By Lillian Rizzo
On a cold Thanksgiving morning, music is softly trickling out from the Haber Houses Senior Center off of Surf Avenue. Rather than the standard holiday season music, however, a lone Yiddish singer is crooning songs that seem to seep through the walls of this concrete building with gated windows.
Inside, the recreation room is filled with Russian and Jewish elderly. They sit eating kosher turkey legs and fruit plates. An Israeli flag sags amid the Thanksgiving decorations that surround it. Once they’ve received their food, the seniors walk slowly toward the long rectangular tables. Some sit across from one another and chat in Russian. Others nod off at their seats while they wait between servings.
Etty Friedman works for the Jewish Community Council of the Greater Coney Island. She is the director of the center and main organizer of the senior annual turkey “dinner,” despite the fact that it runs from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Friedman says that most of the people here are only spending the holiday with each other and have no other family to visit them. Like one of its fellow centers at the Marlboro Housing Projects in Gravesend, the center sets up this event to make sure the elderly have a chance to eat some turkey on Thanksgiving.
Over the last decade, the dinner has attracted an influx of Russian immigrants. As they hold their turkey raffle, two volunteers from the center speak Russian to the audience, which is made up almost entirely of Jews or Russians, save for one Asian man in the room who is picking at a turkey bone and talking to no one.
“Would be helpful if we could speak Russian, huh?” says Friedman, who is only able to speak Yiddish.
As the music plays, couples get up and prepare to dance. They move glacially; the single women reach for each other’s hands and begin to sway. There is a small dance floor at the front of the room where the rabbi stands and where two couples are crunched together as they dance. The others begin dancing in the aisles. The staff navigates around their shifting bodies as they pick up empty plates.
The women form circles of about five or so and take turns dancing in the center. Some men start a conga line to Hava Nagila. Moving throughout the room, the line slowly grows like added weights to a pendulum swing. As Friedman is saying goodbye to the rabbi, the women try to coax her to dance. With a slight yawn, Friedman politely declines and ushers some plates to the kitchen.
The dinner is drawing to a close but the crowd shows no signs of leaving, or wanting to for that matter. The singer is still belting out Hava Nagila and even more seats are left empty as the residents fill the dance floor. The staff has given up trying to weave in between them to clean up and hug the wall while the men and women dance and sing along.
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