She never really expected to gain a new best friend or to uncover documents of historic significance when she began her quest to reconnect with her religious roots, but as Far Rockaway resident Samantha Moyal of Far Rockaway discovered, life can be full of surprises.
Moyal was a 19-year-old student attending Rutgers University on a full golfing scholarship when she became a baalas teshuva. After graduating Rutgers, she went to Jerusalem to study at Neve College for Women and as she continued on her spiritual journey, placing a greater emphasis on honoring her parents was a perfectly natural progression.
“I started working on the mitzvah of kibud av v’em and then I branched out to my grandma,” Moyal told Olam Yehudi. “It started out as me wanting to be nice to my grandma; I ended up gaining a best friend.”
Moyal’s grandmother, Judith Mindell née Kronick, is currently 91 and a decades-long resident of Springfield, Massachusetts. It was during a family get together there when one of Mindell’s daughters-in-law handed her a stack of illustrations that had been found in the attic of the home where Mindell and her husband had raised their six children. The drawings were original works by Mindell, created when she was a member of the very first class of the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1945.
“Samantha said to me, ‘Grandma, did you make these?’” said Mindell. “She was shocked and told me that they were gorgeous. I shrugged. When she told me that they were beautiful and that she was going to call FIT, I told her not to embarrass me.”
Heading home to New York with the illustrations, Moyal reached out to the school and was told that there was a historic archive that housed student works. They had decades-old samples, but none went as far back as FIT’s very first class. A previous attempt to acquire very early works by contacting a student who had entered the school several years after Mindell had proved fruitless.
“She was so nervous when she spoke to the school and she had a little dementia so it didn’t work out,” said Mindell. “But Samantha told them that they didn’t have to worry about that with me and said, ‘You don’t know my Grandma.’ She set up a three-way call with a lovely man from the school and we spoke for 45 minutes. When we hung up, he called Samantha back and told her he couldn’t wait to meet me.”
Mindell’s journey to FIT began when she was in her final year of high school. A teacher of her fine arts class recognized her artistic abilities and suggested she put together a portfolio in the hopes of gaining entrance to the soon-to-be-opened school. In retrospect, she marvels at being one of just 40 students chosen for the initial class.
“I knew I had talent, but I didn’t think I was that talented,” said Mindell.
The vivacious nonagenarian remembers her time at FIT as an extremely busy period in her life.
“We were told on day one to buy a sketchbook and pencil and to never go anywhere without them,” said Mindell. “We were loaded down with assignments, going to museums, on a ferry ride, or to the Cloisters, and wherever you went you were drawing.”
Raised by a single mother at a time where money was scarce, it was Mindell’s grandfather who managed to scrape together the funds for her first year’s tuition. Yet, with no one available to cover the second year’s payments, Mindell had to leave FIT and her dreams behind. Admitting that she would have loved to have earned her degree, Mindell said she was sure she would have been able to make her mark in the world of fashion had she completed the program, an observation that she shared with FIT students when she was invited to speak at the school in October during Alumni Legacy Week.
Smartly dressed in a blue top, black slacks and several colorful necklaces, Mindell received an engraved crystal apple from school president Dr. Joyce Brown, a remembrance of her time at FIT. During her presentation, Mindell shared her recollections of her time at the school with the audience, and when asked by one student during a Q&A session how she felt about having to cut her academic career short, Mindell took the opportunity to offer students a valuable life lesson.
“I have a feeling I would have been a successful fashion illustrator,” said Mindell. “The school was started with manufacturers of the garment industry who were chomping at the bit and were waiting to hire us. But while I wanted to go back for a second year, I have no regrets. You take whatever road you have to take and make the best of it. I wouldn’t be here today with my family, with these children and these grandchildren [had I made it]. You just make the best of whatever you do.”
Mindell said that she was likely the only Jewish student in FIT’s first class but admitted that she was so busy with schoolwork that there was little time to socialize with any of her fellow students. Still, she has fond memories of growing up in a six-story tenement in the Bronx that was home to 54 families, all of whom were Jewish. With plenty of children around and everyone having an open door policy, Mindell remembers having a happy childhood, despite the financial difficulties her mother faced.
Summer nights were special, recalled Mindell. With no air conditioning or fans to combat the blistering heat, the building emptied out as everyone went outside to take advantage of cooling temperatures as the sun went down. Adults would go across the street to an empty lot where they would congregate and swap jokes, while the children began their evenings in front of the building, jumping rope, playing hopscotch and enjoying other simple pastimes.
“After a while the old folks would start singing the songs of the old country,” said Mindell. “One man had a voice; he could have been in the opera and we kids would cross over and listen. This would happen every night and the songs were beautiful. I remember them singing Oif’n Pripitichik and Belz, Mein Shtetele Belz. We loved it and the feeling of Jewishness was definitely there. I met so many people of all kinds as I was growing up, but I loved being with Jewish people the best.”
Decades later, things have come full circle, with Mindell shepping nachas from Moyal and her religious observance, often surprising her granddaughter with a comment or an observation.
“One time I went to visit her and I was davening Shacharis and she told me ‘the Kotel is that way,’ pointing to the east,” said Moyal. “I asked her how she knew that and she told me that she just did.”
On another occasion, Moyal was telling her grandmother about the mitzvah of tzedakah and Mindell recounted that despite living in extreme poverty, her mother would drop coins into a little blue can that would eventually be collected by a rabbi.
Being able to have Mindell’s talents publicly recognized by FIT was extremely rewarding for Moyal who said she considers it one of the greatest gifts she could have ever given her grandmother.
“This was her dream and she had to give it up at 18,” said Moyal. “And now to be recognized at 91 and see her dream fulfilled in this way is amazing. Her illustrations are the oldest works in the FIT archives. And who would have ever believed that a little Jewish girl from the Bronx would have been able to accomplish that?”