Jewish Hall of Fame welcomes Riverdalian

With a mother who was a suffragette and years of work helping Soviet Jews, social justice is in Ezra Levin’s DNA.

The Riverdale resident was among the latest honorees to join the Bronx Jewish Hall of Fame earlier this month.

Sitting on the second floor porch of his home on a recent morning, Mr. Levin, a lawyer, quietly reflected on his career and achievements.

“I know of the people that have been asked the prior year,” he said of recent inductees to the hall of fame, organized by the Bronx Jewish Historical Initiative. “I thought highly of them and I was pleased to be, in a sense, linked with them.”

Mr. Levin, 82, recalled his time in the Army, where he was saw segregation first-hand. The hall of fame inductee, who grew up in Brooklyn, was stationed in the South. While traveling back to Brooklyn while on furlough, his bus pulled into a Virginia rest stop where bathroom signs indicated separate facilities for black and white people. He said he was shocked at the blatant segregation and would not use the restroom.

Mr. Levin also recalled the murders of Civil Rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, which inspired his own Civil Rights work. Mr. Levin served as secretary and board member of the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality.

His work with the New York Coalition for Soviet Jewry, where he served as co-chair, took him to the Soviet Union. Mr. Levin learned first-hand that Soviet Jews who tried to leave the country lost their jobs, were forced to sell their apartments and harassed by the government.

“That, too, was an eye-opening experience to the kinds of oppression that people met with and were visited upon by the former Soviet government,“ he said.

In his professional life, Mr. Levin is the chair-emeritus and senior counsel of the international law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, where he practices corporate law.

He was previously an adjunct professor at Columbia College. He drew on these experiences with the Civil Rights Movement, Soviet Jewry and his wealth of life experiences to co-teach a Colloquium on Human Rights in Contemporary Civilization. He has served as president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, and was the founding chair of a Solomon Schechter High School.

The Bronx Historical Initiative established the Bronx Jewish Hall of Fame last year. In addition to Mr. Levin, this year’s inductees include Arlene Alda, Avi Hoffman, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian.