Jack Carlin’s earliest memory is lying on the kitchen floor of his Brooklyn
home, coloring pictures and playing with a puppy as his American-born parents
spoke Yiddish with his paternal grandparents.
He was nearly five when the
Great Depression and the demise of vaudeville took their toll on his father’s
ability to earn an income as a performing percussionist, and even cost the
family its house. His mother took a job as a factory seamstress, and the family
moved several times. During World War II, he helped his father patrol the
neighborhood as an air-raid warden.
Having earned a draft deferment,
Carlin graduated with a degree in physics from City College of New York. While
working in a laboratory in New York City, he attended a Zionist Organization of
America dance where he met Helen Klenetsky. Helen thought Jack would be a great
match for her twin sister, Rhoda, and apparently she was right. The two recently
celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary with a party at the Jerusalem
headquarters of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel
(AACI).
“Shortly after we were married in 1947, we were listening on the
radio to the UN vote on partitioning Palestine with intense interest,” Carlin
recalls. “When the country was founded, something changed in my blood. And Rhoda
felt the same way.”
INSTANT CHEMISTRY Carlin had a series of jobs that
often took him out of town, but eventually he was established enough to move his
family, which grew to include four boys, to the New York City suburbs of Long
Island. The story could have ended there in the professionally decorated dream
house they acquired in Woodmere.
But in 1959, Jack visited Israel on the
tail end of a European business trip on behalf of his nuclear instrumentation
company.
“That first encounter with Israel had a powerful impact on me,”
he wrote in a still-unfinished memoir. “It was instant chemistry. It was love at
first sight with the country and its people. In fact, I experienced a new and
astonishing flush of pride in my heritage and in myself.”
His wife joined
him for another trip in 1960.
Their oldest son, Ira, came the following
year with a group of bar-mitzva-age boys.
Four years later, as sales
manager for Miles Laboratories’ new line of nuclear medicine equipment, he came
to Haifa to assess the multinational company’s as-yet unsuccessful spinoff
manufacturing citric acid for the food and pharmaceutical industries. Given the
chance to relocate to oversee the plant, he and Rhoda did not
hesitate.
“The government of Israel itself was anxious for Miles
Chemicals Israel to survive and succeed since it was the very first major US
corporate investment in the new State of Israel,” according to Jack. “Failure
would discourage other international industrial entities from investing in the
new state.”
Jack Carlin was the right man for the job, and the family
prospered along with the business in Haifa. He even got Miles involved with
joint technology-transfer projects at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ironically, his success in Israel led to a
senior position at corporate headquarters in Indiana, so the Carlins packed up
and moved in August 1966.
“In addition to my work and other
responsibilities at Miles, I became a sort of unofficial volunteer Israeli
ambassador to communities in and around northern Indiana, both Jewish and
non-Jewish. I was often invited to lecture on Israel and Israeli-related topics
to various clubs, business associations, service organizations and even church
groups in this Midwest section of the so-called Bible belt,” he
recalls.
A MIRACLE IN JERUSALEM Yet the couple missed Israel and felt it
was a better place for their children. So when Carlin was presented with a
proposal to create a new vehicle to identify and commercialize promising
research at the Hebrew University, he resigned as president of an international
division of Miles and moved his family into Jerusalem’s then-new Ramat Eshkol
neighborhood.
Unfortunately, after two years it was clear that this
venture wasn’t panning out. But Jack had been well schooled in the ups and downs
of the business world.
“I picked myself up in 1973 and set up a new
laboratory equipment company called Carmira. The ‘Car’ part was for ‘Carlin’;
the ‘mira’ part for ‘miracle.’ I felt if we succeeded in Israel it would be a
miracle.
And it was a miracle, because Carmira succeeded very
well.”
With Rhoda as corporate secretary and sons David and Joe joining
the business, Carlin developed and marketed the tools all over Israel, including
to Arab hospitals and labs in the West Bank and Gaza.
“In 1989 we sold
the company and I retired,” he says. “All my life was spent in the physical
sciences so now I was anxious to go back to university and study history and
anthropology.”
Rhoda, always at his side, accompanied her husband to
classes and also to meetings at AACI, where Jack accepted the volunteer position
of the senior division’s national director.
Not content merely to arrange
programming, he began a successful campaign to advocate for senior discounts and
benefits countrywide. This work brought him to the attention of a national
organization for pensioners within the Histadrut, and he was poised to get out
the immigrant vote for the newly formed Pensioners Party in 1996 when he was
hospitalized for cardiac bypass surgery.
A GLOBAL FAMILY But that was
only a temporary lull in his retirement activities. The Carlins moved to an
apartment in French Hill, where Jack spends hours every day reading through news
websites.
He regularly lectures on current events at AACI, and draws on
his nuclear background to comment on what’s happening in Iran – a country he
visited in 1970 on a business trip.
An Iranian colleague with the same
surname as his paternal grandmother inspired Carlin to initiate a family
genealogy search through National Geographic, which collected DNA samples and
provided “a fascinating report with migration maps of our
ancestry.”
Another of the Carlins’ adventures took place during the 1982
Lebanon War, in which their son Daniel, now a physician, did combat duty. Toward
the end of the conflict, friends who were close to then-prime minister Menachem
Begin arranged for Rhoda, Jack and son David to go on a VIP tour of
Lebanon.
“We flew from Atarot in n o r t h e r n Jerusalem to a small
airfield near Metulla, and then took two buses, each accompanied by an armed
Israeli soldier.
When the Lebanese saw our buses with Hebrew markings,
they came on board bringing us cherries, thanking us for ridding them of the
PLO.”
“Now we are fully retired, enjoying life as senior citizens in this
country and watching our family grow,” Carlin says. “We have 16 grandchildren
and four great-grandchildren, many living here and others on both coasts of the
United States, in South Africa, Australia and, up until recently, in Japan.
We’re a global family.”
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