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The Short Vort
Good Morning!
Today is Thursday, the 18th of Tishrei 5783, and October 12, 2022
Irving’s Kosher Pizza
Every Chol HaMoed Succos, I am reminded of Irving’s Kosher Pizza in Canarsie.
Every Chol HaMoed, we would pick up a pie and have Oneg Yom Tov in our Succah!
Growing up in Canarsie meant Irving’s Pizza any time of the year and basketball games at Billdersee Park in the summer.
However, I especially cherish the memories of Irving’s Pizza on those hot summer days of 1973.
Every summer morning, I would arrive at the park by 10 a.m., baseball in hand, and practice dribbling, dunking, and throwing foul shots on my own for about an hour.
At about eleven o’clock, the other fellows gathered: Vinnie and his brother Anthony from the local Catholic School; Tyron and Darren, who attended the now-defunct South Shore High School; and my friend Allan from yeshivah.
For two hours during the steamy Brooklyn summer, two yeshivah boys, two Italian boys from Catholic School, and two young Black men from the local high school would engage in an extreme physical competition of successive three-on-three games of 21.
We would switch and mix the teams.
Finally, at about 1 p.m., when the temperature soared over 90 degrees, and our bodies were drenched with sweat, we would exchange high-fives and call it a day.
Allan and I said goodbye to our four comrades as they headed to the local Burger King.
Then we walked from East 81st Street to Flatlands Avenue – a distance of less than 500 feet.
During those 500 feet, Allan and I stopped talking about basketball. We began mentally preparing to enter the Kodesh HaKedoshim of every kid in Canarsie.
Its official name was Irving’s Kosher Pizza and Knishery. But to the Jews Canarsie, it was simply Irving’s.
The first thing that hit you upon entering Irving’s was the aroma of hot pizza and onion pletzels.
Then you’d see Irving himself, a muscular Jewish man in his fifties in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and white apron, making pizza to pay for ambulances to be sent to Israel via Magen David Adom.
As we entered Irving’s, we were no longer American kids playing basketball with the neighborhood boys. We became part of a landsmanshaft of Holocaust survivors, and Irving was our rebbe.
This rebbe of ours had an athletic body with huge arms that could pound hundreds of pounds of dough without the help of any foreign workers.
There was no Spanish here – only Yiddish – because every pizza, knish, and pletzel was hand-kneaded, rolled, and baked by the man whose body was battered, yet, not beaten in the Gehinom on Earth known as Auschwitz.
Irving Finkelstein, born in 1925 in Poland, had had his Jewish education cut short by the Holocaust. He was a man who, despite the hatred and torture he experienced, loved all people. He particularly loved us kids and was happiest when he gave us treats in shul every Shabbos.
His time in Auschwitz was not just his first-class ticket to the next world.
His time there was his constant reminder of his entire raison d'être: the perpetuation of the Jewish people.
Allan and I used to settle in, order our pizzas, and marvel as we watched Irving in perpetual motion: rolling out a pizza, handling the register, or popping a pletzel in the oven.
If you came in with a dollar, you could get a slice of pizza for 35 cents, a knish for a quarter, and a small fountain coke for 15 cents. With the remaining 25 cents, you had a dessert of onion pletzel, and life was perfect.
Irving prepared the onion pletzel with a thin crust topped by a heap of onion. He baked it in the oven until the rim was perfectly toasted -- but the middle, lavished with onions, remained soft and mushy. The fusion of chewy crust, pillowy center, and caramelized onions was as close to Olam HaBah as we Canarsie kids could imagine.
Best of all, Irving himself would leave his spot behind the counter and personally serve us the steaming delicacy. And he approached, hot pletzel in hand, we would, on cue, rise.
We knew, without being told, that if not for this unassuming, hard-working Jew and those like him, we would have been eating across the street with Vinny, Tony, Tyron, and Darren.
The white apron and flour streaks couldn’t disguise Irving’s resilience.
Irving and his fellow survivors watched their worlds crumble, then started again in a new country.
They took any work they could find – without expecting any favors or shortcuts.
While we sensed something holy about this local pizza store and its muscular proprietor, we could never properly tell Irving how we felt.
The most we could say was a quick “Thanks, Irving” when we finished eating and headed out, clutching cups of soda with rapidly-melting ice cubes.
The big man behind the counter would raise his huge arm and wave and simply say, “Tanks for kumming and stay vell.”
There was a world that needed rebuilding, tzedakah to be raised, and pizza to be baked, and Irving had no time for idle chatter.
When Vinny, Tony, Tyron, and Darren exited Burger King, they were satiated from food. When we left Irving’s, we were saturated with the scent of Gan Eden.
“If Not Now, Then When?”- Hillel
Ron Yitzchok Eisenman
Rav
Congregation Ahavas Israel
Passaic, NJ
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