Jay Steele

My Jewish Roots

Submitted May 2020

I was born in 1941, lived on a middle class, mostly Jewish street in Philadelphia, PA, and belonged to a Conservative synagogue within walking distance from our four-room apartment. Next to our synagogue, Temple Brith Israel, was the St. Ambrose Catholic Church.

I have to admit that I hated Hebrew School with a passion. My friends and I would cut Sunday School and go play baseball in a “so-called” hidden field nearby. I say “so-called” because one sparkling May day, I looked up from the batter’s box to see about nine fathers coming over the hill looking for us. There would be “hell to pay,” or so I thought!

After getting severe tongue lashings from our fathers about why we weren’t in Sunday School, the dads decided to play us a game of baseball rather than go home. They beat us badly, as I remember.

Still, I went to the synagogue on a fairly regular basis and became a bar mitzvah. I remember being very happy at being paired up with Alan Shills as my bar mitzvah partner. He could not sing a note, and he made me look much better than I actually was.

I walked every day to a local elementary school (Olney Elementary School). There was an even mix of Jewish and Christian students. In 9th grade, I went to Olney High School, my neighborhood’s high school. It was there that I realized what it meant to be Jewish.

I was always interested in playing sports and was the fastest runner in my neighborhood. I played football and ran on the track team for four years at Olney High School. At that time, Olney High School was the largest high school in the USA with 4,000 students, half Jewish and the other half non-Jewish. Many of the non-Jewish students were of German descent. Some of these students were the children of pro-Nazi sympathizers who demonstrated on the streets of Philadelphia during World War II, not far from where I lived.

When I made the varsity football team as a running back, I played on the same team with several of the children of pro-Nazi sympathizers. Barry Totser, Phil Shyposh, and Larry Brittingham were all of German descent and were my teammates. The day I made the varsity football team my Italian friend, Joe Corbi, our starting guard, gave me some good advice. He said, ”Jay, never take off your football helmet from the time you enter the locker room to the time you leave it.” There was good reason for this. Fist fights would often break out between Jewish and German players during practice. Some players hurled their helmets at each other. I always kept mine on.

Some of these players (not all) carried the extreme anti-Semitic sentiments of their parents with them to the football team. Our head coach frequently made anti-Semitic remarks to Jewish players, especially when we had to skip practice or games on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. As a starting running back, I was called “Jay the Jew” by several of these German players. Larry Brittingham, another running back, tried to put me out of commission with a low, vicious tackle during practice because I was Jewish and had beaten him out for the starting job. Barry Totser, our All-City tackle, would refuse to block for me if my number was called. I solved that problem quickly by running right up his backside as hard as I could. He got the message. It’s no wonder that our team won only two games and lost eight games in each of my three varsity seasons.

I’ve tried not to generalize about all my German teammates, despite my negative experiences with a few. Larry Stuckert was of German descent. and was a great guy and a good teammate. So was Charles Munz. I learned as much about life playing sports as I did in the classroom. I still love sports. It’s one area where you are equal with everyone else. The fastest runner wins the race, whether he’s Jewish or not.

While there’s a lot more to this story, I’ll leave it for another time and another place.

Jay Steele was born in Baltimore, MD, but lived most of his life in Philadelphia and Buckingham, PA, a small town in Bucks County. He spent many years as a Department Chair of History in several high schools with the school district of Philadelphia while simultaneously serving for almost 35 years as a psychologist in private practice. He is married to Sally. They have three grown children and two grandchildren.