2003-10-17_sydel_zeiden-obituary

2003-10-17-Sydel Zeiden-Obituary


Goodbye, Nana San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, Oct. 17, 2003

Sydel Zeiden, 81, whose image lighting Shabbat candles appears in every issue of Heritage, died Sunday, Oct. 12, following unsuccessful heart surgery at Scripps Green Hospital.

Along with her husband of 61 years, Sam Zeiden, Sydel maintained a kosher home in Oceanside
.
Sydel had posed for the photo at the request of her daughter, Nancy Harrison, Heritage's associate publisher, and her son-in-law, Donald H. Harrison, editor-in-chief and co-publisher of Heritage. From the photo, art director Scott Thomas created a drawing for the weekly candlelighting times feature.

In the dry terms of genealogy, Sydel and Sam had two children, Nancy Harrison and Carl Zeiden; four grandchildren, Sandi Masori, David Harrison, Heather Zeiden and Edward Zeiden, and one great-grandchild, Shor Masori, 2.

But Sydel would have been the first to protest that she had even more immediate family members than that: her children's spouses Donald Harrison and Barbara Zeiden; her grandchildren's spouses, Shahar Masori and Hui-Wen Harrison; and her nephew, Harry Jacobson-Beyer, who often stayed with the family, first at its home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles and later
at the Ocean Hills Country Club in Oceanside.

Sydel's inclusiveness and fierce devotion to family were themes that Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal of Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Jacobson-Beyer of Louisville, Ky., and Sandi Masori incorporated into their eulogies at graveside services on Tuesday arranged by Am Israel Mortuary at Greenwood Cemetery.

Jacobson-Beyer recalled that from his "first visit in 1964 to the most recent visit this past August when we were here for David and Cathy (Hui-Wen)'s wedding and Sherry (Harry's wife) and I stayed with Aunt Sydel and Uncle Sammy, I was home. They considered me as much their child as Nancy and Carl. In fact, Aunt Sydel, when introducing me to her friends, called me her third child."

Granddaughter Sandi Masori said: "She could always be counted on to take up the cause of her children and grandchildren. If someone had wronged me, then they had wronged her. Unless it was my mom, in which case I must be wrong, because that was the pecking order. Family was everything to her..."

Rosenthal related that "family was paramount in Sydel's life, and it was in her home that all of the celebrations always took place. Even though she had so many siblings (she was the youngest of 10 children), every event seemed to revolve around Sydel's and Sam's home, and that was the way she loved it to be. She would cook and prepare, and her door was always open."

Sydel Fischer was sitting on the porch of a Chicago apartment building in 1937 when she met Sam Zeiden, who had come to Chicago to live with relatives in the wake of the Great Louisville Flood of that year. Sydel asked if anyone had a copy of the newspaper comics and Sam, obviously attracted to her, dashed into the building to find them.

The couple's romance was interrupted by World War II, during which Sam, who had an aptitude for engineering, served in the Signal Corps. During that period, he fell in love with California, where Harold Fisher, one of Sydel's nine older siblings (now all deceased), had been working for Columbia Pictures. After the couple married in 1942, they moved west, first to Arizona and then to the Los Angeles area.

In Los Angeles, Sam worked for Hughes Aircraft and Sydel was a "soccer mom before there were soccer moms," according to her children. Besides taking her children to tap dancing classes, horseback riding lessons and Scouting meetings, and volunteering as a room mother, she taught her children "how to be ethical, work hard and do the right thing," Rosenthal said. "She
encouraged them to pursue their own goals, to become educated, to get good
grades and to live up to their potentials."

Sydel also emphasized her Jewish heritage, having attended two synagogues in Los Angeles— Sinai Temple and University Synagogue, where she was Sisterhood president — and having "learned Hebrew and studied Judaism as a child in Chicago, something unusual for girls in those days," Rosenthal said.

After the children were well into their school, she accepted an offer from one of Sam's colleagues at Hughes Aircraft to work in the company's credit union, from which she eventually transferred to a top-secret position in the YF-12A program, forerunner of the legendary SR-71 "Blackbird" spy plane.

She later worked as an administrator of a training program for Hughes executives. She located the venues for the conferences, arranged the speakers and looked after all the details — the kind of work done by destination-management companies today.

Following 25 years at Hughes, where she managed to have lunch with Sam almost every day, she retired, but remained so popular with her colleagues that every year at her birthday — including her 81st birthday this last Oct 4— she received congratulatory phone calls from her former secretary.

Upon retirement, family once again became her preoccupation, and through the years she kvelled at her grandchildren's births, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings and, eventually, the birth of her great-grandchild, Shor, who called her "Nana." Sydel marveled that Shor has the same curly auburn hair she had as a child.

Rabbi Rosenthal related that "Sydel always said that when she had children, it was wonderful, but when she had grandchildren it was even better. ... When it came to her great-grandchild Shor, well, this was the best possible gift of all.

"Sydel and Shor shared a very close relationship. Whenever Shor saw her, he would light up and run forward to embrace her. She was there when he began standing on his own, and he took his first steps in her home.

"After she died, and he learned she was in Heaven among the stars, he looked up to Heaven to see her there as he sang 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,'" Rosenthal related. According to Shor's mother, he followed that softly with a version of rock lyrics he had learned from his grandfather: "Nana Nana, Nana Nana, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye."