New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
JCC’s ‘mayor’ hopes to get job back
Furloughed as center’s physical ed director due to the pandemic
A“Hopefully the virus doesn’t last too much longer and the center can regain its footing. They feel as bad about it as I do.” Allan Greenberg, on his furlough from his job as physical education director of the Greater New Haven JCC due to the pandemic
llan Greenberg, known as “the mayor” of the Greater New Haven Jewish Community Center, where he has worked for 49 years, is wondering when and if he will be able to get rehired as physical education director.
The coronavirus pandemic hit the JCC particularly hard, as it relies on social activities, including sports teams and leagues. That’s why Greenberg has always been so important there.
“The stuff I was doing is not happening,” Greenberg said recently when I met him at the
JCC. “There are no volleyball leagues, no basketball leagues, no racquetball, no kids’ programs.”
There were a few people using the fitness center last Wednesday afternoon and some staffers on hand, but the building is not humming along at full tilt the way it did before the pandemic. The pool can be used but a reservation is required. Classes are being conducted “virtually.”
Greenberg is not angry that he was furloughed in September. “I understand the center’s financial plight. This is one of the industries having difficulties with COVID.”
Greenberg repeatedly told me he hopes to be brought back. “Hopefully the virus doesn’t last too much longer and the center can regain its footing.
They feel as bad about it (his furlough) as I do.”
Indeed, Scott Cohen, the JCC’s executive director, told me “we feel terrible” about furloughing Greenberg. “We really see it as temporary. Having him here is a huge portion of this place’s life. Just think of the amount of people he has influenced in his time here!”
Cohen said the JCC has lost approximately 45 percent of its members because of the pandemic. “But about 3,000 people have remained and faithfully pay their membership. We thank them profusely. Many of them are doing it as a donation; they don’t come in because of COVID.”
Cohen recalled the devastating fire which struck the JCC building on Amity Road in Woodbridge in 2016.
“We’ve been through this before. We came out of that fire. We had to rebuild our membership then. So I’m optimistic.”
He noted the JCC got started in 1912 and Greenberg has been there for almost half of its existence. But Greenberg’s grandparents and other relatives were with the JCC long before he arrived. He is carrying on a longtime family tradition.
“My grandparents, Michael and Sarah Greenberg, had the first kosher restaurant in New Haven: the Kosher Ideal Restaurant, in the Oak Street neighborhood.”
When redevelopment wiped out that area, his grandparents brought their restaurant into the JCC, then at 1156 Chapel St. “I hung out there. Maybe I made a soda or something.”
One day at the JCC he noticed an attractive young lady using the payphone. He struck up a conversation with her and gradually they began to spend more time together. This was his future bride, Ellen.
“My wife’s grandfather Abe Markle was president of the JCC in the 1940s,” Greenberg noted.
“We have a lot of nepotism here,” he joked. “My sister-inlaw Debra Kirschner is the camp director.”
There’s more. Greenberg’s father, Arthur Greenberg, was the receptionist and “greeter” at the door of the JCC from 2001 “until the day he died in January 2019, at 96. That job created a second life for him after my mother died. And I got to see him every day.”
Greenberg also regularly got to see his daughter Allison at the JCC because she entered its day care there when she was three months old. “She grew up here,” he said. He recalled “sneaking out” of the JCC, taking a break from his around-the-clock schedule, “to see her before she went to sleep.”
Greenberg’s longtime friend Barry Berman, who sent me an email last February to tell me about Greenberg’s many years of service, was impressed by his dedication. “After spending long days and nights at the JCC, he was never farther than a beeper or cellphone away – getting calls in the wee hours to tackle issues resulting from snow storms, pool problems, electricity outages, etc.,” Berman wrote.
“Allan has coached and mentored thousands of children and adults in JCC sports,” Berman added, “always with a smile, encouragement and tremendous sense of fairness. They all feel that he is part of their families. It’s been said he’s been to more bar and bat mitzvahs than rabbis.”
Berman quoted Mark Sklarz, a former JCC president: “Allan is the best ambassador the JCC could possess. Children see through him the highest values of integrity, sportsmanship and respect.”
Martha Weisbart, a former JCC assistant executive director, called Greenberg “the heart and soul” of the JCC.
Berman sent that email to notify me the JCC was planning to honor Greenberg with the inaugural Allan Greenberg Award on May 3. But of course COVID made that event impossible.
“I think it’s been canceled three times,” Greenberg told me when I asked him about the ceremony. “They’ll do it when they can.”
Greenberg knows it won’t happen this year, which sets up the possibility of a 50th anniversary award. “That would be nice,” he acknowledged when I brought it up. But he said it’s more important to him that he be allowed to work there next year.
“I’m 70,” he said. “I don’t want to retire completely. If I can’t work here, I’ll look for some kind of work I don’t take home with me. Something simple.”
If he does take a job somewhere else, it will mark the first time in his life he has worked for someone other than the JCC. He was hired part-time to coach Biddy Basketball for the JCC in 1971. In 1974, the year after he graduated from what then was Southern Connecticut State College, he became a fulltimer.
“This center is a great place with a mission, trying to help people,” Greenberg said. “My mission is trying to teach values to children and make them better people.”