'My Grandmother’s Candlesticks': Honoring a grandma who resisted assimilation

The book My Grandmother’s Candlesticks goes beyond exploring an immigrant grandmother’s role in ensuring Jewish continuity in the family. As a grandmother herself, the author, Diane Schulder Abrams, speaks for a generation of contemporary female elders who have led extraordinary careers while keeping their Jewish values front and center.

While the Lubavitcher Rebbe gave thousands upon thousands of blessings, often in return the esteemed Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson assigned the recipients of those blessings tasks that he knew were challenging but well within reach. Schulder Abrams’s memoir is a triumph, inasmuch as the Rebbe’s personal request to her has at last been accomplished. At the age of 87, Schulder Abrams has fulfilled a promise to the Rebbe, with the publication of My Grandmother’s Candlesticks: Feminism and Judaism, A Multigenerational Memoir.

The author’s relationship with the Rebbe dates back to 1974, when she accompanied her fiancé, then-Bronx borough president Bob Abrams, on the first of countless visits to meet with him.

She was surprised by the Rebbe’s keen interest in her life and her thoughts. He certainly took note that the smart young attorney was both an ardent feminist and an advocate for traditional Jewish values, and saw no contradiction.

At that first meeting, she mentioned that she had interviewed her father – CEO of Gibraltar Corporation of America, a commercial financial concern – to find out not about his illustrious career but, of all things, about his Polish mother, the author’s grandmother Rose. At a time in her young life when she was pulled in the direction of feminist activism among New York’s brightest and most vocal, she was keenly aware that her father, his siblings, and she herself adhered to traditional Jewish values, just as her grandparents did. 

The Rebbe responded to reading her inspiring interview in Jewish Life magazine by urging her to expand it into a book.

Meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe

One Sunday in New York City in the early 1990s, as Schulder Abrams was standing in line outside the imposing red brick Chabad Lubavitcher Headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, the Rebbe turned to her. “You promised me some time ago to write a book of memoirs about your grandmother,” the author recalls the Rebbe saying.

Schulder Abrams was stunned and certainly caught off guard. She had been 23 when her grandmother died in 1961 and, while they were close, Rose didn’t talk much about her own experiences. The author admits, “There was much that I didn’t know about her life.” 

But one thing was clear. Among the many grandchildren she was blessed with from her six children, Rose worried in particular about Diane. She bequeathed the centerpiece of her Shabbat table, two slender silver candlesticks, to the granddaughter struggling to strike the right balance between her legal career, political activism, and a Torah way of life.

Rose and her husband, William Schulder, were respected members of their Orthodox community on New York’s Lower East Side and later in Williamsburg. The author describes them as the backbone of a community where homes were open to those in need. Music, holidays, religion, and ethics, Schulder Abrams observed, “were all interwoven into a harmonious whole. There was a certain relationship between the kind of community in which she lived and the kind of person that she was. She always counseled us to speak well of people. She used to say, ‘Nobody’s perfect, and if you want to tear people apart, you can do it to anybody.’

“Even though she didn’t talk about herself much, and I didn’t think to ask for more details, my grandmother was a constant in my life.... It isn’t just the facts but also the spirit, the warmth, the sense of the person that I really wanted to capture and convey in this book.”

Brief glimpses in My Grandmother’s Candlesticks depict Rose as a take-charge matriarch with a big heart.

Schulder Abrams sought ways to redress the gap between the known and the unknown aspects of her grandmother. To carry around the weight of the Rebbe’s request for a book without being able to fulfill it was not something the author took lightly. The problem was not that she didn’t want to, but she was stuck in terms of how to approach writing about a woman who hadn’t seen much point in talking about herself. She was stuck, too, on the question of how this book should end. To make headway, Schulder Abrams took an oral history course at Columbia University to learn how to go about doing genealogical research. She followed this up with a visit to her grandmother Rose’s shtetl in Lizhensk, Poland.

An ardent feminist in the 1960s

Schulder Abrams was a graduate of the prestigious Columbia Law School when such women were still very few, coming of age in the early 1960s with an acute awareness that she had opportunities that were unthinkable for women of her grandmother’s and her mother’s generations.

“I came of age in the 1960s in America, when activism became for many, and for me certainly, almost a substitute for religion. What I didn’t see then is that this can come at a great cost,” she reflects wistfully in the memoir, referencing the high price she paid for her achievements.

She was one of three women lawyers asked to submit a chapter for Robin Morgan’s seminal book Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Working closely with charismatic activist, attorney, and founder of the Feminist Party, Florynce Kennedy, in 1951 one of the first Black women to graduate from Columbia Law School, together they wrote the book Abortion Rap, which was cited in a brief submitted to the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, leading to the Supreme Court’s finding restrictive abortion laws unconstitutional.

Her list of achievements was not confined to the courthouse. Schulder Abrams was an academic, too, and introduced the first Women and the Law courses at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. In 1970, future Supreme Court judge professor Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who also had attended Columbia Law School during the same period, requested a copy of Schulder Abrams’s curriculum for the Women and the Law course Ginsberg introduced at Columbia Law School.

When Schulder Abrams was given her own half-hour public access TV program in New York, she featured interviews with a roster of guests that reads like a who’s who of New York personalities, politicians, and activists at the forefront of the feminist movement: Estée Lauder, Carol Bellamy, Matilda Cuomo, Geraldine Ferraro, Jane Fonda, Betty Friedan, among other successful women.

Questioning Jewish identity

The author had Jewish faith hardwired into her childhood identity in the way that, she’s thrilled to say, her children and grandchildren similarly were raised – in their case, in Jewish day schools and seminaries in New York and Jerusalem that provide both joyful and uncompromising Torah-based education. But her parents made the startling decision of enrolling her as a teenager at a public school that was much closer to their home in Lawrence. She describes going through, in her teenage years, an intense period of questioning her Jewish identity, especially after her parents made the decision to take her out of the Hebrew Institute of Long Island. Why her parents made that decision could have been delved into in a chapter unto itself, but, alas, it’s left to the reader’s imagination to guess why.

“I managed to hold on to my religious beliefs for about three years, despite all the various ways those beliefs were being whittled away, but by the time I was 17 as a senior in Lawrence High School I remember coming home from school, days and days in a row, closing the door to my bedroom, having bad headaches, thinking what for me was the unthinkable – that perhaps the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai might never have happened. It felt like a betrayal and was devastating, as if I had been led to believe a lie. I didn’t really discuss my growing doubts with anyone. People didn’t speak much about their inner feelings in those days.”

Attending public high school, Schulder Abrams observed that “the Jewish students seemed to have little knowledge or interest in religion or religious practice. Though most had a religion nominally, it seemed to have little relation to what they said, thought, or did.”

The Magazine can relate to this crisis of faith. If it didn’t happen to us directly, it happened to someone close. Schulder Abrams notes that her university education exacerbated the problem of whether or not to believe in God. She remembers as if it were yesterday: “The assumption at the university amongst many of the faculty and students seems to be an outlook that took for granted that God was long since dead and buried.”

Becoming a politician’s wife

Reclaiming her late grandmother’s candlesticks from a box in the family garage, polishing them, and lighting the candles at the lowest point in her Jewish identity crisis became life-changing.

Week by week, cultivating a Jewish circle of friends, marriage seemed far off. Now in her thirties, she was called “too picky.” Schulder Abrams told her father that she would only date a man who shared her strong objections to the Vietnam War. His reaction was so incredulous, it’s funny: “That’s the dumbest reason I’ve ever heard!”

Nevertheless, it was Jacob Schulder who led his daughter to a rabbi who knew charismatic Bronx borough president, Jewish bachelor Bob Abrams. The two singles were so busy with their lives, that it took a year for their first date to take place. They were smitten, and although Bob wasn’t Shabbat observant, Diane was able to convince him that his presence at the Shabbat dinner table was a main condition for going forward with marriage.

Throughout Bob’s political career, Diane helped out in his political campaigns by attending meetings with constituents and supporters. Soon after their marriage in 1974, Rachel was born, and nearly 10 years later, with a blessing from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Becky miraculously completed the family when Schulder Abrams became a mother for the second time at nearly 49 years of age.

Now, after 50 years, the couple remain so close that they both took part in this Magazine interview – which they also did as a pair a few years back when the Magazine interviewed Bob Abrams soon after the publication of his memoir, The Luckiest Guy in the World: My Journey in Politics.

A ‘mazeldik’ life

As documented in a video clip, while standing in line to hand out dollar bills the Lubavitcher Rebbe was recorded saying to Schulder Abrams: “I give you a blessing that when you write the book, everything in life will be mazeldik for you.”

The couple instilled in their daughters a deep love for Israel around lively Shabbat meals with many guests, and an Orthodox Jewish education. Yet Diane and Bob were caught off guard when their daughters married American husbands and proceeded to make aliyah. 

Today, many in Jerusalem know Diane and Bob as the sprightly couple who recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary at their children’s lively and traditional shul, Shir Hadash, in Talbiyeh. They recently bought an apartment minutes from Shir Hadash and near their children, while New York City remains their permanent residence.

Respectful of their privacy, Diane is leaving much to her accomplished daughters – Rachel, an anthropologist, mother of five, wife and partner to Rabbi Ian Pear, who built from scratch his much-loved synagogues in Jerusalem, the main synagogue in Talbiyeh and the annex in Emek Refaim; and Becky, an attorney and mother of three, married to Dan Greenwald, an attorney – to reveal in their own time. But clearly, the pride is there in her daughters’ decisions to make Israel their home, through the personal photos included in the book that show glowing grandparents at the center of their Jerusalem family life.

On February 16, 2020, while attending a banquet in the Brooklyn Armory with 3,000 women representing the couples working in Chabad Houses worldwide, Schulder Abrams was so inspired by this annual Women’s International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries, or the Kinus, as it’s called, that it strengthened her commitment to complete this memoir.

“Sitting there that night, thinking about this book with three of its major themes – my grandmother, feminism and Judaism, and continuity – everything seemed to come together.

“As I walked out of the building, I left on a high, with an even greater sense of the enthusiasm and dedication these women had for their work. I was uplifted to see them as living examples of the amazing ability of women to make important contributions, as the Rebbe always stressed, to their community and the world.”

Celebrating Rose Schulder’s traditional Jewish values, along with the Schulder Abrams’s professional accomplishments in the academic field of women and the law, My Grandmother’s Candlesticks is an important book that celebrates both women’s progress and traditional Jewish values in the same breath. The Rebbe reminds us, too, that feminism and the empowerment of women are in perfect harmony with a Torah way of life.

Readers may be inspired to rush out and write about their own candlestick stories – if they are blessed to have a grandmother around to ask. 

My Grandmother’s Candlesticks: Judaism and Feminism, A Multigenerational Memoir is published by OU Press, an imprint of the Orthodox Union.

Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi is an Israeli artist and author of the memoir The Wagamama Bride: A Jewish Family Saga Made in Japan.