Elegy for Abe Lebewohl

In the window of the 2nd Avenue Deli on the Upper East Side hangs a picture of a man with a thousand-watt smile, a caption below revealing that twenty-five years ago he was murdered on his way to the bank. This was no ordinary man: it was Abe Lebewohl, owner of the deli and the embodiment of the American Dream.

Especially since he was a Holocaust survivor and, as his brother Jack Lebewohl reflects, a pure family man, the tragedy of his unsolved death at the age of sixty-four while fulfilling his morning routine is inexplicable. It’s enough to make one question everything: work, love, longing, life itself. Still, a quarter of a century later, Abe’s life matters, particularly because he imbued it with his singular kindness.

Born in the Ukraine in 1931, Abe along with his mother were sent to Kazakhstan eight years later while his father was sentenced to Siberia. By 1941, Abe and his mother reunited with his father and, three years after the war ended, his brother, Jack, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Rivoli, Italy. Another two years, and the nineteen-year-old Abe immigrated to New York with his family, settling in a six-floor walk-up in Williamsburg and soon working as a soda man on Coney Island.

While a degree of survivor’s guilt has attended the lives of many who made it to America, to “the other side,” as it’s sometimes known, for the Lebewols the “feeling was thank G-d,” as the now early-seventies Jack recalls by phone from his home in the East Village. “It was basically thank you, G-d. My mother and my father each said, ‘We lost everybody. Not one person survived. Thank you, G-d, for saving us.’”

Jack, a trained lawyer whose thick Brooklyn accent underscores a great sense of conviction, continues that his parents believed his brother “couldn’t have done what he did” in any other country than America and that they “always used to say, ‘G-d Bless America.’” What Abe did amounts to the precise realization of a hard-fought dream: turning a ten-seat coffee shop into what over the years became one of the finest, most cherished Jewish delis in the country.

Fatherly Presence

It was a restaurant on Second Avenue and 10th Street that, from its gold-plated ceiling to its buzzing waiters and wood-lined tables, drew both the celebrity and the working man, and stood out with the fatherly presence of its proprietor.

Stories abound of Abe’s geniality and generosity, whether it was delivering chicken soup to a fevered NYU student free of charge, presenting a tray of chopped liver sandwiches and hot tea to protestors in frigid rain or just sitting down with his diners and asking how they were doing.

“What you saw, that was Abe. There were no acts. That was his personality,” Jack says of his brother who hired an ethnically diverse staff and who would just as soon sweep the floor as he would hurry downstairs to grab extra pickles. For Jack, though, the deli was only one part of Abe.

“For him, success was a number of things. One was family and that was probably the most important thing,” Jack explains. “Number two was, of course, financial. But it wasn’t financial for the sake of money; it was financial for what it could do to help the family, to live a better life, to get educated. Also, he felt that because G-d was very good to us, because he survived the war with my parents, he felt he had an obligation to repay and help other people who may not have been as fortunate as we were.”

Abe’s benevolence came to a screeching halt on March 4th, 1996, a Monday morning at around 8:50 when, driving his van to his local bank with the weekend’s receipts that totaled about $10,000, a gunman stopped him and shot him in the face and stomach. Lying on the sidewalk, as the shooter or his accomplice rode away in the car, Abe reportedly last spoke, “They got me,” before later being pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital.

The whole city went into mourning following Abe’s death, many wondering how an abundantly gracious man, who had been through so much including the atrocity of the Holocaust, could have been killed. There is no easy answer to such a question yet the Lebewohls marched forward and opened the deli back up, Jack leaving his practice to take over the eatery until its closure in 2006 due to a landlord dispute.

Today, a Murray Hill location and another on the Upper East Side stand and are owned by Abe’s nephews, Jeremy and Josh, but the original deli is now a bank, the very institution that Abe was killed going to. While this may be a piece of macabre irony, for Jack, “that’s life.”

Across the street sits a cobblestoned park named for Abe and, if it can’t quite bring the man back, it is a place where children can play with the joy that he radiated and where a candle for him will glow forever.