Oral Histories
Marian Cohen Weiss
Interviewer: The date is March 30th, 2026. This is Bill Cohen from the Columbus Jewish Historical Society and today I am interviewing my sister, Marian Cohen Weiss, W-e-i-s-s. She is in Woodstock, Illinois while I’m here in Columbus. Marian, let’s start with, first of all, did you have a Jewish name when you were born?
Weiss: Well, I believe it was Miriam Chana bat Avram…
Interviewer: Okay.
Weiss: …so that would go along quite well with Marian.
Interviewer: Yes, and what do you remember? Is there, how far back can you trace the family? Do you know who the grandparents were or maybe perhaps great grandparents and perhaps where they were from? Any names or any hints as to, as to your ancestry?
Weiss: Well, several people have actually done family trees that go back quite far, but personally, I only knew my maternal grandparents, as they lived in Columbus and we were able to interact with them. I’ve…
Interviewer: And their names were?
Weiss: Max and Yetta Lopper.
Interviewer: L-o -p-p-e-r.
Weiss: That’s right.
Interviewer: And do you know, do you know what they did? Do you know any details about them?
Weiss: Well, my grandmother was a housewife. My grandfather was a, a fruit salesman, and he sold his wares from a cart led by a horse and that horse was housed at the family home, so he, as far as I know, he went down the street with his horse and cart and sold fruit, probably vegetables, too, and that’s…
Interviewer: Did he sell to the general…go ahead.
Weiss: I believe he sold to the general public, and perhaps, he also went to markets, but I don’t know too much about that, but I was always intrigued that my mother got to have a horse at her house and I never did.
Interviewer: So, your mother, who was also my mother, Beatrice Lopper, she lived with her parents and there was a horse right there at the house.
Weiss: Right, yep, behind…
Interviewer: And do you know what street that was?
Weiss: Oh, if you’d say it, I would know it. I can’t…
Interviewer: At one point I think they lived on Washington Avenue. At another point, I think they lived on Parsons, just south of Livingston, but that’s interesting that there was an actual horse right next to a residential house. Did you…
Weiss: Yes. Behind it.
Interviewer: Wow. Okay and that’s Max and Yetta Lopper, and do we know, were they born overseas in Europe?
Weiss: Yes. I don’t know, I’m assuming my grandfather was born in the same town as my grandmother. I think they came over together and it, they always, was called Austria-Hungary and you know, the borders were always changing, so that’s what it was known as. I don’t know what it would be known now but that’s, that’s what it was called. They also lived with, a cousin lived with them who came over from overseas as well and her name, as we called her, was Tubby, but I think her actual name was Tova. She was a cousin and she was a very good seamstress and worked for The Union in Columbus, The Union store.
Interviewer: Do you remember, did Aunt Tubby and the grandparents, did they speak English or Yiddish or German or, do you remember what they spoke?
Weiss: No. I don’t ever remember my grandparents speaking English. I think my mother always translated for them. There wasn’t a lot of conversation between us even though I visited often with my mother, and you know, I felt that I knew her even though we didn’t converse, and whenever I left the house, she’d put her hands on my head and said a blessing which in Yiddish would translate to “A blessing on your head,”…
Interviewer: That’s a wonderful memory.
Weiss: …and that’s the most that we spoke to each other.
Interviewer: And when you say you visited the grandparents, are you talking about the house they had on Lilley Avenue near Whittier or someplace else?
Weiss: That’s right. Lilley Avenue, and my Aunt Lena also lived there for a great deal of her adult life.
Interviewer: Lena, the sister of our mother.
Weiss: That’s right.
Interviewer: So, now, were you born in Columbus, Ohio or somewhere else?
Weiss: I was born in Springfield, Ohio, where my father was working as a family doctor who would be known as a general practitioner now. That’s where I lived for only the six months of my life, but I was very familiar with Springfield, Ohio, because my parents had very close friendships with the Jewish community there, very close and we went back frequently to visit with them, and all of the people there were known to me by the names “Aunt” and “Uncle” even though we were not related, so I was very familiar with Springfield even though I only lived there for six months.
Interviewer: And you were born what year?
Weiss: 1944, May 10th.
Interviewer: So, after six months there, you and your parents moved to Columbus?
Weiss: No. I believe we moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for a while.
Interviewer: Ah, yes. Do you have any memories of life in Cleveland or were you too young?
Weiss: None at all. I don’t know how old I was when we moved to Columbus. Well, I started, I started preschool in Columbus so I must have been four, maybe five.
Interviewer: So, if you moved perhaps in ’48 or ’49, you went to a preschool. What, do you know what that was or who headed that up or who your teacher was or anything about it?
Weiss: I’m sure it had a name, but it was only known to me as Mrs. Schwartz’s Preschool, I believe, on Livingston Avenue in a big dark red brick house, and I don’t remember too much but we did have some, some Jewish education there. I recall her standing at a big black board with a long pointer stick as she pointed to the different vowels, Hebrew vowels, and we had to repeat, “ti, to, ta” as she pointed to them, and the other thing I remember about it, was that we had a woman come in to play the piano for us. She was blind and brought her German Shephard dog with us, with her, and that was a big highlight of our school day. For some reason…
Interviewer: You’re saying…Go ahead.
Weiss: For some reason, I started there in, it must have been kindergarten. Yeah, don’t have this exactly, but, so I started there in kindergarten, and the school went up a grade or two, but I was deemed to be so advanced that they skipped me into first grade, so, I have always been one year ahead of myself in school because of that. I’ve always been the youngest because I skipped half of kindergarten and half of first grade, so, it wasn’t that impressive when I told people that I skipped a grade and that’s why I was younger. They didn’t know it was kindergarten and first grade.
Interviewer: Still, it counts. Let me ask you this. It’s interesting. You remember even though you were maybe only five years old, you remember learning some Hebrew.
Weiss: I just remember the vowel, the vowel things that we had to learn. We must have learned more than that, but I just, I do see her standing up there with this long stick while we repeated.
Interviewer: So, at some point, you wound up going to public school and when was that and where was that?
Weiss: Well, let’s see. I can’t tell you the exact date. I’d have to do some math. It was probably Nineteen Forty…let’s see, ‘47 maybe? No. That’s too early, must have been ’49 I would think, but they went right to school at Maryland Avenue School and I was started in second grade. It was the first year that they were open and it was considered a very progressively-built school in that the bathrooms were built for small children – small toilets, small sinks, etcetera. We also had a door from each classroom opening on to the playground. Each classroom had a separate door and that was also deemed architecturally very advanced, so I went…
Interviewer: That was Bexley, Bexley Maryland Elementary. Didn’t they have a female principal?
Weiss: Yes, they did – Mrs. Singletary, Miss Singletary. Excuse me. Yes, that was also quite, quite a deal in those days. Yeah.
Interviewer: Now, maybe I’m confused. I thought there was somebody named Miss Scatterday but perhaps I’ve got…
Weiss: You are right. Susan Scatterday. Thank you for helping my brain.
Interviewer: Okay, but that was considered progressive to have a, not just a teacher who was female but a principal.
Weiss: Right. Right, and not only that. We also had in Bexley, two male teachers in elementary school. That was also progressive, so, it was actually flip-flopped in that usually the principal was male and the teachers were female, but at Maryland, the principal was female and we had some male teachers in elementary school.
Interviewer: What are your memories of Maryland Elementary School. Were most of your friends Jewish, or not Jewish, or perhaps you didn’t even know one way or the other?
Weiss: No. I would say my close friends were Jewish, but I had, I had a lot of non-Jewish friends then. I belonged to a Girl Scout troop, Brownies and then Girl Scouts at that age so that included kids of all religions and we became close that way because we had a very active Girl Scout troop.
Interviewer: As far as you…
Weiss: For the most part, for the most part, my close friends were Jewish at that age.
Interviewer: Did you, do you remember going to Sunday School at that point?
Weiss: I did go to Sunday School. I don’t remember a lot about it, except that I was not happy that I had to spend my precious weekend time at another school, but other than that, I don’t remember too much about Sunday School. Course…
Interviewer: And that was which synagogue?
Weiss: That was Tifereth Israel on Broad Street. Everybody went to Sunday School, so we had friends going there. We also had some very dear friends of my parents, Morris and Celia Hackel from Delaware, Ohio, who came all the way from Delaware every Sunday to take their kids to Sunday School and our families were very close. They had three children, who were the same age as my family and I think, as the children were in Sunday School, the parents went out and had coffee or visited at each other’s homes, so that shows how important Jewish education was, because these people came from quite a distance at that time to have their kids participate in Sunday School.
Interviewer: Do you have any memories of how Jewish kids and non-Jewish kids, how they got along or didn’t get along in elementary school, any awareness of that?
Weiss: No, I think we all, we all got along. My, most of my interaction with non-Jewish kids., I think, was through Girl Scouts. Otherwise, there wasn’t a feeling of identifying people by religion.
Interviewer: Now, when you got into what we used to call Junior High, seventh and eighth grade, that was a time for bar mitzvahs. Any memories at all of either bar mitzvahs or bar mitzvah parties?
Weiss: You know, I actually don’t have memories of that, of those, of those kinds of things. I think they were much less elaborate than they are now where they’re almost like weddings and so they, they, they weren’t that memorable. They were pretty cut and dried. Of course, at that time, we did not have bat mitzvahs because girls did not have, were not bat mitzvahed so it was just bar mitzvahs.
Interviewer: Did you do anything at the Jewish Center on College Avenue? Any memories about that place?
Weiss: Oh yes. Yes, that was a, that was quite a hangout for Jewish teenagers at the time. They had a bowling alley, quite a few lanes and we would go bowling there. And then, on Sunday afternoons, at a certain age, and I, it must have been maybe, maybe sixth grade, before we were old enough to rebel against it, we went to dancing lessons at the Jewish Center and the teachers were a husband and wife, Miss Bloom, Dorothy Bloom. And her husband Mr. Nolte, so this is where we were taught the basics of social dancing and I don’t think we girls minded it too much, but I know the boys were not happy about it. They had to go because we had to have partners, you know. We were all dressed up and, I believe, we wore little white gloves, and we learned the basic in-steps – the foxtrot, the, we didn’t learn the tango, but I can’t remember the other ones we learned, the waltz…
Interviewer: Perhaps the box-step or the waltz.
Weiss: It was, yeah, the waltz, the box-step, yes. So, that’s another place that we spent time.
Interviewer: Now when you were about, when you were about…
Weiss: Later…I was just going to say, that later, when were in high school, they had teen dances. In the summer, they were outside and we went to those a lot. As a matter of fact, I think, it wasn’t just for Jewish kids. A lot of the high school-age kids went to those.
Interviewer: And those were at the Jewish Center?
Weiss: Umm-hm, yeah, outside.
Interviewer: Now, around when you were eleven years old, would have been around 1955. Rock and Roll was just beginning. Do you remember? Did Mrs. Bloom teach the jitterbug?
Weiss: Gee, I doubt it.
Interviewer: But you learned it. You learned it, certainly.
Weiss: We might have learned the cha-cha.
Interviewer: Oh, yes.
Weiss: We probably learned the cha-cha, which quite a few rock and roll songs used that, used that step. Now, I don’t think so, although now, one of the highlights that happened at the Jewish Center in those early rock and roll years were that Conway Twitty, who kind of styled himself like Elvis Presley, in his early years, although he became a country singer mostly later, he came to the Jewish Center and gave a performance. It was quite a big deal. We all went to see him.
Interviewer: That was a time when, when the teenagers loved rock and roll and the, a lot of the parents hated it. Any memories of how the Conway Twitty concert went along those lines?
Weiss: No, not really, but I know all the teenagers went and I think it’s a tribute to the Jewish community that they actually invited him.
Interviewer: Yes. Fascinating.
Weiss: I think naysayers were overruled as far as rock and roll went for that occasion.
Interviewer: Fascinating. Now, as you got into your teenage years, you were at Bexley High School.
Weiss: Right.
Interviewer: Any, any memories of the issue of inter-faith dating, either in your own family or among your friends’ families? Was that a big issue?
Weiss: At my house, yes. Interestingly enough, both of my brothers were allowed to date non-Jewish girls, and my parents were quite happy with their selections. However, I was not allowed to date non-Jewish boys, so we had quite a double standard there. Starting in my, I guess, sophomore year, I was quite attracted to a non-Jewish boy whom I was not allowed to date, but I dated him anyway, for several years. I was also able to date Jewish boys and that was a good thing because it kept my parents happy and I was still seeing this other boy on the sly. I have a hard time imagining that they did not know about it, but they never questioned me. I had quite a few non-Jewish friends. We had kind of, kind of two groups, a Jewish friendship circle and a non-Jewish friendship circle and my non-Jewish friends were very helpful in getting me out of the house to see my non-Jewish boyfriend and we had a great time. They were a great group of people and I’m sorry that it had to be that way.
Interviewer: Now, there were, there were some Jewish sororities or groups that were like sororities. Were you involved in any of that in high school?
Weiss: Yes, we had, we had actually a Jewish sorority called Sigma Eta Pi. I believe it was a national sorority. It was organized and it functioned just like a college sorority where you were selected and you were voted on and you had pledged for a year and had to do all kinds of activities to, you know, in order to become a full-fledged member of the sorority. It was kind of fun. We also had like, a hell-night of silly things that the actives made us do, and then we were full-fledged members of the sorority. We had our pins and our bracelets with the Greek letters on them. It was a way of getting out of our group of friends that we stayed with that were the exact same age because we had older sorority sisters from all the classes above us.
Interviewer: And this sorority was really just for Jews?
Weiss: Yes, just for Jewish girls. Yes. I don’t know…
Interviewer: And was there anything…
Interviewer: Go ahead.
Weiss: I don’t know if the non-Jewish girls actually had a sorority but they had, they had their own group that held dances and Jewish girls were not invited to these. I can’t remember the name of it, but they had their own group.
Interviewer: Was there, the sorority, the Jewish sorority that you were in, other than the fact that it was all Jewish girls, was there anything particularly Jewish about it in terms of activities or was it just a purely social thing?
Weiss: It was, yeah, it was purely social. Yeah, purely social. When I, when I was in junior high, I think just junior high, I was a member of USY, United Synagogue Youth, which was a Jewish youth group and we, we did all kinds of Jewish activities and had what we called conclaves, which were gatherings of groups from other synagogues around Ohio and they would come visit us and we would go to Cleveland and visit them for weekends of activities that included services at their synagogues and then other social, social things.
Interviewer: The Excelsior Club was a swimming club on the north side of Bexley, not far from Maryland Elementary School. Do you have any memories of that?
Weiss: Oh, great memories, great memories. That was such a good time. We would just go and spend the whole day and come back just exhausted, just, and fall asleep. Remember how good it was to fall asleep after that, but yeah, it was a great place, a good pool. They also had like a dinner club there which we never ate dinner at, but the kids, us kids, when we got so hot and exhausted, would go inside and order a slice of watermelon and that felt so good, that cold watermelon for the rest of us were so hot. There was also a, across the street, a small, what we called a strip mall and there was a drug store there where we would go and buy the romance magazines and then, bring them back to the pool and read them on our reclining chairs. These magazines were very tame compared to what you might find now or even see on your phone, but to us, they were quite titillating.
Interviewer: Did you have any understanding in junior high and high school about why there was a Jewish swimming pool?
Weiss: No, because, you know, I never thought about it as the Jewish swimming pool. It was just the way things were. I mean, there was the Winding Hollow Country Club and then there was the Excelsior Club, and I never thought about those discriminatory clubs and golf clubs, etcetera, as discriminatory. It’s just the way things panned out. I never felt any anti-Semitism spelled out that way and I never experienced any anti-Semitism. We were friends with lots of non-Jewish people and even the things that now I can see separated us in the community, it did not even cross my mind at that time. There was nothing overt, at all.
Interviewer: So, the same, would you say the same is true for the fact that you, there was a Jewish sorority just for Jews and I think you mentioned there that some of the non-Jewish kids, they had their own dances but Jews weren’t invited to those, so is that the same basic thrust of what you saw but didn’t really particularly think about?
Weiss: Exactly. It was just like, you know, you had a group of, you had groups of people that were the quote “popular kids” and then you had groups of people that were the other kids, that it didn’t really strike me, at least, that this was anti-Semitic, even though, you know, it was not that far after the Holocaust and World War II, um, it just didn’t strike us that way. It was just where they went and where we went. I think we didn’t think about it as much as that we were excluded as that they included their friends and we included our friends.
Interviewer: Now, there were other places that Jews would congregate, thinking about Martin’s Kosher Foods, Rubino’s Pizza. Any memories of those two institutions?
Weiss: Well, Rubinos. Gee, I never thought of it as being a Jewish gathering place. I thought everybody went to Rubino’s. I still miss it, and even though I didn’t like the pizza, just the smell of that place brings back so many memories. We all just went there and of course, we remembered the people who owned and worked there and how they answered the phone by slamming their hands down on the receiver, how they wrapped the pizza so that it came to a point at the top, and those booths. Yep, that was a great time. Of course, Martin’s was the go-to place especially on Sunday. My parents were friends with the Godofskys. At least, it seemed that way or maybe Martin was just that friendly towards everybody, but the one thing I do remember about Martin’s was, I tried my very best not to look in the meat case because there was this big cow’s tongue there, the whole tongue and people would actually buy tongue sliced up. Yuck. We never did, thank goodness.
Interviewer: Now, how ‘bout our parents’ friends? Were they mostly Jewish as you remember it?
Weiss: Yes, I think almost every one of them was Jewish except for some friends that my parents had made when my dad was in service. He had friends from Cincinnati that were very dear friends who weren’t Jewish and then there was another couple that I can’t remember, but yes, everyone else was Jewish. Almost all the friends that my mother had were the wives of doctor friends of my father’s, and they were all, they were all very close. They played Poker, I think, once a month at different people’s homes and of course, that included our house and the women played bridge at the same times so it was quite an evening when the Poker Club came to our house. My favorite part of that night was that the women all wore furs, fur coats and I would go in the closet where they hung their coats and pet the furs, especially the beaver coats that were so soft. That’s what I remember about the Poker Club evenings.
Interviewer: That’s a great memory. So…
Weiss: It sure is.
Interviewer: …so, you were talking about our dad, Arthur R. Cohen who was a radiologist and everybody in his poker club were other Jewish doctors or perhaps, one or two accountants. I think there was a Swedlow, Mr. Swedlow.
Weiss: It could be. There was probably a dentist, probably a dentist or two. I don’t…
Interviewer: Now, let’s think about some other relatives. There was an Uncle Morris, a brother of our mother, Morris Lopper. What do you remember about him?
Weiss: Well, he was our Uncle Mo. He had married and divorced, very early, I guess, in my life and had a daughter who would now be called special needs and would probably be living independently but at the time she was sent away to an institution and my mother would go and visit her and I would go with them sometimes, but my Uncle Mo was an attorney. He was in World War II and I believe he was, he was overseas and he got quite a few medals for his service. He was a quiet man, always smoking his pipe, and he would come over to visit us in our home. I would, we would go over to visit her house, his house occasionally and when he had to leave his home and I believe he went to Heritage House, my husband Bruce, and I were the happy recipients of his beautiful oak furniture which is in my dining room to this day.
Interviewer: As I remember, Uncle Mo lived on East Livingston…
Weiss: Yes.
Interviewer: …in what we would call today the inner city. He did not move to Bexley or Berwick or Eastmoor along with most of the other Jews after World War II. He stayed in that inner city area. Is that what you remember?
Weiss: Yeah. I don’t remember him in any other house. I wasn’t aware that it would be considered inner city, but that’s just me.
Interviewer: Then there was another sibling of our mother Beatrice Cohen, and that was Lena Lopper. What do you remember about her?
Weiss: Oh, she was a big part of my life, and she was my second mother. There’s so much I could say about her. She never married. She worked for the Glick Furniture Store and was the personal secretary to Robert Glick for many, many years. Gee, Bill, you’ll have to help me, who she worked for at the state level.
Interviewer: Oh, at some point after Glick’s she worked for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in terms of, there was a division under there, I think called the Peace Officer Training Council which was the agency that trained local police officers, so, yes, you have, you remember it correctly. Lena was the secretary for the director of that division.
Weiss: Um-hm. Right, right down there near Broad and High.
Interviewer: Yes.
Weiss: I would sometime meet her for lunch when she had her, her lunch hour and we would go, we would stay downtown for lunch, but she never married. She didn’t have a lot of good things to say about men in general, even though she worked for some very excellent men and she had good things to say about them. The Glick family was very good to her and, I think, even their children loved my Aunt Lena. I would sometimes go visit her at the store and she would let me help her stuff envelopes for the Glick’s advertisements and sometimes I even got to play in the big display windows. I can’t imagine what I did in there, but that was fun. She visited me often no matter where I was, and she was just always, always there for me. We talked every week when I didn’t live in Columbus. She was quite a swimmer and got her lifeguard training certificates and one thing that she did was to participate in a fundraising activity swimming for something called Swim for Diabetes, which required her to get donations for her to swim different laps at the pool, I guess, at Heritage House or the Jewish Center, yeah, the Jewish Center, so she was a big swimmer.
Interviewer: Now, there’s one story, perhaps you can recount if you do remember it. Back in the days when Aunt Lena and our mother, Bea Lopper, were in their teens and twenties, the rule was that the oldest girl should be married first, but Aunt Lena was older by two years, older than our mother Bea, so, since Aunt Lena never married, that impacted the marriage of our mother and father. Do you know about that?
Weiss: That’s right.
Interviewer: Tell us.
Weiss: Well, I learned about it through the years and I know that it was expected that the older daughter would marry first. Thank goodness my mother didn’t wait for Aunt Lena because she never did marry and I don’t know that she ever had a serious suitor, but just like me, my mother had to keep her relationship with my father somewhat secret, not their dating relationship but when it came time to actually get married, my mother went to Chicago where my father was doing, I believe it was an internship, and they got married in Chicago, secretly. Eventually, of course, they told everyone, but they did not have the kind of wedding that most young Jewish women would have had.
Interviewer: Do we know how the other relatives reacted to that informal violation of the rule about the oldest daughter marrying? Did…
Weiss: Yeah, I don’t…
Interviewer: Did, did our mother’s parents…were they upset?
Weiss: Well, I know that my grandparents, my mother’s parents, liked my, liked my father and they were, I, they welcomed him into the family as they found out. I mean they had known that they were in a relationship for probably a couple of years before they got married, and my father didn’t tell, well, my paternal grandmother had passed away so it was just my paternal grandfather and he, I have letters about my father trying to decide when to tell his father about his marriage and it did take him a while but my father’s father also welcomed my mother quite lovingly into the family. So, perhaps the community was shocked. I don’t know, but it all worked out for the best.
Interviewer: So, you graduated Bexley High School, 1961. What happened in your life after that?
Weiss: A lot. Okay. Well, I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin for all four years. I was in like a little two-year special education program, not special education the way it means now. It was a new thought about the first two years of general coursework were related to each other. For example, if you were doing history of a certain era, you would be, in your English class you would be reading books of that era, etcetera. Anyway, after my first two years, I elected to major in occupational therapy and that, at the time, included quite a few craft and art courses which is just what I loved and that was one reason why I decided to go into O.T. My sorority mother was also in occupational therapy, and while other women, girls were studying for their exams, at the sorority house, she would be doing her knitting project. Wow. That looked good to me, though I also had quite a few other difficult classes, in medical things, anatomy, human anatomy with cadavers, and lots of science classes. University of Wisconsin at Madison was a dreamy place to be, right on the lake. It was all beautiful. I lived at a small boarding house for the first year or so, who also came from Columbus, and then I pledged Sigma Delta Tau sorority and lived in the sorority house. That was a Jewish sorority. At the time, the fraternities and sororities were quite segregated as to religious, as to religions. There were the Jewish sororities and the Jewish fraternities and the non-Jewish, etcetera. Today, they’re much more integrated and much less segregated. So, I had wonderful years in the sorority. I met my husband, Bruce, through mutual friends, a group that we all hung around with. He was, he had transferred to Madison in his, I believe, sophomore year, from Florida, and even though I dated many, many other boys, I, at, by my mid-junior year, we were an exclusive couple and he proposed to me in my senior year and we were married in 1966, coming up on our 65th anniversary in June.
Interviewer: Mazel Tov!
Weiss: Thank you.
Interviewer: So, what happened after that? Where did you live as a married couple at the beginning?
Weiss: We moved around quite a bit, mostly for Bruce’s education and vocation. After graduation, we moved back to Ohio for two years and lived on campus while Bruce was going for his master’s in micro-biology, and it was really nice being on campus. I was an occupational therapist at Dodd Hall which was the OSU Rehabilitation Center, and my Aunt Lil also lived on campus for so much of her life and so close to the rehab center that I would go over to her house for lunch and we would watch the soap operas together before I headed back to work. She was a marvelous, wonderful, brilliant lady. After Columbus, we moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where Bruce started work on his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in patho-biology. This was a very long stay, at least close to five years while he worked on his doctorate. At the end, in the end, just before he was to do his, can’t remember whether it was oral or written exam, he decided to pack it all in and not get his doctorate because of moral issues between his, what do you call it, his advisor and himself. He was being called upon to say things that weren’t true about, about his, about his work. So, that was a very hard time and our daughter, Emily, was born in Baltimore, and she was two years old when we left Baltimore for Bruce’s first job which was in Batavia, New York, a small, wonderful town in western New York state. Bruce was at a community college teaching micro-biology there and he was just stepping in for someone who was on sabbatical, so after one year, we left again and we moved to Niagara Falls where Bruce also worked at a community college. We stayed there for, I think, about four years, yeah. After that, we moved to Woodstock, Illinois, another small town, about 60 miles from Chicago while Bruce worked as a micro-biologist at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, then later at Northwestern Hospital in downtown Chicago, and that’s where Emily, our daughter, spent all her growing up years and that’s where we still are now.
Interviewer: And all your years in Woodstock, for many of them you worked as an occupational therapist?
Weiss: Right. I worked as an occupational therapist wherever we lived, even if it was only for a year. O.T.’s have a great choice of work wherever they are. I worked in rehab centers. I worked in acute care hospitals. I worked in special education departments, here in Woodstock. I mostly, in my last years, my last 20 years of working, I worked in home health care, but wherever I worked, I set my own hours, my own days. When we lived in Batavia and we were only there for a year, I worked maybe two or three days a week so that I could be home with our daughter, so, yeah, it turned out to be a very good vocation for me. Even though I didn’t get to use any of my arts and crafts skills, I felt that I really did help a lot of people learn to become independent with their disabilities.
Interviewer: In your many years in Woodstock, you’ve been active in the general community, but you’ve also done many things in the small Jewish community there. Tell us about that.
Weiss: Well, when we moved here, we didn’t even know there were any Jewish people here. It was a town of about ten thousand. Somehow, and I don’t remember how, another Jewish woman caught wind of us and started sending out, letters at the time, about other Jewish families that lived in Woodstock and getting the women together to meet each other which we did. Well, that grew and grew and the families got to know each other, and it was determined that we really needed to have a congregation, so about five of the families and we were one of them, started the first synagogue in Woodstock. We met at different people’s homes. We, once, one of our founders, had a large farm/slash/estate in the country and we, actually met in what was called the chicken-coop. It was not rustic as you can imagine but it was, I guess, it was, at one time, housed chickens so that was how we met. Our children met each other. It was a wonderful, wonderful time exploring our Jewish faith all on our own. Eventually, we bought what was a church and held, well, I’m sorry, should go back. We rented from a church in Wood… downtown Woodstock and held our services there for many years before we bought our own building which had been an elementary school, so, before we bought the building, we had done our own services. It was a wonderful time. Everyone felt committed, participating, and it was a, very much a family tradition and family participation. However, when we moved into our own building, it was thought that we needed to have a rabbi, which we did, and we have had several rabbis over the years who came and went. Having a rabbi sometimes caused, I guess, I would call it, arguments, over who liked the rabbi and who didn’t like the rabbi and so, people also came and went into the congregation. Being the only synagogue in McHenry County, we enveloped all phases of Judaism from Orthodox to non-Orthodox, all, all phases, and many people were not as observant as others and, as is not unusual, this caused some dissention, so, this came and went until now, this year, 2026, actually, in 2025, the congregation dissolved. Well, it didn’t dissolve. It moved from, it had to sell the synagogue and moved in with the Unitarian Universalist Church in McHenry County which has been a very wonderful group to work with, having much of the same values and Unitarian is very welcoming to every religion.
Interviewer: So, let me understand. There, there is still the Jewish congregation that meets at the Unitarian Church or the Jewish congregation basically just dissolved and many of its members…
Weiss: No, I’m glad you’re clarifying. Yes, there is still a congregation, getting smaller, and, actually, this year, because the Unitarian Church itself, like many congregations, is finding itself in bad financial straits, is selling their building. So the McHenry County Jewish Congregation has now found a new home in a church in Ridgefield, Illinois, which is just a block or two away from our old, our, own home congregation and it’s a Presbyterian congregation, very welcoming to us and we’ve been there for, I don’t know, about four or five months, and been able to hold services and celebrations there, so we’re still hanging on.
Interviewer: So, you’ve kept your identity as a Jewish congregation even though you have often been in buildings that were not particularly Jewish.
Weiss: Right. Right. You know, like, like many Jews, we are wandering.
Interviewer: [laughter] You and your husband Bruce, you’ve been active in a lot of other non-Jewish, more general charities and causes and events and activities in Woodstock, right?
Weiss: I would say it’s mostly Bruce. He’s a, he likes organizations and he’s been, he’s very well-known in the community. He participates in a lot of community service events, from things, from things like Protect-a-Highway where you gather trash – that’s the mundane – and then he works very hard for other organizations like Woodstock Area Community Ministries, which is a giant food-pantry type set-up twice a month, I believe, where the Chicago Area Food Bank brings large trucks to our town full of every kind of food and people drive through and are given all kinds of food free, and Bruce is very active in that. He also, he also works for this community ministry where people come and are given money to help them through whatever their problems are, whether it’s needing rent money, needing special shoes for work, paying their electric bills, etcetera, and people donate to these organizations, and Bruce is very instrumental in getting people to donate to the organizations as well as actually physically helping out to see that the money is going where it’s supposed to go, so, yeah, he, he loves that kind of thing.
Interviewer: As you look at, as you look at the activities that you and Bruce do in the general community, do you think they, do you think they have some root at all in Judaism?
Weiss: I suppose so. I don’t, I don’t know that we feel compelled as Jews to do these things as we just feel compelled to do them, but I don’t, I don’t know that it’s because of our Jewish background that we feel that way. I don’t think there was a lot in his family that he’s, that it’s been carried over by him, and yeah, so I don’t, I don’t get that feeling, so it’s just personal.
Interviewer: We skipped over a couple of relatives earlier and I wanted to make sure you had a chance to comment on them. You did mention Aunt Lil, Lillian Glanz whom you were close to, and Lena Lopper and Uncle Morris, Uncle Mo. There was another of our mother’s brothers who was Sam Lopper. Do you remember much about him?
Weiss: Oh, yes. He was my mother’s dear brother. He never lived that far away from us and he would stop over frequently to visit. I know that he was, I don’t know how correct I am, but I believe that, that he worked at the city markets in the fruit and vegetables, and, so that’s mostly what I remember his work, but he was just the sweetest man, so gentle and he and my mother had a wonderful relationship. He would come over and just sit at our table and the one thing I remember was that the only thing that he drank was hot water in a coffee cup. Sometimes I try that myself when I can’t think of what I want to drink. I think of Uncle Sammy drinking his hot water. He was, he was a lovely person. They always lived fairly near to us as I, as I grew up, and we would visit at their home quite often, he and my Aunt Betty and she, she was a nice person but not very social so my Uncle Sam always came over by himself to visit us. My Aunt Betty never came over even though we visited her at her home.
Interviewer: Now, Uncle Sam had his own grocery store in the Black neighborhood…
Weiss: Oh, okay.
Interviewer: …of Mt. Vernon Avenue and Miami…
Weiss: Okay.
Interviewer: … in the 50s and perhaps early 60s. Do you have any memories of that place?
Weiss: Not at all. I don’t think I ever went there. I, did you work there or did Bob work there? Somebody did.
Interviewer: I did work there as a twelve- year-old for a few months. Yes. Yes.
Weiss: Okay. No. I don’t, I don’t remember that at all.
Interviewer: There was another aunt, from our father’s side, a sister to Aunt Lil, and that was Aunt Eleanor. Any memories of her?
Weiss: Oh, yes. She lived down South. She had married once and then I guess, divorced early, did not have children. Mainly, I believe, she lived in Florida. She would come up rarely to visit, and she was a social worker, working in child adoption. When she came to visit us, she was quite a talker and, but the only thing she could talk about was the children that she had placed, and that was her life and that was all she knew and that was all she talked about, so that’s really all I remember about her is her talking. Yes. I don’t think my father was close to her at all. She was the youngest in their three siblings. I guess, there was another sibling who died young, but my Aunt Eleanor, my Aunt Eleanore, My Aunt Lil was the oldest, I believe, and she was very close to my father. As a matter of fact, when she left living on the OSU campus, she ended up living right across the street from my parents in a duplex and it was great because he could go, he could just walk across the street and visit her any old time. She was an excellent baker and an excellent needleworker. She made many doll outfits for my Tony doll and even when Emily was a little girl, we would go over and she would bake with Aunt Lil. Aunt Lil would make her a big baker’s hat out of a plastic bag, and I have pictures of the two of them making cookies together. Aunt Lil had some kind of childhood disease. I don’t know if it was polio or some other affliction, but she was always lame in one leg, and always wore a brace and as she aged, she ended up being wheelchair-bound, but she still had the most lovely countenance and attitude towards life. Wonderful woman.
Interviewer: And as I remember, she and her husband, at one point, were furriers.
Weiss: Yes. Mm-hm. They were.
Interviewer: And she was pretty sharp and basically helped to run the business.
Weiss: As far as I know, yes, and then, when she lived on campus, she rented rooms in her home to boys from the campus. I think they were probably graduate students, more stable kinds of students, but yes, and so that was another way for her to have income. My dad also had rental units around the OSU campus and so they, when she lived there, they visited quite a bit together.
Interviewer: In her later years, Aunt Lil wound up at Heritage House, and at one point, I believe, she was president of the Residents Council that advised the administrators what they wanted.
Weiss: Yes. Yes. I can, I can see that. She had a good head on her shoulders, and she was very articulate, so, that would have been a good choice.
Interviewer: You’re now in your 80s and, hopefully, you have many more years but as you look backward on your life, any particular, themes, any particular memories, any advice you might have for younger Jews?
Weiss: Oh, boy. I think I was very fortunate with my parents and with my siblings as to how we were raised with a lot of love. Of course, fathers were not that much present in those days, but there was a feeling of love and acceptance in my family and, I think, we felt that our parents were always proud of us and so that cycle just goes on as we. raise our own families, as we choose our own spouses. I don’t know how much Judaism enters into that, but I know that the cycles, for better or worse, go on and on depending on how you were raised and how much love and acceptance you felt, and I see that in other families, how that works and how that doesn’t work, so I’ve always felt very well loved and even though my brothers and I were four and five years apart and didn’t know each other growing up, as we became adults, we spent more time together and just knew that we loved each other so much, and so we were, I felt very grateful and loved that way.
Interviewer: Well, with those words, we will end our interview with Marian Cohen Weiss of Woodstock, Illinois on this March 30th, 2026. Thank you very much.
Weiss: Thank you, Bill.
Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein
June 30, 2026