Long Beach, CA (special) -- Sixty-three years after the Queen Mary's maiden voyage, and 32 years after it arrived here to become a museum ship and hotel, there still is a debate over what was the Cunard Line's motivation for installing a synagogue aboard the fabled transatlantic liner.

Rod Smith, curator of the Queen Mary's museum, and Seymour Fromer, director emeritus of the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, CA, agree that it was a humanitarian gesture by the British shipping line to the increasing number of refugee Jews who were leaving Hitler's Germany for new lives in the United States. Jeremy Frankel, a semi-professional genealogist who is the nephew of the synagogue's architect -- Cecil Jacob Epril --

QUEEN MARY TODAY--The former Cunard liner is berthed in Long Beach as a 365-room hotel and tourist attraction.

on the other hand asserts that the 12 x 15 synagogue, known aboard the ship as the "Scroll Room," simply was a recognition by Cunard that there were a growing number of wealthy American and British Jews who were making such voyages and who would be pleased by such a facility. 

The Queen Mary carried approximately 2000 passengers and 1000 crew on each of its voyages from 1936 to 1939, and again from 1947 to its retirement in 1967. During World War II, the Queen Mary served as a troop ship, in which as many as 16,638 people sailed to Europe on a single voyage. The synagogue remained available for Jewish troops.  During its civilian years, the Queen Mary had three classes of service, with third-class cabins placed in the bow, second-class cabins in

SHIP'S SYNAGOGUE--Designed by the English architect  Cecil Jacob Epril, this was one of the first synagogues to  be put aboard a trans Atlantic liner

the stern, and first-class cabins in the middle of the ship. The synagogue as well as a kosher kitchen were placed in the third-class area of the 1,018 foot-long ship.

The location of the synagogue and the kosher kitchen seem to indicate that Cunard personnel anticipated that the people who would most require those facilities would be the passengers in third-class -- consistent with the idea that refugees from the nazis were the principal users. 

Further, Fromer said in a telephone interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, a Cunard official declared such was the reason during ceremonies in 1936 when the on-board synagogue was dedicated by Great Britain's Chief Rabbi J. H Hertz.

Fromer paraphrased from memory news accounts in which a Cunard executive said "this is a strike for racial justice."

"You know," commented the former Magnes Museum director, "they thought of the Jews then in racial terms, so this was for racial justice and against the hate mongers. So it was clearly done as a form of resistance to nazism."

Frankel countered that for many years prior to the construction of the Queen Mary kosher food had been made available for Jewish passengers. He suggested that providing a synagogue trimmed with wood from Palestine was "just the next logical step" in a competition to attract well-to-do Jewish passengers.

The architect's nephew noted that passengers in first class and in second class could be escorted by ship's personnel to the synagogue in third class, so having the prayer sessions there were no bar to wealthier Jews. He suggested that the synagogue was put in third class because the company preferred to maximize its space in first class for passenger cabins, which were revenue producing.

Chief Rabbi Hertz, who dedicated the synagogue, is the man still familiar to many Jews today as the editor of the Hertz Commentary, which many congregations use as a companion volume for Torah readings.

In the front of the Queen Mary's compact synagogue was an Aron Kodesh which today is part of the collection of the Magnes Museum. Its design was compatable with the ship's art deco look. The Ark had only one door, which bore an iron grill work, instead of the normal two doors. The Ark was made small enough to be proportional to the confined synagogue space in the ship.

"It is a very unusual Ark," said Fromer. "I often joke that it was designed by an architect and not tampered with by a committee." A few paces in front of the Ark was a reader's table, the whereabouts of which today is a mystery. There were several rows of benches divided by a center aisle. Today some of the benches, along with two Torahs from the Queen Mary, belong to Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Long Beach.

TRANS-ATHLETIC ATHLETES--Stars from Palestine who were Queen Mary passengers included the soccer team of pre-state  Israel.

 Other benches -- along with some of the kosher dishes used in the dining rooms -- are on display in the Queen Mary museum.

On either side of the Ark were plaques. One was engraved with a prayer seeking divine blessings upon the President of the United States. The other was engraved with a similar prayer for members of the Royal Family. When King George V and Queen Mary (for whom the ship was named), visited the synagogue in 1936, they took particular interest in the Jewish prayer for them, according to an account in the Jewish Chronicle of London.

That newspaper had played a role in persuading Cunard to equip the ship with a synagogue, and even introduced the shipbuilding line to architect Epril, who had designed several land-based synagogues in Great Britain.

His nephew said Epril's synagogues could be found in Cambridge and at such London locales as Walm Lane and Edgware. The synagogue in Edgware was used between 1934 and 1951, then was converted to a Jewish preschool called Rosh Pinah School, Frankel said. 

Although Epril was Frankel's uncle, Frankel did not know him personally because the family was so geographically far-flung. He said he felt a real sense of connection to his uncle when he learned that he had designed the Rosh Pinah School because as a tyke Frankel had attended that pre-school.

Frankel's interest in the Queen Mary stemmed from his family research. "The trouble with genealogy, it leads you into so many different areas," he said. "It is not just names and dates and places; you end up doing stuff like this."

The Queen Mary was built in an era when luxurious superliners were matters of national pride. The ship entered service a year after the French liner Normandie did. In the Normandie's first season in 1935, Jewish passengers enjoyed kosher cuisine and prayed in a multi-purpose room. But after the owners of the ship learned of Cunard's plans for a separate synagogue, they decided to beat the British to the punch. They installed their own synagogue in time for Normandie's 1936 season, which started a short while before the Queen Mary's maiden voyage.

But neither the Normandie nor the Queen Mary could claim the honor of being the first ship to have its own synagogue. Frankel found a clipping from the Feb. 23, 1934 edition of the New York Times describing a ceremony in which seven rabbis dedicated a Jewish sanctuary aboard the Kosciuszko, a ship operated by the Polish-owned Gdynia-America Line. According to the article, rabbis filled in the first and last words of a Torah Scroll which was dedicated to that ship's use during that ceremony.

There is no saying for sure whether it was that ship, either, which was the first to have a synagogue aboard. 

* * *

The Queen Mary's peacetime route took it from Southampton across the English Channel to Cherbourg, France, where it picked up more passengers, and thence sailed to New York.

In the exhibits aboard the Queen Mary today, considerable attention is given to the ship's maiden voyage which left England on May 27, 1936. Among the passengers aboard was the first stowaway -- who turned out to be an intrepid young journalist who hoped to get a terrific story. The stowaway was a young Jewish lady from Toronto, Canada -- Rohama Siegel. 

Excited news stories of the time identified Siegel as the daughter of Toronto School Board Member Ida Siegel, and said that before she was put off the ship at Cherbourg, she toured all three classes of the ship, attended some bon voyage cocktail parties and befriended an elevator operator. She returned from Cherbourg to Southampton aboard another ship, her passage apparently paid for.

In Toronto, the stowaway's mother is much better remembered by the Jewish community, not only for having served on the school board but for helping to found numerous organizations including the Hebrew Ladies Maternity Aid and Child Welfare Society. Ida's great-granddaughter (and great niece of Rohama), Rabbi Gail Labovitz, reported in an article in Canadian Woman Studies that "the very goals of these organizations indicate the multiple loyalties of Ida's life, encompassing both preservation of Jewish culture and the integration of the families into Canadian life."

What the matriarch thought of her daughter's headline-grabbing escapade aboard the Queen Mary was not recorded. In 1986, when the Queen Mary celebrated its 50th anniversary, the stowaway whose married name was Rohama Lee was found to be living in New York. But her old telephone number has been disconnected without referral. HERITAGE's efforts to see if she could be located were unavailing. 

The Queen Mary's museum is located in several areas of the ship, with visitors following a map to go from one area to another. Stowaways when caught were confined to quarters not far from the isolation ward where sick passengers were treated. In the isolation ward one can read the list of passengers who died aboard. It includes one Mr. S. Cohen, who perished during Queen Mary's 226th voyage on Oct. 15, 1954. Cause of death for the American: coronary occlusion. 

* * *
Rabbi Wolli Kaelter, the rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel, recently told HERITAGE that the first time he saw the Queen Mary was in 1936 when he booked passage as a rabbinical student headed for Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.

The cruise was in September, and Koelter remembers it with feelings of melancholy. 

"I was (sea) sick most of the time, so I do not recall too much," Kaelter said. "My thoughts were directed back with the considerable concern I had for my family." When he had travelled to the United States the year before on the Cunard/ White Star Line ship Brittanic, it was shortly after the nazis had pushed through the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. On his return to Germany for the summer of 1936, "I could immediately see what drastic changes had occurred in Jewish life at that time -- not so much in Danzig (where his family resided) as in Berlin."

Returning to the United States aboard the Queen Mary, "my thoughts were directed number one to my people, my family in Danzig, and what would happen to them and number two, I was looking forward to Cincinnati and continuing my studies." Passage aboard the Queen Mary, he said, "was not a great experience."

Kaelter did pray in the ship's synagogue, receiving an aliyah during Sukkot services from a religious functionary known as the shomer (watchman) who served as both a mashgiach (supervisor of kashrut) and as a synagogue prayer leader. In the 1930s that position was filled by D. Davies, who worked under the supervision of British Rabbi M.L. Gordon.

Kaelter's family eventually was able to follow him to the United States. "The first one was my brother in 1928 and then eventually my mother in 1941 which was very late, but by that time I was an American citizen and she was taken off the transport to Warsaw twice," the rabbi said.

After the City of Long Beach acquired the Queen Mary, Kaelter said, "I asked what had happened to the chapel and what had happened to the sacred objects. The told me that the chapel was now empty (it is used as a storage room) and that the sacred objects had been 'suitably stored.' 

"I asked 'how suitably?' and they took me to a basement storeroom where the Torahs sat on the floor along with other objects that had been there. I told them that was totally undignified, and that Temple Israel would be happy to be host to the sacred objects. So then they delivered the sefrei Torahs--two of them--and the pews and the candelabra ... to us. "

Today, said the rabbi "the pews of the Queen Mary are in the foyer of the Temple Israel lobby and the Torahs of course are in the sanctuary."

Kaelter recalls that the Torahs were paraded into the sanctuary of the Reform congregation and rededicated to use by the Jewish community. One of the Torahs--perhaps the one over which Kaelter as a young man had pronounced the blessings when he received his shipboard aliyah -- subsequently was loaned to John and Marcie Blumberg, active temple members, to help his parents' congregation at Mammoth Lake observe the High Holy Days.

Explained Blumberg, an attorney: "My parents, Myron and Shirley Blumberg, and another couple, Jordan and Sheila Glazov, thought 'there are a lot of Jews up here and when High Holy Days roll around, there isn't any opportunity to be Jewish up here.'" 

As Blumberg had a bachelor's degree in chorale music and had sung in the Temple Israel Choir, his parents asked if he would help to lead services for a congregation in formation. "And since I was on the board of directors at Temple Israel, we were given permission to take the Queen Mary Torah up to Mammoth Lake and use it for High Holy Days, which we did."

Eventually, residents of the California mountain community decided to rotate services between Mammoth Lake and Bishop. Until the small traveling congregation obtained its own Torah, Blumberg packed the Queen Mary "in a big suitcase to protect it and then unpacked it in Mammoth, and then we put it in an Ark that one of the members of the congregation had built."

From England to California, from the sea to the mountains -- the Queen Mary Torahs may be among the best traveled Sacred Scrolls in the world.

* * *

There is mystery and confusion about what happened to some of the other objects that once were housed in the Queen Mary's synagogue.

When the Queen Mary was purchased in 1967 by the City of Long Beach for $3.45 million with revenues from neighboring oil fields, the idea was to put down the gangway and invite the tourists aboard. 

But according to an Associated Press story in the March 9, 1970 edition of the now defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (a story, by golly, that I wrote during my days as an AP reporter based in Los Angeles), an engineering study found that the ship needed to be extensively remodeled to house major exhibits. 

Additionally, the ship "needed to be connected to utilities; it needed complex electrical wiring, an air-conditioning system, permanent linkage to the shore's sewage system and plenty of parking."

At the time, the City of Long Beach was in partnership with the Diner's Club. A Jacques Cousteau museum was planned in the ship's lower decks.

As time went by, the Wrather Corporation -- which had built the Disneyland Hotel -- took over operation of the Queen Mary. Later still, Disney itself tried to turn the ship into a major attraction. In 1993, the present operator of the ship -- Queen Seaport Development -- successfully bid for a 66-year lease to operate not only the ship but the Queen's Village shopping area nearby.

Lovetta Kramer, marketing vice president for Queen Seaport Development, said her company arranged for such temporary attractions as a decommissioned Russian submarine dubbed the Scorpion that is moored inboard of the Queen Mary's bow, and an exhibit of Imperial Russian treasures that is offered as a separate attraction aboard the Queen Mary.

Kramer said her company's president and chief executive officer, Joseph Prevratil, is fascinated by the Queen Mary's history and wants to overcome years of historical neglect. Recently, the company created "a non-profit foundation which I am responsible for, which is responsible for the restoration, preservation and historic memory of the ship and that is called the RMS Foundation," she said.

When the City of Long Beach followed its engineers' recommendations, she said, it made a lot of changes. For example, during Queen Mary's days at sea, "all the restaurants were on the interior of the ship because when it sailed it was on the North Atlantic, which was ugly, dark and gloomy and everyone would have gotten sea sick if they looked out the windows," Kramer said. "In some of the rooms the mirrors were tinted pink so if you looked in them, you didn't look green."

Once permanently moored at Long Beach's Pier J -- and therefore no longer subject to rolling motion of up to 40 degrees to the starboard and 40 degrees to port -- designers decided to move restaurants up to the Promenade and Sun Decks so visitors could have a view of the Long beach skyline.

"Some of the early operators of the ship had little appreciation for the historic importance and as was true with so many things during the '60s and the '70s when 'new was better,' those areas were not in use," Kramer said. "None of the chapels (Jewish, Catholic) or other places of worship were kept intact aboard the ship."

The synagogue is used as a store room. New conduit pipes now block the view of the area which once had been the kosher kitchen. All that remains to be seen of Jewish life aboard are some of the artifacts. Ron Smith, the ship's curator, recited an inventory: "We have from the synagogue three benches. We have dedication plaques" with the prayers for the U.S. President and for the British Royal Family. "Then we have two breast plates from the Torahs, one Torah mantle, one set of Torah crowns, a yad (pointer for reading the Torah), a havdallah cup, a spice tower and a kiddush cup." There also is a Scroll of Esther, or megillah, in the archives.

From the kosher kitchen and pantry, he said, "we have many dishes left, several patterns of dishes. We also have cooking utensils and mixing bowls. It is all, of course, marked. There are some objects merely marked with the Hebrew letter for 'kosher,' not indicating whether it is for milk or for meat, but most of the objects are clearly marked as being for either milk or meat." Smith said behind the conduit piping, one can still see in the kosher kitchen where one sink was used for dairy, the other for meat.

"What was unfortunate about the refit of the ship was that there didn't seem to be an extremely cohesive plan as far as what to do with the ship's household objects, " Smith said. "They did sell off a lot of things at auction, and what wasn't sold they kept and in many cases that is what we made the exhibits with. But there was no decision that we should keep x number of these, or x number of those; it was just sell off things in lots and whatever was left, they were stuck with."

The reader's table from the synagogue was one of the objects for which there are apparently no records, Smith said. "There was a statement in one of the newspapers that it was up for auction, so it could have been when they dismantled the synagogue to refit the ship....they offered it for sale. This is unfortunate because we would really like to have some of these things back."

Similar mystery attaches to the Holy Ark, now in the possession of the Magnes Museum. When the Magnes announced its acquisition in 1992, it did not identify from whom it had obtained the piece. 

The City of Long Beach, he said, "gave the Ark to a small congregation -- I don't know which one -- and the congregation used it, I believe, until they grew larger. In California, we have a lot of start-up congregations, and they held it, and then they exchanged it or sold it to a collector of Judaica."

Fromer said someone "had kept it outside, and it needed restoration." The collector said he wanted to place it in the museum. "So we worked out an arrangement to exchange some things with him and get it for the Magnes," Fromer said. "We had a campaign, a small campaign, to restore it. And we gave it to the Oakland Museum Conservation Lab and it was restored to its original magnificent condition."

Asked the name of the collector, Fromer replied "I don't know if he wants his name mentioned." And he said he was not certain whether only one congregation had owned it or whether several congregations had "passed it from hand to hand."

* * *

During World War II, the Queen Mary was painted gray and took American troops to Europe on its east-bound crossings of the Atlantic. The GIs carved on bulkheads throughout the ship the initials of themselves and their girlfriends.

With so many American troops at a time aboard the Queen Mary and its sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, the two queens were a tempting target for German submarines. Hitler reportedly offered a $250,000 reward to the U-boat captain who could sink either of the great ships. Able to make 29 knots on their never-twice zig-zag courses, the two ships could simply outrun the torpedoes once upon the open sea. 

Closer to land, the Queen Mary did have one tragic wartime accident: in 1942 in the Irish Sea, it rammed and sank its escort ship HMS Curacoa, with a loss of more than 300 lives aboard the smaller vessel.

On the Queen Mary's westbound, wartime crossings, diplomats and members of the officer corps traveled to North America for consultations on the war effort. 

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was transported on one cruise to the Quebec Conference where from April 10 through April 24 of 1943, he and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid plans for the D-Day invasion of Europe. 

Sadly for Jews, at Churchill's urging the two leaders also decided to postpone until after the war Roosevelt's exploratory efforts to win approval from Arab leaders for more European Jewish migration to Palestine. What was merely a "postponement" for the two Western leaders slammed the door shut on the lives of many Holocaust victims.

Besides Churchill, another luminary of the period who traveled aboard the Queen Mary was then General -- and later U.S. President -- Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Following the war, the Queen Mary brought back to the United States thousands of war brides -- European women who had married American servicemen -- and their babies. Those might have been the happiest cruises ever aboard the ship.

After this service, the ship was refitted as a luxury liner and entered its golden age. Archive photographs of celebrities who enjoyed the Queen Mary's service include the violinist Jascha Heifetz and pianist Arthur Rubenstein, and film world celebrities Eddie Cantor, Samuel Goldwyn, Harpo Marx, Victor Mature, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jack Warner. A pre-war photograph in the ship's archives shows Mandate Palestine's soccer team, clad in warm up suits, posing with ship's personnel.

Although the post-war show business celebrities were passengers, occasionally they could be coaxed onto one of the show stages aboard the ship to participate in the Queen Mary's entertainment, Smith said. At such occasions, he said, the custom was to pass the hat and to donate the proceeds to a favorite charity.

Although the Queen Mary was glamorous, the advent of trans-oceanic air travel made the ship's 4-5 day passage across the North Atlantic seem comparatively burdensome to business-minded travelers who valued their time.

The transatlantic market soon became a losing financial proposition, so Cunard Lines tried to market the Queen Mary instead as a cruise ship. But Queen Mary was constructed to shield its passengers from the elements, not to expose them. The swimming pool, for example, was completely indoors. There were few places affording passengers a place to lounge in the sun. 

So at last, the ship was put up for sale. Unlike other liners of the period, the Queen Mary found a buyer interested in more than its scrap metal value. The ship made its 1,001st and last voyage in 1967. Along with the ship, Long Beach has helped to preserve a chapter of Jewish history.