From Persecution to Service: The Chaplain Gary Cohen Story.

North Philadelphia was a tough neighborhood for a twelve year old Jewish boy in 1947 two years after World War II had ended. My father, born in 1898, had been a child eight years old when brought to America from Lithuania, via Kiev, Russia and then South Africa, where his father had died. He used to tell me of his remembrances of Russia, with traders coming in to his town with icicles hanging from their moustaches. His mother, Pearl Cohen, brought him and his two younger brothers, Phil and Harry, to New York in 1906, as they fled from the persecution and prejudices against the Jews that so pervaded Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. They sailed past the Statue of Liberty with a hope of rebuilding their lives, and immediately moved to Philadelphia. She remarried a man name Schwartz, apparently a hard man who treated her roughly, and had two more children--two daughters, Celia and Ida.

My father, Abraham Cohen, although bright, had to quit school after sixth grade, typical of the poorer immigrants of those days, and managed to get a job at the age of twelve cleaning fish on the docks of Philadelphia. When eighteen, he married Mary Segal, a sixteen year old Jewish girl from a family of twelve children, whose sisters always told me how pretty she was. Dan, Hyman, Phil, Rose, Mary, Iris, Isabel, and Ida were eight of their names, in order of their birth. Mary’s family had come from the same area in Lithuania, then Russia as Abe’s, so the match was a natural. . . .

There was, however, another side of my childhood in those days. When I awoke in the morning, every morning, when I would leave our house, always walking through our store, I would see across the bricks of the wall of our corner row house, written in large freshly chalked letters, words such as, “Jew” and “Dirty Jew.” Then, when I walked the half mile to M. Hall Stanton Elementary School at 16th and Cumberland Streets, I was daily greeted with catcalls of “Jew” this and “Jew” that. It was a day when anti-semitism was still strong, despite the monstrous discoveries of the Satanic evil of Hitler’s death camps, which were emptied in 1945 by the United States and Allied liberation.

It was a tough neighborhood, with Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish immigrants and others. We had a Jehovah’s Witness family on the street, which at that time mystified me--I knew little about the different religions then. In North Philadelphia parents, instead of teaching their children to respect others of different faiths and backgrounds, pushed them to pick fights and beat up anyone who was different. Of course, since then I have met many wonderful wholesome people from all of these groups, so I do not for one instant have ill thoughts towards any group. I am only, however, relating what went on in Oakdale, Tucker, Bouvier, and Sydnham streets in Philadelphia in those days. . . .

At first some people urged me to “tell their mothers.” I tried it a couple of times and was abruptly told by both mothers that they teach their children “to take care of themselves” and that was the end of it. Amusingly as I look back, from age 7 to 12, I was sent to Camp Shalom for eight weeks each summer. This was a camp for Jewish children; I was really too young to be in camp for the entire summer, but staying home only meant endless fights so no doubt I was better off. Unfortunately my dear mother would remark, while working in our grocery store, to some of the neighborhood boys (or hoodlums, to be more accurate), that, “Gary was learning to fight at camp.” In that neighborhood that was like letting the hyenas smell meat. Also, unfortunately, the fighting at Camp Shalom among its refined Jewish clientele, was strictly supervised, three three-minute rounds, wearing heavy boxing gloves, with someone your own weight, and with a counselor as the referee. Fighting these “nice boys” was inadequate preparation for the brutal fights with street hardened kids that went on in the neighborhood. My wonderful mother, Mary, meant well, but I was always welcomed back in that last week of August by tough boys waiting in line to fight me.

I was a reader and a student, and throughout my life I would read “How-to” books on every subject and would noticeably improve. Thus as a teen, I purchased a thin book on How to Fight Using Ju Jitsu, which in those days was before Karate or Kung Fu or Tae Kwon Do became more dominant. I also began to lift weights at home, then in my latter teens regularly went to Fritze’s Gym in Germantown Philadelphia. I mastered to some extent two techniques of throwing someone over your shoulder and some other tricks. (These actually work best with someone near your own weight.) Then, as providence would have it, a strange tough kid at the Avenue Movie at Germantown and Leigh Avenues, accosted me outside the boys bathroom during an intermission between pictures. (By the way, it cost ten cents in those days to go to the Saturday matinee.) He started to pick a fight, and I promptly grasped his right hand with my two hands (as the book had instructed), rotated right, bent over and yanked him, and he flew in the air over my shoulder and hit the ground! He got up and said, “Wow, that was neat! Where did you learn that?” and before I could answer, he walked away never to be seen again.
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