When some 1,200 hundred people turn out for two community dinners, you know something’s afoot. Actually, you knew it before the dinners even took place.
You knew it for 14 years, or for 42 years, and it was nice to see how deeply it has been appreciated, even by the national heads of two organizations, ADL and JNF. There was time in the national leaders’ schedules — it was a given — to be at these two dinners. That’s the measure of respect and impact that the dinners’ honorees command.
A given: Because there is really is no ADL office around the country like the Mountain States office.
A given: Because there really is no JNF icon around the country like Stan Kamlet.
The only thing Scott Levin did wrong in his 14 years heading the Mountain States ADL was announce his retirement. Hundreds of his closest friends — Jews, gentiles, old, young, ministers, rabbis, just to get the diverse list started — came to wish him well because everyone knew, in a very tough job, Scott Levin never lost his cool or his smarts. In a shocking climate of spiking anti-Semitism, Scott Levin was never absent, never overstated, always forceful, always reassuring — and always a good listener.
It’s a high profile job with the profilers not necessarily being the most sympathetic types, to put it mildly. Scott Levin spread the wealth, training a staff to do the work as well as he did.
JNF is such a high profile organization in our community today that one needs a long institutional memory to recall that it was once a quiet, very quiet, group. In his own quiet way, Stan Kamlet changed all that. Stan: stories. Stan: smiles. Stan: jokes. Stan could make a tree laugh. How beautifully, humorously, poignantly and lovingly this was all brought out by everyone at the dinner, from Russell Robinson, JNF’s national CEO, to Stan’s deliciously articulate, 11-year-old great-granddaughter, to his adopted son Norm Brownstein.
Scott Levin and Stan Kamlet, the big difference in their fields of expertise notwithstanding, share this talent: putting together a great team to advance the cause of the Jewish people. The word “mentor” was heard a lot in the salutes to Stan.
Something else was heard. Alas, it went right over the heads of most of the dinner attendees: the name of Stan’s father John Kamlet. For those who did not know him, Stan’s invocation of his father came across as filial piety. For those who did know John Kamlet, Stan’s invocation of his father came across as something so much more. Stan Kamlet became such an effective mentor to next generations of JNF leadership because he himself had the benefit of being mentored by John Kamlet.
Not only Scott Levin but his predecessor Bruce DeBoskey, and his precedcessor Saul Rosenthal, had the benefit of being mentored by Mr. ADL himself, Sheldon Steinhausner. As Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s national chairman, noted, Sheldon Steinhauser modeled the way a regional office of the ADL should function. In fact, Denver was the ADL’s first regional office, first led by Mickey Freed.
We have here history and precedent, and future and initiative. We mark two special embodiments of fertile leadership because they have reached, or nearly reached, the conclusion of their careers. Others of their same caliber still lead us and for that we, and our community, are grateful —indeed grateful that we need not mark the conclusion of their careers.
To Scott and Stan, we sum it up this way: yeyasher kochachem.
Don’t miss episode 51 of IJNCast — Scott Levin was the featured guest!
© IJN 2024
