A Bloomberg's love affair with faith

Though a dedicated member of her Medford synagogue for 60 years, when it came time for her son's bar mitzvah, 98-year-old Charlotte Bloomberg went elsewhere.

"Michael [that's Michael, the self-made billionaire and mayor of New York] had his bar mitzvah at Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline," she recalls.

One day she had found children racing up and down the hall at her synagogue's Hebrew school, and she did not approve.

"I grabbed Michael, and I said: 'What are you doing? Would you do this at [the local public school]?' And he said, 'No, but here they don't care.'

"So I went home and I said to my husband, 'I don't think that's the right place for him.' "

But things change, and Medford's Temple Shalom became the right place for Charlotte Bloomberg. If Temple Shalom can be said to belong to anyone besides its congregation, it belongs to Charlotte Bloomberg. One wing even bears her name, the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Jewish Community Center, named for her and her late husband, who died when he was in his 50s.

Michael's younger sister eventually had her bat mitzvah there.

A diminutive woman with a formidable constitution, Charlotte Bloomberg still sits on the synagogue's board and attends its monthly meetings. In her early 90s, she shared the presidency with two other women, and "they were amazing," recalls Charlotte Potak, the current president.

"They kept this place going for two years, when we were kind of in a transition," she said, from hiring a new rabbi to contending with Medford's declining Jewish population.

Four years ago, when Rabbi Braham David interviewed to become the temple's spiritual leader, he was put up at Charlotte Bloomberg's home.

He quickly grasped that in this town, the celebrity Bloomberg is Charlotte. The first time he met the mayor - at Temple Shalom's high holiday services, when Michael Bloomberg was visiting his mother - David said, "Oh, you must be Charlotte's son."

Charlotte Bloomberg is at an age beyond when most people kick back, yet she makes her continuing service sound as inevitable as a law of nature.

"I'm perfectly able to, and I like to do it, and they need people," she said, "so there's no reason not to."

Her love affair with her religion appears to be second only to her passion for her family.

"I just take it for granted; this is what I am," she says of Judaism. "I don't think of it every day."

Faith comforted her when her husband died, she said, and it largely defined the boundaries of her social world. "Most of my friends, my close friends, are Jewish, because I met them through the temple."

She and her husband moved to Medford from Brookline right after the end of World War II, after Hitler's death camps coughed up their skeletal survivors, who told tales of the even ghastlier fates of the dead.

Yet, remarkably for a woman nearing the century mark, Bloomberg says she has never experienced anti-Semitism personally. She raised her family in what she describes as the warm embrace of Medford. By the time of Michael's younger sister's bat mitzvah, the children had slowed down enough in Temple Shalom's halls that the family celebrated her ceremony there.

Having the mother of a rich man in the congregation certainly helped Temple Shalom, one of several causes to which the mayor has donated generously.

In New York, Bloomberg says, her son belongs to a synagogue, but "does not go regularly to services."

Of course, he has running the country's largest city on his to-do list, but his mother believes it's also the case that faith "doesn't play as important a role in his life."

Is that a disappointment to her? "I would like to see him more interested, yes, but he's a grown man," she said. "He can decide for himself."

While some Jewish leaders worry about a drift from synagogue affiliation by younger Jews, Bloomberg doesn't. Judaism has "lasted all these years," she said. "I think it will continue."

To the obligatory, nonreligious question - is her son going to run for president next year? - Bloomberg laughs. "The last time we talked about it, he said, 'I haven't made up my mind yet.' "

Then she offers a mother's intuition: "Personally, I don't think that he is interested."

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