Ted Comet, Jewish communal activist and founder of NYC’s annual Israel parade, died on Wednesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 100.
The cause was cancer, according to his daughter, Diane Richler, who was by his side.
Over his 75-year career, Comet held leading roles in Jewish communal organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee, American Zionist Youth Foundation and the Council of Jewish Federations. He was considered “the widely-recognized dean of Jewish communal professional life,” according to John Ruskay, the executive vice-president emeritus of UJA-Federation of New York.
“He was a treasure,” added Ruskay, who was a friend and colleague of Comet’s for 60 years.
Rabbi Yosie Levine, the spiritual leader of the Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, where Comet had been a member since 1968, counted Comet as a friend as well as a congregant.
“Ted was a one-in-a-million kind of person,” Levine said. “You could learn more about life in an hour with Ted than you could reading a hundred great books. Knowing him was one of the great blessings of my life.”
Comet was the co-founder, in 1965, of New York’s Salute to Israel Parade, now named the Celebrate Israel Parade, which each spring draws tens of thousands of marchers and spectators as it winds up Fifth Avenue. In the 1960s, he helped organize some of the first large demonstrations in support of Soviet Jewry. He is also a founder of the annual Israel Folk Dance Festival, whose 73rd iteration will take place Sunday, March 30 in Manhattan.
Born in 1924 in Cleveland, Comet was the youngest of seven children. His father was a shochet, or ritual slaughterer, who died when Comet was 11 years old. Comet moved to New York for his final year of high school to study at the Talmudical Academy, what is now known as Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy/Yeshiva University High School for Boys, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school and yeshiva located in the Washington Heights neighborhood. It is affiliated with Yeshiva University.
In 1946, when Comet was a 22 and finishing his studies towards the chaplaincy at Yeshiva University, he volunteered as a counselor in a Jewish orphans’ home in Versailles, France. The children were survivors of Auschwitz, and the experience changed the trajectory of his life.
It was there that he met and befriended a shy, 18-year-old teenager named Elie Wiesel — a relationship that lasted until Wiesel’s death in 2016. In the summer following his arrival in France, Comet went to the Pyrenees to establish a summer camp for the young survivors.
“It changed my life in two ways,” Comet said in an interview with the New York Jewish Week last spring on the occasion of his 100th birthday. “One was that I didn’t know the horrors of the Holocaust [until then], on the downside. On the upside, I was stunned by the ability of these orphans to respond to love, to care and to concern. I realized you can make a difference.”
Those realizations inspired him to pursue a career dedicated to the Jewish people, and to fostering a relationship between Jews and Israel.
Comet returned to the United States in 1947, received a master’s degree in social work from Yeshiva University and was hired as the director of the Brooklyn Zionist Youth Foundation, an affiliate of the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. Following that, he became the director of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He then held leadership positions at the American Zionist Youth Foundation, Council of Jewish Federations, the Joint Distribution Committee and the World Council of Jewish Communal Service.
In 1951, Comet met Shoshana Ungar, a Holocaust survivor from Belgium. They married a year later, and had two children — a son, Joel, who lives in Jerusalem, and his daughter, Diane, from Newton, Massachusetts, who survive him. Comet is also survived by six grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren.
“He continued to find meaning in life until the very end,” daughter Richler told the New York Jewish Week about her father. “He kept his sense of humor and his awareness and his ability to have meaningful conversations with people.”
In the late 1960s, when Shoshana was in her 40s, she learned to weave. She created five, six-foot tall tapestries that tell the story of the trauma she endured as a teenager fleeing Belgium during World War II and in the years beyond. Once she completed those tapestries, she put her loom aside to never weave again. She then returned to school and trained as a psychotherapist, eventually working with Holocaust survivors and their families.
Following Shoshana’s death in 2012, Comet devoted much of his time to conducting tours of her tapestries, and sharing her theories about the transmutation of trauma as well as spreading her message of hope and resilience.
“Everybody has trauma,” Comet said. “Trauma is built into the human condition. The challenge for everybody is do we let it master us or do we master trauma. That was Shoshana’s major point.”
Comet’s hope was that the trauma of Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel was attacked by Hamas, could “be transmuted into some positive change in Israel.”
“The whole notion of transmuting pain into purpose is so reflective of his life and his values,” said Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. “Ted was a Jewish communal giant who inspired literally generations of people to engage communally. Even in the most recent years I see him speak with the same vigor and enthusiasm about Jewish communal life. And inspire people of all ages and stages to get more involved.”
Several days before his passing, this reporter visited Comet. At the time, the burning issue that he was trying to solve was, “What will I do with the rest of my shortened life? All of a sudden it became urgent and I have come up with all kinds of ideas.”
“The big issue is what do we leave behind? The answer is our life has to have meaning and purpose,” he said. “I would like Jews to feel that we are part of something and we all have roles to play in the creative continuity of the Jewish people.”
Prior to his death, Comet was focused on what to do with his wife’s tapestries after he was gone — his hope was that they would be used as pedagogic tools.
Goldstein said on Wednesday that, according to Comet’s wishes, he expects the tapestries will be displayed at UJA-Federation’s headquarters at 130 East 59th St.
“Shoshana is dead for 12 years and her message [of the transmutative power of trauma] is still impacting me,” Comet said. “Isn’t that something wondrous? The sense of wonder, there is so much around us that is wondrous if we just let it be recognized.”
The funeral will take place Wednesday afternoon at The Jewish Center at 131 West 86th St.
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