Flashback 1997: To serve and protect: Jews answer the call

      I spent some time Wednesday dubbing old videos onto my Google Drive — it was fun to watch family scenes I hadn't looked at in ... 28 years, such as my older son's second birthday party. It reminded me how I'd use my family to pivot into larger issues, such as this column on Jewish first responders. What's interesting below is how I casually nail the profession that the babe would go into. As if it were foreordained. The Shomrim Society is still around.

     "That's a fire truck," I said to my son, getting down on one knee and pointing as the red pumper screamed by. "Those are the firemen going to fight a fire. Maybe you'll grow up to be a fireman someday."
     He just gurgled and cooed, but my wife furrowed her brow.
     "Don't tell him that," she said. "He's not going to be a fireman."
     Normally I'd let the comment slide. I knew what she meant: our son was going to be president of the United States, or the doctor who cures cancer or — be still the fluttering of our fondest hopes! — a lawyer.     
     But her comment strayed into one of the few areas I care enough about to argue over, so I made a little speech: "Firemen are heroes," I began, elaborating with some of what I had seen covering fires over the years as a reporter.
     The Paxton Hotel, with trapped residents leaping out of the windows and being tended to in the middle of the street. The Rose of Sharon Baptist Church, that tremendously cold day on the West Side. How the rose window looked, eerily backlit by the flames. How after part of the roof collapsed and a firefighter was lost, his comrades kept searching for him, even after the fire was out, even when it was obvious that he had to be dead and heavy equipment would have to be brought in to find him. How they didn't want to leave. How, the next day, the firefighters dug through the freezing rubble with their hands.
     I don't think I convinced her any. Public safety is not the sort of profession that Jewish parents, generally, lay out for their children. We don't grow up to be firefighters or – even worse — police officers.
     Which is why I was surprised, and pleased, to find there are nearly 300 members of the Chicago chapter of the Shomrim Society, the national organization for Jewish law enforcement officers.
     "Our membership is not limited to Chicago police officers," said officer David Welbel, an investigator in the organized crime unit and president of the Chicago chapter. "It's open to any branch of law enforcement. We have a lot of suburban police, a lot of county people, some federal agents assigned here in Illinois."
     Jewish police officers tend to be acutely aware that they are contradicting a stereotype.
     "It's just not a traditional role for a Jew to go into," said Sgt. Bruce Rottner, a 25-year veteran working neighborhood relations in Rogers Park. "I've always felt the uniqueness of being a Jewish police officer. I don't shove my Jewishness in anybody's face, but I'm proud of it. It was just wonderful, in 1972, walking into my first Shomrim Society meeting and seeing other police officers who were Jewish."
     The Shomrim Society — the name means "guardians" in Hebrew — is mainly social and philanthropic. Its big annual event is a dinner dance in the fall. Not all Jewish Chicago cops are members. "We have what I refer to as `closet Jews' on the job," Welbel said.
     Which brings up anti-Semitism. Both Welbel and Rottner say they've encountered only traces of anti-Semitism in their years on the force.
     That wasn't always the case. During the Great Depression, when Jews first entered the classically Irish police force in significant numbers, they were met by "thinly disguised contempt, and disbelief that they would make good cops," Arthur Niederhoffer wrote in his essay "The Jewish Patrolman."
     Ironically, Jews were faulted, not so much for their religion, Niederhoffer noted, but for having gone to college, generally. That made them "the target for the anti-intellectualism that policemen shared with many other Americans."
     Rottner was one of three college graduates in his police academy class in 1972, and he remembers being told by a police commander that "college people tend to get bored on the job and don't make good police officers."
     Welbel's own parents — Czechoslovakian Jews who both survived Auschwitz — were dubious about their son's joining the police force.
     "They didn't like it," he said. "Traditionally, law enforcement is not a profession that young Jewish men would seek. The encouragement in the family is always something of higher achievement; being a lawyer, being a doctor or, if not that, a CPA."
     But Welbel, 43, had dreamed of becoming a police officer.
     "I always had an interest in law enforcement as a child," he said. "I always admired those guys: the uniform, the authority, the squad cars, the whole ball of wax."
     As so often happens, his parents came around to see his point of view.
     "But now they've adjusted to it," Welbel said. "They're glad that I joined the Police Department because they see that's what I'm happy doing.
     "Besides," he continued, "they see my brother in business for himself, and they see he's constantly aggravated. They say, `You don't need the aggravation.' For me, I enjoy my work very much. It's easy going to work, and not too many people can say that."
     "Many of us as adults don't get to do what we wanted to do as kids," Rottner said. "This is what I always wanted to do: be a policeman."
       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 1997