If It’s Good Enough for Jesus, It’s Good Enough for Me

By Larry Klayman

WND

December 26, 2020

 

My grandfather Isadore “Izzy” Klayman escaped from a small village near Odessa in the Ukraine just a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution. His father, Meyer, had been smuggled out of what then was part of Russia a few years earlier, and landed in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania, getting a job in a meatpacking plant as a butcher. Indeed, this was the family trade back in old country. Saving money, Meyer later sent for his wife, my great grandmother, Bubba Raisal, and young Izzy and his sister Rose, who as Jews would not have had a “guaranteed” long life expectancy in the USSR, given the intense anti-Semitism of the Communists and their historic persecution in Russia.

Given that my grandfather hailed from a peasant village, where birth records were not kept, Izzy, when he entered the United States at Ellis Island in New York City, did not know his birth date. When the immigration officer asked him to identify his birthday, he responded only: “Give me Christmas. If It’s good enough for Jesus, its good enough for me.”

My grandfather was a proud Jew, and at one time he wanted to be a rabbi. Instead, he continued the family trade in the food business, opening a grocery store and then a meatpacking operation, in which my father, Herman, and Uncle Benny Klayman partnered with him. It was called “I. Klayman & Co.,” and it grew into the largest independent pork-packing plant on the East Coast by the time it was driven out of business — brought about by the stupid wage-price freeze of Nixon’s economic adviser Alan Greenspan. At its end, the operation slaughtered over 5,000 hogs per day. You could say that my family knew how to bring home the bacon!