Leah's Eulogy

Eulogy for Leah Tannenbaum

by Edward Cone

June 23, 2002

Temple Emanuel

Greensboro, NC

In my very first memory of Leah Tannenbaum, it is summertime and she is standing at the side of her pool, and I’m swimming with a bunch of kids who I just met. I must be eight years old, my mother has picked the kids up, and we have all come to Mrs. Tannenbaum’s house to swim.

And if that childhood memory of a nice lady with a cool house who was generous with her pool was the whole story, that, as the song we sing at Passover says, that would have been enough, dayanu.

But although my eight year old eyes saw clearly some of the important elements of what was going on there, there was much more at work on those summer days.

As the years passed I came to understand that in 1970, perhaps not every member of Irving Park society was inviting kids from housing projects to swim in the family pool. I recognize now that the nice lady with the cool house was a woman of strong convictions, who threw herself fully into the causes in which she believed, including the pioneering program for underprivileged children that I witnessed.

I came to understand that Lea was a person who did a lot more than write checks and go to meetings for the things she believed in—although she did go to a lot of meetings and write a lot of checks—that she was the best kind of leader, one who leads from the front, working harder than anyone else and making it look like fun.

And in time I grasped the fact that my own mother was picking up those kids and driving them to Lea’s house to swim because Lea’s courage and vision and energy had inspired my mom to participate, too. Of all Lea’s good works in the community—and she had been doing her thing for more than three decades by the time I showed up at her swimming pool in 1970, and she did not stop for the rest of her four-score-and-seven years—of all her good works for Greensboro, that gift of leadership is one of Lea’s greatest legacies.

Rabbi Guttman mentioned her numerous jobs and accomplishments--there is actually a two-page, single-spaced list of the boards Leah sat on and the awards Leah won for community service, going back to the late 1930’s. You could roughly categorize her activities as being in the realms of social justice, the arts, and education, although you really have to see the list to get the scope of her interests.

If there was a job to be done--from delivering Mobile Meals and serving as PTA president at Irving Park School to rescuing the Eastern Music Festival and serving as a trustee of Greensboro College—if there was a job to be done, Leah did it, sometimes twice.

The Tannenbaum-Sternberger Foundation became a vehicle for supporting good causes, and more recently it emerged as part of Greensboro’s economic development infrastructure—just months ago it made an important gift to build out additional space at the business incubator housed in the old Revolution Cotton Mill, which was co-founded a century ago by Lea’s grandfather.

Her work earned her honorary degrees and citations and plaques, from every organization from her alma mater Goucher College to the NCCJ, but those things were never her motivation. There was always a personal touch to what Lea did—she had great empathy for the elderly, and here at Temple Emanuel, where she served as president of the sisterhood, she was a big supporter of the Friendship Circle and also supported a group called the Adult Enrichment Center—I thought her compassion for the elderly was funny since she never really seemed to become one of them.

When it got the point that I started working with Lea as a volunteer, I had to make the transition from calling her Mrs. Tannenbaum to calling her Leah or Lea. That’s a challenge of living in your hometown, graduating to first name status with one’s elders, but with Lea it just felt natural. She had a way of making people feel good, a talent for being positive. Not that she was shy about her opinions. A lot of times she would start a sentence with the phrase, "Don’t you think…?, thus telling you what she thought and inviting you to come along for the ride.

On the Weatherspoon Museum board, Lea volunteered for more jobs than any eager newcomer out to make their name. I remember one year when nobody was willing to chair the annual meeting committee. The hand that had been resting on the table by a pocketbook that perfectly matched her outfit went up. Leah would do it, again—and now other hands went up, too, and suddenly there was a whole committee behind her. Meanwhile, she was bringing a family gift to the museum of a magnitude that named a gallery and led to the purchase of an incredible sculpture by the artist Magdalena Abakanowicz—not a sentimental or safe choice, by the way, but one true to the mission of the museum. All that, and she still showed up to make sure the cheese and crackers and vegetable dip were in the right place for the reception after that annual meeting.

Leah put a lot of time and money and effort into preserving this sanctuary as a part of Temple Emanuel, and she chaired the private foundation that is helping to carry out that mission today. One reason that she wanted to maintain a presence for Temple Emanuel in the heart of Greensboro was that both the city and the Temple mattered greatly to her, and to her one went with the other. Leah Louise Baach Tannenbaum came from a unique subculture, the descendants of the German Jews who emigrated to the South in the 1800s, a group that embraced public life and in a very real sense helped build this city. Lea’s own family was among those that led Greensboro into modern times, and Lea embodied their ideals.

She was a doyenne of that fading world, a matriarch, and she loved its style and high-mindedness, although she was completely down to earth. Certainly she had the grace of an old-school Southern lady. I loved the way she would pronounce my name, "Ayehdwud," with at least three syllables, and greet me with a kiss on the cheek and ask, "How are you, darlin’?," in a way that made me feel like I really was her darlin’, along with most of the other people in the room. Because that was her not-so-secret strength—the genuine warmth that brought other people along with her, wherever she was leading.

--30--

Last update: 6/25/2002; 6:26:59 AM.