Nine decades in, Seymour Lachman is still the consummate public servant

Photos: Jeff Zorabedian

IT was a lazy spring Saturday in the early 1970s in the mixed Italian/Jewish neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn — the kind of afternoon when many of the locals could be found taking in a ball game at the park or polishing their cars.

Not this day, however. Word had leaked that none other than New York City’s Mayor John Lindsay was coming to these parts, bringing the area’s staunchly conservative Italian-American residents out in force in a spontaneous show of displeasure with Lindsay, their liberal Democratic nemesis. Scores of people gathered outside the apartment building on Avenue P which the mayor had come to visit, as shouts of “Down with Lindsay! Down with Lindsay!” reverberated throughout the surrounding streets.

But why in the first place had Lindsay made the trip — police entourage, blaring sirens and all — from Gracie Mansion to Brooklyn, just a few miles from Bensonhurst but worlds away politically? He was there to hold a meeting of the New York City Board of Education at the home of Dr. Seymour Lachman.

The Board — a five-member body charged with setting policy for the city’s sprawling public school system — usually met either at City Hall or at Board of Education headquarters at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. But this time, Mayor Lindsay had convened a Board meeting for a Saturday, and when Lachman learned of it he explained to the mayor that as an Orthodox Jew he would be unable to attend.

“I know about the Sabbath,” the mayor countered. “But I can travel to you, can’t I?” Despite Lachman’s attempt to explain that this, too, was not in keeping with what he called the “spirit of the Sabbath,” the mayor remained unmoved.

That Shabbos afternoon, an official meeting of the Board went forward in the Lachman living room. It was a day to remember for Bensonhurst, but just another day in the colorful life of a consummate public servant, Seymour Lachman.

Over a career spanning decades in academia, politics, and Jewish communal activism, Dr. Lachman has worn many prestigious hats — but always, with a yarmulke proudly perched underneath.

Sitting with Dr. Lachman in the comfortably furnished apartment he shares with his wife, Susan, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s clear that although he’s no longer teaching or politically active, retirement for this nearly 91-year-old isn’t yet on his agenda. Engaged as ever even with a full nine decades behind him, he’s currently hard at work on a soon-to-be-published book — his eighth — this one a memoir of his years as chairman of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and his role in advocating for the Jews once trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Firm as his religious convictions are, however, Dr. Lachman has never been a provocateur looking to flaunt his principles whether others liked them or not. Quite to the contrary, he stresses his belief that it’s both crucial and achievable for disparate segments of society — black and white, Jew and non-Jew, Republican and Democrat — to learn how to get along.