my mind.
That was when things began to go awry:
I was awakened late one night in 1992 by a noise downstairs and, leaving Ben asleep, got up to see what it was. Halfway down the stairs, I saw a man standing in the hallway with an armful of my coats. I let out a yell, and he dropped everything and ran out the back, climbing through a small window. Our home had never been broken into before.
Several months later, in the summer, I went into the house from the backyard to retrieve something from my bedroom upstairs. When I came out of my room, a huge guy was coming down the stairs from the third floor. I was surprised, but I was accustomed to having workmen in the house, so I asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m James,” he responded, equally startled.
“What are you doing here?”
Share this articleShare“I’m looking for Jerome,” he said, and ran down the stairs and out the door before jumping over the wall. It was only later that day that I found some TV sets had disappeared from the third floor, presumably thanks to Jerome.
Then came December. Ben and I threw a big bash for the holidays. Just before the event, the caterers called to say that two of their regular waiters were sick but they were sending replacements. I didn’t think anything of it. The party was a smash, and the last guest didn’t straggle out until almost 2 a.m. The next morning, having had a bit too much champagne, I staggered downstairs. To my consternation, several pieces of my underwear were hanging from the chandelier. Bras, panties, pantyhose — all had been raided from the dryer in the laundry room and festooned the crystal. A few hours later, I walked into the powder room and was horrified to see that someone had written “DEATH TO THE JEWS!” on the wallpaper with a black marker. I knew it wasn’t one of my guests since I had seen the last one out. I immediately called the caterers, who suspected the two waiters. They called back to say that the two men couldn’t be located and had given false names and contact information.
That did it. Ben called Artie and told him he had to bring over another mezuzah right away. It was an emergency. Artie was there in an hour. He nailed the mezuzah to the doorsill, and we all said a prayer. We didn’t have another problem after that.
I realize there are many observant Jews who might think that my having a mezuzah seems frivolous. For them it is a religious symbol, the following of God’s word. For me it is more of a spiritual amulet, a blessing over my home from a beloved friend.
I have long felt a connection to Judaism. My father was among those who liberated Dachau, the German concentration camp. I grew up looking at the photographs from that day he kept in scrapbooks in his office. (Some are now in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.) I never had Jewish friends growing up as an Army kid. It wasn’t until I moved to Washington at 16 and, later, attended Smith College that I made Jewish friends. Ben and I both liked the Jewish traditions: keeping Shabbat, the reading of Proverbs (“A woman of valor, who can find? Her price is far above rubies”). At Passover, we learned the meaning of “Dayenu” (“it would have been enough”). We were taken with the blessing at Yom Kippur, “May your name be inscribed in the Book of Life,” and the sound of the shofar. We loved the humor, the debating, the wisdom.
When Ben died nine years ago, I asked a Jewish friend to say Kaddish, a prayer in honor of the dead, at his funeral at Washington National Cathedral. A year later, I had a yahrzeit (a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the death) for him at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where he is buried.
My son, Quinn, has done a great deal of research on our family history. One day several years ago, he came into my office. “Mom, guess what!” he said. “We’re Jewish!” It turns out that in the early 1400s, a Sephardic Jewish physician named Joshua Lorqui was the Spanish queen’s doctor. He saw the Inquisition coming and converted to Catholicism. Quinn had traced my mother’s family back to him.
The Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7 awakened disturbing memories for me. I had been fascinated by Islam ever since I was the social secretary for the Algerian ambassador, Cherif Guellal. I learned a lot about Islam from him. I loved the gentility and the grace of it. I loved the music and literature, the colors, the food, the gardens and the dancing. I loved the poetry (Rumi: “Kindle in thy heart the flame of Love”). Being from Savannah, Ga., I especially loved the Arab sense of hospitality. You couldn’t leave their house without having a cup of sweet tea and a honey cake.
When the Arab-Israeli War broke out in 1967, Algeria severed relations with the United States, and I was out of a job. I hated the antipathy between the Arabs and the Israelis. Years later, I would go to Israel and Palestine for two weeks to report on both sides of the story. It was eye-opening. In Palestine, I interviewed a farmer who told me in tears that his land, which had been in his family for hundreds of years, had been taken from him by the Israelis and he had no home. I sat at the table with Israelis listening to their tales of the Holocaust and their feeling of finally having found a sanctuary. There never seemed to be an answer, a solution that would be fair to all.
This year, when Hamas massacred about 1,200 Israelis, I was repelled by the barbarity of the attack. When the Israelis struck back, I became disgusted by the indiscriminate killing of so many innocent Palestinians. I’ve been struck by how complicated and polarizing the issue is and how neither side is without its villains. I found it sickening that some supposedly intelligent Ivy League students supported Hamas. The internet blew up with antisemitic rhetoric. Around the world, swastikas and yellow Stars of David were being painted on Jewish buildings, synagogues, homes.
Several weeks ago, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Brooklyn rabbi Rachel Timoner, “Do Not Take Your Mezuza Off Your Door.” She told of a terrified congregant who was considering taking her mezuzah down. She urged people not to do that, not to stop assembling in their synagogues, not to take their stars from around their necks, not to stop living as proud Jews.
It was only then that I remembered I had a mezuzah on my door. I began to wonder whether I or my family could be targeted because of it. Would people who visited my house be safe? I went to the front door and looked at the mezuzah. It’s fairly unobtrusive, yet every Jewish visitor instantly recognizes it. Antisemites might, too. I agonized about whether I should take it down. Few would notice, and I would definitely feel safer. Yet it seemed to me that taking it down would be a betrayal of everything I believed in, maybe even a betrayal of Artie.
And then I thought about my father taking me to Dachau. Inscribed on a stone near the huge iron gate there are the words “Denket Daran Wie Wir Hier Starben” — “Remember how we died here.”
I was stricken with shame. I knew that the silence of good people had enabled the Holocaust to take place. Of course I would not take the mezuzah down. It had protected me for 40 years. It would stay.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyxtc2ipqerX2d9c3%2BOamloaWFkwKK4y7Jkqq2Zo7tuucSzrLOZmGKxsLvRqaasrF8%3D