THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 7, 1995 TAG: 9511070259
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
While world leaders mourned warrior and peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin half a world away in Jerusalem, Saul Glickman was laid to rest as a kindred spirit.
Unlike the assassinated Israeli leader, he never achieved fame - unless you count the time during his Portsmouth boyhood when he won the city marbles championship.
Nevertheless, just as they converged in death, he and Rabin walked parallel roads in life - waging war and making peace.
``He wasn't any great, grand figure,'' said his widow, Sarah Glickman. ``But he was a most marvelous person.''
Disappointing his parents, he dropped out of pharmacy school to become a professional baseball player. Then World War II came along, and he traded his bat for a gun.
As a member of the 83rd Infantry Division, he was in the second wave of Allied troops who stormed the beaches at Normandy. He would later tell his son, Charlie, about watching in horror as fellow soldiers were mowed down in the surf by German bullets.
But he never talked about what came after that - entering the concentration camps where German Jews had been corralled by the Nazis.
Like Yitzhak Rabin, Saul Glickman ``was among the liberators of a people that was marked for destruction,'' Rabbi Israel Zoberman said in his eulogy. ``Though the two did not know one another personally, they've come together, because both have served the cause of shalom - the cause of peace.''
And just as the old soldier Rabin went on to build bridges between Jews and Arabs in the Mideast, Zoberman said, Glickman became known as a bridge-builder between Hampton Roads' Jewish and African-American communities.
Charlie Glickman traced his father's racial tolerance to his boyhood in a predominantly black neighborhood of Portsmouth where his parents, Lithuanian immigrants, ran a grocery store.
``Until he was 14, all of Dad's friends were basically black people,'' his son said.
After the war, Saul Glickman worked until retirement in the accounting office of Norfolk Naval Shipyard. He died Friday at 83.
He was buried Monday in a small Jewish cemetery nestled alongside a railroad track off Interstate 664 in Chesapeake.
Dwarfed by stately old trees, a small group of family and friends recited the mourners' Kaddish, a prayer extolling the virtues of God. Then they watched in the crisp fall air as an Army honor guard lifted the U.S. flag off the simple pine coffin with the Star of David on top. A train whistle sounded in the distance as the soldiers folded the flag and presented it to Glickman's widow ``on behalf of a grateful nation.''
Saul Glickman was buried next to his brother-in-law, Emanuel Baras, Sarah Glickman's brother, who was killed by a German mine explosion as a 19-year-old infantryman in 1944.
Rabbi Zoberman, the son of Polish Holocaust survivors, served in the Israeli army while Rabin was chief of staff in the 1960s. He said the slain leader and Saul Glickman both ``helped us to believe that the world can be transformed.'' ILLUSTRATION: As a member of the 83rd Infantry Division, Saul Glickman was in
the second wave of Allied troops, who stormed the beaches at
Normandy during World War II.
by CNB