“Sinatra introduced me to almost everyone he knew ”
A rabbi had a dream of fighting racism, and Frank Sinatra made it happen. Anthea Gerrie goes to Hollywood to meet the man who founded the Simon Wiesenthal Centre
ONCE UPON a time, Rabbi Marvin Hier was an unconnected outsider, a scholar who loved the movies and had a dream of establishing a yeshiva in Los Angeles, home of the movie industry.
Now — thanks in part to Frank Sinatra, the star whose photo he kept on his desk as a teenager —he is the 82-year-old rabbi who knows everyone. Presidents, princes, showbiz royalty — all have met him and supported his work at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre which he heads. Hier not only knows many Oscar winners, he’s even won a couple himself.
The centre — named after the famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal — campaigns worldwide against all forms of racism. It runs the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, is building a similar institution in Jerusalem, and does much work on campus. It also — fittingly for its location— has a film division.
But “without Sinatra there might not be a Simon Wiesenthal Centre,” says Hier. When the rabbi moved to LA, in the 1970s, the city had a sizeable Jewish population but little appetite for memorialising the tragic demise of distant communities. Ol’Blue Eyes had the pulling power to draw pledges, and was prepared to open up his contacts book to make the centre happen.
We meet in his office, where he is not only surrounded by religious books but has a display cupboard facing his desk filled with his own personal movie memorabilia, including those two golden statuettes and his tickets to the ceremonies where he collected them.
But Hier’s story started far away, New York’s Lower East Side. “I spent all my Sundays there in the movies,” he chuckles. But as he cheered on Wyatt Earp and other celluloid heroes in those post Holocaustyears, one question nagged him: “Where were the good guys when it came to saving the Jews?”
It was a question close to his heart, as most of his parents’ relatives had been wiped out by the Nazis. “It was a case of ‘stay shtum’ — no-one wanted to talk about it, and I could not understand why the Holocaust was relegated to the sidelines of Jewish life or why it took so long for a museum telling the stories of the victims and educating about what happened to be established in the United States.”
Dreaming up one himself was always on the cards for a man whose entrepreneurial spirit was honed in his teens when he and his friends picked willow branches to sell at Succot.
The ones they picked were not great — having been attacked by insects — so he made a deal with a plant nursery to provide better ones, and still boost the family finances.
Hier saved enough from the trade for an engagement ring for Marlene. The couple have been married for 59 years, and she has proved an assiduous fund-raiser, using direct mail marketing to recruit a formidable worldwide SWC subscription base.
Marlene’s support and a longestablished habit of taking 10,000 steps a day are the elements Hier credits with the sprightly energy he still brings to his multiple roles in the organisation — that, and an unfailing sense of humour. By the time we meet, the great-grandfather has already walked more than half his quota of steps.
He and his wife left New York originally for the Schara Tzedek congregation in Vancouver, where he honed his writing skills with punchy sermons and established a new community. But then the family took a three-month sabbatical in Jerusalem.
It was the desire for their two sons to have the yeshiva education they enjoyed in Jerusalem but which was not available in Vancouver which led to the move to LA to start an institution of learning in a larger city with a sizeable Jewish population, even though LA had only a small Orthodox community. And while his mission was to start a school rather than a memorial to the Holocaust, Hier somehow managed to establish both at the same time, persuading Wiesenthal, whom he had visited years before in Vienna to lend his name to the enterprise. He appealed for funds, and received a call from Mickey Rudin, Sinatra’s lawyer. “We were in an empty building with nothing but a telephone where we were planning to start the Yeshiva University of Los Angeles”, he remembers. “He told me to expect to hear directly from Sinatra, who invited my wife and me to his home in Palm Springs. Hier explained to the Sinatras that as he kept kosher, he could eat only fruit. “The presentation of the lunch was very elaborate.
Every ten minutes there were new additions, different varieties of fruit which came out. Barbara could not have been a more gracious hostess; she and Frank ate fish, and as there was lettuce and tomato, my wife had a salad.”
“He asked his neighbour Danny Schwartz to come over and told him: ‘bring the Jewish directory’. He started calling names there and then and became a member of our board of trustees.”
Sinatra, had in 1948 famously provided $1m for the Haganah to pay a ship captain with a cargo of arms bound for Israel. He also persuaded Elizabeth Taylor to conarrate Genocide, the first of two Oscar-winning films produced by Hier. The rabbi had to lunch the star at the Polo Lounge, to seal the deal. There she ate salad while he nibbled on slices of melon, but later, filming in London, she shared the salt beef sandwiches the rabbi had brought in from Blooms.
Once Sinatra was involved, the project took off. The celebrity support came through donations, endorsements and also unpaid contributions to movies which won Hier two producer Oscars and a Netflix deal. He is the only rabbi, to the best of his knowledge, to have been made a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures.
No wonder Newsweek twice named him among America’s top most influential rabbis, although he plays it down. “I can’t pick up the phone to Putin,” he points out when we meet, “but I have met a distinguished army of world leaders, and Sinatra introduced me to almost everyone he knew.” He produces a facsimile of the page in Sinatra’s phone book listing his name and number alongside big names of Tinseltown.
By the time Hier picked up his second Oscar from Robert de Niro in 1998, 16 years after accepting the first, he was a seasoned showbiz pro and familiar face in Hollywood. He recalls Jack Lemmon joshing to Walter Matthau as the duo ran into him backstage, carrying his statuette: “Walter, they must have changed the rules. Once upon a time you had to go to a good acting school to
win an Oscar; now it seems you have to go to a good yeshiva!”
Hier, a born schmoozer, is proud that “we never had to pay five cents” to any of the stars who narrated those Oscar-winning films or 15 others from the same stable. “One often talked the next one into doing it,” he says of the stars who narrated the products of what is now the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre’s in-house moviemaking division, Moriah Films. They include Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dustin Hoffman and George Clooney, who narrated Never Stop Dreaming. This 2018 film celebrating the life of Shimon Peres has been snapped up by Netflix, potentially to be followed in by a new documentary on David Ben Gurion.
It is simply unconscionable that antisemitism is again in vogue in Europe and around the world
Other new enterprises for the story-telling rabbi include new exhibits at the LA Museum of Tolerance, which expanded into a freestanding institution in 1993, and the $100m Museum of Tolerance under construction in Jerusalem.
After Wiesenthal’s death in 2005 Hier asked Nicole Kidman to narrate a film celebrating his life and legacy and later persuaded Sandra Bullock to voice Golda Meir in a film about Israeli prime ministers for which he coached her in her Yiddish lines. Michael Douglas voiced Yitzhak Rabin and Leonard Nimoy Levi Eshkol in the same film, and Sir Ben Kingsley has narrated several Moriah documentaries.
Despite all his success, his access to world leaders and celebrities, and his work raising awareness of all forms of racism, Hier still laments his failure to eradicate the hate polluting the world: “It is simply unconscionable that antisemitism is again in vogue in Europe and around the world,” he reflected in his memoir, Meant To Be.
However, the ongoing challenges only reinforce his efforts to raise yet more money for more films, exhibits and institutions intended to produce a better future by teaching lessons from the past. “History has taught us that we have paid a grave price for indifference; there can be no bystanders in this battle.”
Like those western heroes he applauded in the picture palaces in his teens, Hier is determined in his ninth decade not to sit back and become one of the good men who do nothing while evil triumphs.