Abe Foxman, who grew from being a hidden child during the Holocaust into the country’s best-known fighter of Jew-hatred, was called a “towering” and “giant” figure in statement after statement from Jewish groups after his death.

At his funeral on Tuesday, the capacity crowd that filled the pews at Park Avenue Synagogue heard a different aspect of Foxman’s life—the man who was a close friend and mentor to many, a father of two and grandfather of four.

The crowd heard of the man, who regularly sent texts to those he loved—texts that at times were just three heart emojis—and who would sign off from every text and email to them with “LOL.”

Even after he learned that it means “laugh out loud,” he kept using it because for him, it meant “love you lots,” attendees learned.

Foxman was praised at his funeral and beyond for his moral clarity and lifelong dedication to fighting Jew-hatred. He was called a lion, the “pope of the Jews” and a giant.

He was also abba, dad and grandpa—a loving man who would rush back from high-level meetings and fly back to attend his children’s recitals and performances.

He missed only one given by his daughter, Michelle Foxman, when he was having emergency surgery in Jerusalem, she recalled at her father’s funeral.

His youngest grandson, Cielo, is the son of writer and editor Ariel Foxman. At just 8, the boy stood with his three young-adult cousins on the bimah.

He told the thousand or so people watching that even though his grandpa wasn’t speaking much in the days leading up to his death on Sunday morning at 86, during a visit in those final days, Foxman roused enough to say Cielo’s name and “I love you” and to squeeze his hand.

The three older grandchildren, the son and two daughters of Michelle Foxman, cried as they eulogized their beloved grandfather.

They recalled writing book reports and college papers about him in classes that they took on Holocaust history. He was always interested in their lives and pursuits, they said.

His grandson Gideon shared that they had a meal together nearly every week during which he would seek his grandfather’s counsel.

That was a large commitment for a man, who headed one of the major Jewish organizations, with a budget when he retired in 2015 of $60 million, and offices across North America and in Israel.

Foxman was appointed to the advisory council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, first in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and subsequently reappointed by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

He was also vice chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park in Manhattan.

Foxman was born to Polish-Jewish parents in 1940 in what is now Belarus. When his parents were ordered into a ghetto, they asked his Polish-Catholic nanny to hide him. She did, baptizing him a Catholic.

When his parents, who miraculously both survived the Shoah, went to collect him, the nanny refused to return him to his parents.

A legal battle ensued. Eventually he was reunited with his parents, who were then living in a displaced person’s camp.

Foxman bore no ill will. Whenever he conferred with one of the three popes who invited him to meet, he would ask them to pray for the nanny who saved his life, he had said.

The spiritual leader of the N.J. synagogue that Foxman regularly attended, Rabbi Shalom Baum, of Congregation Keter Torah, recalled that the late Jewish leader told him about the first synagogue service to which his father took him after he rejoined his parents.

“He wisely waited until Simchat Torah, rather than bringing him on the Days of Awe,” which would be boring for a very young child, Baum said.

On Simchat Torah, everyone dances around the unfurled Torah scrolls. “But there were only two children left in the synagogue community then, and no Torah scrolls,” as they had been incinerated by the Nazis, he said.

One young man picked up the little boy and put him on his shoulders, as they danced around the sanctuary. Years later, after that young man had become Rabbi Leo Goldman, of Detroit, Baum said, the two reunited in Jerusalem.

Foxman took his moral responsibility deeply seriously. But he wore his renown lightly.

Deborah Gruber was a classmate of Michelle’s during their undergraduate years at Columbia University. Now a neuro-oncologist on Long Island, Gruber said that even though her close friend’s father was famous, she never knew it while visiting the Foxman family home in Bergen County, N.J.

“He was an incredibly devoted father,” Gruber said at the service on Tuesday. “For 15 years, I didn’t know what he did” for work.

Foxman spent his entire career, nearly 50 years, at the Anti-Defamation League, rising to become its national director and, at his retirement in 2015, its national director emeritus.

Frequently approached for absolution by celebrities and politicians who said antisemitic things, Foxman, after they consulted with him, would require them to issue a public apology and undergo Holocaust education.

“Abe believed that hearts could change,” said Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, spiritual leader of Park Avenue Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, during his eulogy.

“He never understood ‘cancel culture,’ the idea that people could be irretrievably reduced to their worst moments,” the rabbi said. “He believed that if hatred hardens your heart beyond repair, then the hatred has already won.”

Foxman “held both optimism and pessimism at once,” and said, “I don’t have the luxury of being a pessimist,” Cosgrove said.

“It was a balancing act that was Abe’s moral posture towards the world: vigilance joined with hope,” he said. “Fierce particularism among the expansive human concern. A statesman and a mensch.”

   | Read More JNS.org – Jewish News Syndicate