Faces of WHC: Fleur Bresler, 99-Year-Old Lifelong Member

1942 Confirmation Class, Washington Hebrew Congregation Archives (Bresler pictured bottom row, third from right)

Fleur Bresler’s WHC roots run deep. Born in 1926 in her family’s Kalorama home, she entered the world already part of the congregation her family belonged to. Now 99, she’s a great-grandmother celebrating a century of membership and a six-generation family legacy at WHC.

In the early 1900s, Bresler’s father ran R. Harris and Company, a successful family jewelry store downtown. As a young girl, Bresler would tag along with him, taking special interest in an engraver who worked upstairs.

“We lived an extremely comfortable life,” says Bresler from her home in North Bethesda. She even remembers a chauffer would drive her father to and from work each day.

Then, things took a turn. She lost both her parents by the time she was nine years old, and one of her older sisters took her in and raised her.

“By today’s standards, my childhood would have been considered less than normal,” Bresler says.

Her early memories of Washington Hebrew are what you’d expect from a young girl.

“I remember Rabbi [Abram] Simon was very boring, and the pew was horrible,” she says. “No matter what I did, my legs were too short to hit the floor. You simply couldn’t get comfortable.”

One of her strongest memories, she says, was that the schoolrooms were down on the first floor, and the sanctuary was upstairs.

“Across the street was a five and dime store,” Bresler remembers. “We’d buy a wooden paddle with a string and ball on the end of it, and you’d tap the ball on the wooden paddle. That was our favorite thing to do to annoy Rabbi [Norman] Gerstenfeld.”

She remembers Rabbi Gerstenfeld as “very formal,” and wanting “absolutely no nonsense.” Still, she preferred his sermons to Rabbi Simon’s.

Rabbi Simon (left) and Rabbi Gerstenfeld (right)

“Gerstenfeld was far more interesting as far as his sermons were concerned,” Bresler says. “But Rabbi Simon was a little bit more down to earth. There was not supposed to be any chatter or squirming around, or anything that would detract from the formality of the service. And keep in mind, the sanctuary was rather small, so he could see all the way to the back.”

Once she was a little older, she recalls getting together with a group of WHC women who met monthly: the Sunshine Club, they called it.

“It was about a dozen girls, and we were pretty much all in the same Sunday School class. The parents all knew each other,” says Bresler.

Ironically, she met her (Jewish) husband, Charles S. Bresler, at a mutual friend’s Christmas party. Their first date, as she remembers it, was a “disaster.”

Charles, who at the time was involved with the Junior Chamber of Commerce, invited Bresler to one of their dinners at the old Willard Hotel. It wasn’t until the car ride over that she learned her date was the chairman for the speaker of the dinner, and that the speaker was Senator Joseph McCarthy. This was right at the height of the McCarthy era.

“And he says to me, ‘By the way, you’ll be at the table with his fiancé, and his fiancé’s mother,” recalls Bresler. “It was a little late for me to get out of dinner.”

Each time the audience clapped for McCarthy, Bresler says she would intentionally blow her nose.

“It was one of the most horrible evenings of my life. Nevertheless, we managed to get over that and get married in spite of it,” says Bresler.

Growing up, Bresler describes D.C.’s Jewish community as small but very close-knit – enough that you knew every family, or at least knew of them. She also recalls a stark divide between Washington’s German and Eastern European Jews.

“One side of 16th Street was the German Jewish population, and the other side was the Eastern Europeans,” says Bresler. “There was little to no interplay between the two.”

The segregation of Jews and non-Jews, she says, was clear.

“I grew up knowing there were things that I didn’t do and places we didn’t go,” says Bresler. “That was just a thing. It was not looked upon as being unusual.”

Bresler, like her fellow German Jews, went to Woodrow Wilson High School — now known as Jackson-Reed High School. She graduated in 1945, at the end of World War II.

“Keep in mind, we had no television,” Bresler says. “We had newspapers, we had the radio, and we had newsreels at movie houses — but the newsreels could be as much as a week or ten days after the event took place.”

She says not being able to watch what was happening in real time sheltered from the realities of the war in many ways.

“We would see soldiers, and they were building temporary barracks and things on the [National] Mall, but it was somewhat foreign or away from us,” she recalls. “We learned a lot of things well after the war, like when a piano fell through the floor of the White House.”

After World War II, D.C.’s population exploded. Everything around her changed.

“We became a far more mobile society,” says Bresler. “You had airplanes that took you places. You weren’t just dependent on a car or train. The whole world got a lot bigger.”

In 1955, Washington Hebrew moved from its original home on 8th and I Street NW, to where it is today, on Macomb Street — a change Bresler remembers clearly.

“They totally outgrew 8th and I, plus Jews weren’t living down there anymore,” says Bresler. By this point, she had children of her own, and the Macomb Street location was far more convenient as her children were getting ready to be confirmed or bar mitzvahed.

She recalls a couple of years when High Holy Day services were held at DAR Constitution Hall. She also remembers several presidents visiting WHC over the years. In 1952, when the Macomb Street site was chosen, President Harry S. Truman laid the cornerstone. Three years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was there to dedicate the building. Decades after that, in 1974, President Richard Nixon attended a funeral service at WHC for his former staffer, Murray M. Chotiner.

Bresler has always had a love for collecting. As a young girl, she collected acorns. In the 1960s, she began collecting art. She’s since curated an extraordinary collection of nearly 2,000 pieces. Some, she donates to institutions like the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery.

“I am firmly convinced that collectors are born,” says Bresler. “We’ve either got an extra gene, or we’re missing some.”

In 2013, she launched Washington Hebrew’s Tikkun Olam Values (TOV) Fund in honor of her husband, who passed away in 2010. Through donations, the Fund has helped tens of thousands in D.C. with food, learning, and basic needs.

“Being Jewish, it’s imprinted on you that if you have the means, share with others. The Tov Fund is to give back to the community and to help people be able to live a decent life.”

She’s spent her life giving back, while making sure to live her own life to the fullest. At 92 years old, she celebrated her birthday at Burning Man, a week-long festival that draws tens of thousands to a Nevada desert each year.

“It was a hoot!” says Bresler. “We only had one dust storm, and the temperature never got over 100 degrees.”

Bresler’s advice for a long life is to not take everything so seriously.

“Have a sense of humor, even if it’s a sick sense,” she says.

But at the end of the day, she knows what matters most.

“If push comes to shove, and the world starts to come to an end, what you’re left with is your family and your own people.”