Lyndon Johnson was Scheduled to Visit my Austin Shul [Synagogue] the Day After Kennedy Died - [AND HE LATER DID]
by Cathy Schechter
Article is copyrighted by Cathy Schechter, 2013. First printed November 18, 2013, by Tablet Magazine. Reprinted with
permission from the author. Some editing has been done.
Texas Jewish Historical Society - July 2014 Page 3
On November 22,
1963, the women of
Congregation Agudas
Achim Sisterhood in
Austin, Texas, were
working in their new
kosher kitchen, mix-
ing potato salad for the
several hundred people
expected to turn up at
the dedication of their
new synagogue the next
day—a group that was
to include Vice President
Lyndon B. Johnson.
The women didn’t have
enough mixing bowls, so
they wound up using the
synagogue’s brand-new
plastic trashcans to pre-
pare the potato salad, a
detail their honored guest would never
need to know.
Of course, Johnson never made it
to Austin. Instead of holding a joyous
celebration, the congregants gathered
to mourn the death of President John
F. Kennedy and pray for their old
friend, Lyndon, who had just been
sworn in as President on Air Force
One, standing next to the blood-splat-
tered and shocked former First Lady
Jacqueline Kennedy. No one expected
that he would reschedule his visit—
but, ever the consummate politician,
Johnson decided to keep his promise,
and on December 28, the new Presi-
dent arrived at the new Agudas Achim
building.
The synagogue owed its new
location on Bull Creek to Johnson’s
intercession in a real estate deal. It’s
highly probable that no American
president has ever been as intimately
involved in the construction of a Shul
as Johnson was in this one. In Octo-
ber 1963, as vice-president, he loaned
his Lincoln Continental convertible to
congregant Morris Shapiro, who drove
the Torah scrolls the three or four miles
from Congregation Agudas Achim’s
downtown location to its new suburban
home amid a parade of marching Jews.
The connection between Johnson
and Agudas Achim was Jim Novy, a
Polish-born immigrant who wound up
in Texas under the Galveston Plan and
made a small fortune in scrap metal.
One of Johnson’s earliest political al-
lies in Austin, Novy, pillar of Austin’s
Orthodox congregation, was instru-
mental in building the synagogue. For
many Austin Jews, their relationship
with Johnson had been so close that he
was almost too famil-
iar; Milton Simons,
who was Agudas
Achim’s president in
the autumn of 1963,
recalled that some of
the congregants knew
the vice president so
well they refused to pay
to hear him speak at the
synagogue dedication.
The assassination
changed that: When
the dedication was re-
scheduled, a gully wash
of people from all over
the country wanted in,
offering what Simons
described as “enough
money to pay the mort-
gage,” just to come to
Austin to hear the new President talk
to the Jews. In the end, it was Novy
who kept the strangers out. As far as
he was concerned, Austin Jews were
LBJ’s Jews, and even “the people
too cheap to buy tickets,” in Simons’
estimation, should be there to hear
the new president’s first non-official
public remarks as president.
I first encountered the story of the
synagogue dedication in 1988, while
writing a book about Texas Jews. In
2000, when Agudas Achim moved to
its current location at the Dell Jewish
Community Campus, I volunteered to
produce a video to mark the occasion
and interviewed congregants who at-
tended the 1963 event, many of whom
have since passed away.
Early one morning after the
sh’loshim for Kennedy were over,
Novy received a call from President
Johnson. “He told Daddy, ‘I said
I would be there, and I’m going to
be there,’” Novy’s daughter, Elaine
Shapiro, said. With only a week’s
notice, the members of the congrega-
tion hustled once again to prepare.
The shul’s decorations committee set
the stage for the possibility that there
might be television cameras in atten-
dance. The Sisterhood catering team
thawed out the barbecue and remade
the potato salad and Jell-O mold.
Shirley Rubinett remembered that
the Secret Service sent taste-testers,
and the president was supposed to eat
only what they approved. But, in the
end, she told me, “He ate whatever he
wanted, he gobbled it down, he was
hungry.”
Almost every person I spoke with
said that the most memorable im-
age of the evening was entering the
synagogue vestibule and seeing a red
telephone on the table—a cultural icon
preserved in the congregants’ collec-
tive memory as the infamous “red
phone” connecting Washington and
Moscow, though it could not have
been. Ann and Saul Ginsburg’s son,
David, played “Hail to the Chief” on
the spinet piano. The suave and artic-
ulate Dr. Polsky emceed the evening,
and Jim Novy introduced the presi-
dent with a litany of stories of all the
times Johnson had helped him and the
Jews. “I’ve always called on President
Johnson to give us a help,” Novy told
the crowd, “and there was never a time
that I asked that he wouldn’t take care
of Jewish problems.” In fact, Novy’s
introduction that night gave rise to the
persistent Internet rumors that Johnson
was a righteous gentile who saved
hundreds of Jewish lives before and
during World War II, though exhaus-
tive searches by Johnson Library ar-
chivist Claudia Anderson have turned
up no primary-source proof to substan-
tiate the rumors.
After the community poured out
its affection, President Johnson rose to
speak. In his remarks—captured on a
33 1/3 LP for congregants to keep as a
souvenir—he revealed the reciprocity
of the trust and respect he felt, as well
as the strength he drew from them.
He combined a tribute to his home
community and the Jewish people with
remarks that foreshadowed his War
on Poverty, which we Texans chose to
hold in our memories in a more elevat-
ed place than the missteps in Vietnam
that ultimately doomed his leadership.
And he offered his personal tribute to
Jim Novy: “If we have leaders like
this good man who spent so many of
his hours in the years past trying to
build temples like this, temples where
men can worship, temples where jus-
tice reigns, temples where the free are
welcome, temples where the dignity of
man prevails, then American will truly
Lyndon Johnson, continued from page 3
be worthy of the leadership we claim,
and the rest of the world will follow us
where we lead.”
When Novy died in 1971, John-
son—by then out of the White House
and back in Texas—sat alone in the
back of the sanctuary, without Secret
Service or aides or hangers-on, wear-
ing a kippah. Shortly after, Johnson
also died of heart disease. It would
seem that the partnership forged by
the two men and the benefits yielded
to Congregation Agudas Achim had
come to an end.
But there is a postscript to this
story: During the later years of the
Johnson presidency, Encyclopedia
Judaica approached Jim Novy to see
if he could persuade the president
to help fund them. Through Novy’s
influence, they were able to
obtain an
interest-free two million dollar loan
to conduct the research needed to
replace the old Jewish Encyclopedia
with a version that reflected both the
Holocaust and the birth of the State of
Israel. In return for the favor, Novy
asked for 100 sets of the encyclopedia
to sell as a fundraiser. The proceeds
arrived after the deaths of both John-
son and Novy, but Dr. Byron Smith, a
former shul president, hid the money
from anyone who wanted to use it
for operating expenses, and used it
to pay down the Bull Creek building
mortgage, years in advance. LBJ was
always one of us.
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[IMAGE - IFF 2025]
Jim Novy introduces President Lyndon Johnson at the dedication of Con-
gregation Agudas Achim’s new building on December 28, 1963. Johnson
and Lady Bird are seated to the left of the dais. From the dedication pro-
gram. (Courtesy of Congregation Agudas Achim Archives.)
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SOURCE: *
Texas Jewish Historical Society
Lyndon Johnson was Scheduled
to Visit my Austin Shul the
Day After Kennedy Died
[First printed November 18, 2013, by Tablet Magazine]
https://txjhs.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2014-July.pdf----
Provided for the historical and educational value of all readers.
