LaibeKessler

The interview opens with its date and interviewers. Laibe explains that his parents gave him only his Hebrew name, Laibe, and expected him to pick an English name later, which he never did. The name came from his grandfather, and two cousins carried it too.

Laibe's grandfather and his eldest son, Philip, left Proskurov in 1907. To keep Philip out of the Czar's army, they paid a farmer to carry them across the border hidden in a haystack, then sailed from Hamburg to Ellis Island and went on to relatives in McKeesport. The grandfather was a baker, but the ship's manifest lists him as a laborer.

Laibe reflects on a father who would leave his whole family behind to save one son from the army. Uncle Philip told him the Proskurov bakery was attacked from both sides. In McKeesport, Philip ran for the school board on the Socialist ticket, and the youngest brother, a lawyer, served as Socialist Party secretary and knew Eugene Debs.

Laibe names his grandmother Fanny and her six children. Sadie's fiancé in Russia chose not to come, which left a spare ticket. The family gave it to a motherless cousin, Jake Pildish, who left his father behind and never saw him again. Laibe adds that the family name was originally Tessler, spelled with a T.

The brothers went from peddling produce to a grocery store to real estate and insurance, and in the 1920s they built the Kessler Building in McKeesport. The Depression took everything just as Laibe's father died in 1930, at 32. Laibe recalls the 200 cars in the funeral procession, the family's synagogue known as "Cox's Army," and how, without a father, he found a home at Temple B'nai Israel.

Laibe's mother's family, the Levines, were Litvaks from the Kovno district and claimed seventeen generations of rabbis. His grandmother went into labor on the ship and was put ashore at Halifax, so his mother was born in Canada. Her father went back to Lithuania and was never heard from again. Laibe also describes the prosperous McKeesport Levines and their Union Clothing store, and his parents' marriage at 17 and 18.

His paternal grandparents died in and just after the 1918 flu epidemic. The family brought Laibe's great-grandfather over from Ukraine, and his youngest uncle walked the old man to synagogue every Shabbat. Laibe ends with the McKeesport cemetery plot where five of his relatives lie side by side.

Aunt Tilly and C.J. Rosenbleet first drew the family to McKeesport. Laibe remembers Tilly's grocery store and her teasing about what a handful he was. Her children stood in for the father he had lost: cousin Pearl, who married a piano-loving doctor, and Sidney, who took him swimming. The tape ends mid-story.

Laibe lists the fields Montefiore could never build: cardiology went to Presbyterian and Allegheny General, children to Children's Hospital two blocks away, obstetrics to Magee-Womens, and neurosurgery stalled for lack of money.

A board president told Laibe over dinner that Montefiore was losing $25,000 a day in the early 1970s. Laibe argues the hospital squandered its real lifeblood, the young Jewish specialists it had trained, himself included.

No Montefiore department head ever became a university chairman; when Dr. Troen was passed over he started his own residency, just as the attending doctors had urged. Laibe counts three revolutions, ending in the quiet sale of Montefiore to the University of Pittsburgh around 1989-90.

Laibe was secure at Allegheny General, but friends still at Montefiore were upended by new university chairmen. He concludes the sale helped the Jewish community: it stopped the losses and created a roughly $75 million health-care foundation that supports the UJF.

Asked how he met his wife, Laibe (with Sydelle laughing in the background) first describes his brief first marriage around 1950, which fell apart while he was overseas with the Air Force, and his 1955 move to New York.

His patient, songwriter Ann Ronell, kept fixing him up; after Ava Gardner failed to show, she arranged a cocktail party with a young singer, Sydelle Radin. At dinner a strolling violinist played and Sydelle began to sing, stunning the restaurant.

Laibe introduced Sydelle to his mother and Elmer Hamburg at the Plaza, admired her refusal to break plans with a friend, and married her on 2 March 1957 in a New York rabbi's study before about 15 guests. Thirty-eight years on, they still forget their anniversary.

Opening the 21 March 1995 session on his medical career, Laibe recaps Penn State, his Navy service while waiting for medical school, and his Pitt years under the quota system. He graduated in March 1948, went to Europe for the Joint Distribution Committee, and returned to intern at Montefiore.

Laibe opened general-practice offices in Squirrel Hill and the Hill District, delivering babies, treating children and making house calls. He and Nate Alpern also staffed the new hospital floor at the Jewish Home for the Aged, in an era when 65 was considered too old for surgery.

The doctor-draft law sent Laibe back into uniform despite his wartime Navy service, and he ran outpatient clinics at a base in South Carolina. As the only Jew in his unit, he offered to cover Christmas duty, but his colleagues insisted he celebrate.

After flight surgeon school at Randolph in Texas, Laibe was sent to Europe instead of Korea, serving as deputy medical commander at the Chaumont air base. He was dismayed that French doctors diagnosed everything as 'liver trouble,' campaigned to fix the F-84's seat, flew all over Europe, and separated from his first wife.

Home from France and convinced general practice was ending, Laibe chose neurosurgery under Dr. Yale Koskoff, whom he had assisted as an intern. He recalls Koskoff's famous lobotomy on the criminal Wilbur Wright, who afterward simply enjoyed outsmarting the police.

On a weekend at Koskoff's primitive Bear Rocks retreat, with Peter Lindstrom and his teenage daughter Pia, Laibe was sent to answer a police message: Wilbur Wright had killed himself in Butler jail, flushing the razor blade first. Wright's brain went to Harvard and confirmed a perfect lobotomy, which fed the psychosurgery debate.

Laibe wraps up the Wilbur Wright story, the press criticism of Dr. Koskoff, and the little-noticed book about the case. As a resident he helped Koskoff build a private research department at Montefiore, including a primate lab, before finishing there in 1955.

Laibe moved to New York for a residency at the Neurological Institute, then the top neurosurgical training post in the country. Everyone assumed its residents could not be Jewish; Charles Carton had only recently broken that barrier.

Laibe tells how the famed Jewish neurosurgeon Leo Davidoff was forced out of Presbyterian when Byron Stookey gave the board an ultimatum. He also recalls a rebuke for offering a 'psychiatric opinion', and how he diagnosed a Yiddish-speaking woman's trigeminal neuralgia that no one else had understood.

Having married Sydelle in his last year of residency, Laibe took a six-month fellowship at the Lahey Clinic in Boston under James Poppen, whom he considered the world's greatest neurosurgeon. He relays Poppen's stories of Harvey Cushing and Gilbert Horrax, the founders of American neurosurgery.

After years of $25-a-month stipends, Laibe took his first real job in 1959 at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, driving there with Sydelle, who was pregnant with their first child. His opening lecture on cerebrovascular surgery drew not a single question, unlike the relentless students of New York and Boston.

In Dallas his assistants on a showcase aneurysm case cared more about a new gun than the operation, Sydelle sat alone all day in a motel, and local doctors cared mainly about which country club he would join. Laibe sensed he would not make the social compromises Dallas demanded.

Laibe realizes too late that Sydelle, a Brooklyn-born Manhattanite, was alone and unhappy in a Dallas motel. The city's advertised culture proved hollow, and even the absence of trees wore on them.

Walking through a 'whites only' door at Parkland Hospital in 1959 forces Laibe to ask what he would sacrifice to oppose segregation; he notes he would have been the ER doctor who received President Kennedy had he stayed. Seeing Sydelle depressed, he calls Montefiore in New York and leaves Dallas within a week.

At Montefiore in the Bronx, under Charles Carton and affiliated with the new Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Laibe joins early research on stroke and small blood vessel surgery. His group buys the first Zeiss operating microscope sold in New York and, in 1960, uses it on a brain vessel.

Feuding between Dean Leo Davidoff and Charles Carton drives Carton to California and leaves Laibe exposed. Davidoff and pathologist Zimmerman erase their contributions from a published conference book and laugh at his claim that AV malformations could be removed, so he leaves for Pittsburgh in summer 1961.

His stepbrother Lester Hamburg smooths his return to Pittsburgh's Montefiore, but his former mentor Yale David Koskoff is hostile and the head nurse bars him from using Koskoff's instruments. Board president Stanley Cahn buys him his own set.

Laibe buys a house in Churchill's Sherwood Forest and builds referrals by driving to hospitals in Greensburg, Jeannette, Latrobe, and the North Hills. The veteran surgeon Tom Shube has Sidney Kaufman give him a rent-free office for his first year.

Laibe sets up a radioactive cerebral blood flow laboratory on Darragh Street behind Montefiore. Neurosurgery chief Stuart Rowe tells him there is no way he can get a University of Pittsburgh appointment.

No Jew had yet received an appointment in Pitt's Department of Surgery; even Koskoff could only get one in psychiatry. Laibe brings aneurysm, AVM, and carotid surgery to Montefiore while driving to outlying hospitals for patients.

Asked by AGH's neurologist to come work there, Laibe insists the invitation come from the neurosurgeons themselves. After a Saturday meeting, Drs. Rowe and Grunigle take him for coffee and ask him to take over neurosurgery at Allegheny General.

As Greensburg referrals fade, Laibe narrows to Montefiore and AGH. When the university's full-time system reaches neurosurgery around 1972, his Montefiore operating room is taken for a baboon experiment and his cases are bumped, so he moves all his patients to AGH.

With surgery chairman George Magovern as an ally, Laibe pushes AGH toward specialized floors, specialized nurses and imaging staff, and a head injury service, and patents a device for comatose patients. He first wrote about intraluminal manipulation of the cerebral circulation in 1969.

A new state trauma system brings AGH a helicopter and a trauma chief whose methods Laibe cannot accept. Around 1983, at about 60, he suggests a new department chief, coaches Joseph Maroon on what to demand, and watches the department grow from 40 cases a year to 2,500.

Laibe receives Pitt appointments in the 1960s and 1977, though even surgery chief George Magovern finds it ironic that he must recommend a full professor. AGH's new medical school makes him a full professor in 1988; he retired from surgery January 1, 1995, and now teaches and does medico-legal consulting.

Laibe says HMOs helped drive him from practice: they excluded integrated hospitals like AGH and limited patients to panel physicians.

Laibe reads from a letter from his cousin Floyd Kessler's brother describing the town where his father's family was born: renamed Khmelnytskyi in 1954, 40 percent Jewish in 1926, and emptied of its Jews in 1942. The family were bakers in a grain-milling center.

Married March 2, 1957, in New York, Sydelle had worked for Mademoiselle, run an antique jewelry shop, and pioneered freelance photo styling while studying voice. Her best friend was Beverly Sills, but Sydelle gave up singing to marry and raise a family.

The family arrives in Pittsburgh in 1961 with Adam and baby Emily and settles in Churchill so the children could walk to school; Sydelle, a Brooklynite, has to learn to drive. After five years they move to Shady Avenue, just as Philip is born in 1964.

The children start at Linden public school, and Laibe admits he gave little time to the Jewish community then. Getting Adam into Shady Side Academy required a connection, a recommendation from board member Stanley Kahn, because Jewish children were otherwise shut out.

Laibe and Sydelle's social life centers on music: they throw parties for the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Opera, and the Civic Light Opera's touring leads, often through their friend, associate conductor Karl Kritz. He points to photographs of guests including William Steinberg, Isaac Stern, Sasha Schneider, Chaim Potok, and Yefim Bronfman.

Emily chooses Allderdice over private school; Adam goes from Shady Side to Hobart, where a year in Israel is hard to get credited and the campus is still slightly antisemitic. Laibe moves Emily from American University to Penn State, and she later rooms in New York with Beverly Sills's family and becomes a publishing executive.

Philip goes from Penn State and hotel work into theater and tours with Jesus Christ Superstar. Following the show brings Laibe and Sydelle to Berlin, his first time back in Germany since his postwar Joint Distribution Committee work, where they visit the Wannsee house and the Gestapo museum.

Sydelle, raised Jewish without synagogue or committees, worries that Adam and Emily got little Jewish education at their Reform congregation. In 1973 she enrolls Philip at the Hebrew Institute, which draws Laibe onto its board and eventually into its presidency.

Philip's Hebrew Institute bar mitzvah brings Laibe back into Jewish life, and AIPAC pulls him into politics. Adam follows his fiancée Lisa Hahn to Baltimore, marries her in Boston, and rises in Baltimore's Jewish communal agencies; they have Hannah and baby Philip Max.

In 1990 Laibe revives the UJF Physicians Division, finding about a thousand Jewish physicians across 28 hospitals where once there was only Montefiore. His new Maimonides Society signs up over 200 members and honors him with its first Maimonides Award.

Laibe chairs the forming Midwestern Maimonides network and affirms that he and Sydelle live openly as Jews among non-Jewish friends. He notes that a Jewish neighbor now leads the AGH staff and that he stopped operating on January 1, 1995.

Laibe introduces the Jewish Family Assistance Fund, founded by Herman and Helen Lipsitz and run by modest volunteers like Holocaust survivor Abe Cohen. It gives small, fast grants to people with nowhere else to turn.

The fund helped 199 people last year with $25,000, from a hearing aid to co-signed loans for new immigrants. Laibe resists another post until Saul Rubin calls it the only organization that really helps a person who's down and out.

Laibe argues Jews must engage in politics, citing 93 senators backing an embassy move to Jerusalem. He tells how he raised $3,600 in two and a half hours to send Congressman Rick Santorum to Israel, opposed his Senate run, then backed him over Sydelle's objections for the sake of Israel.

Drawn into AIPAC by his college friend Jesse Cohen, Laibe helps organize Jewish votes to carry Arlen Specter after the Anita Hill hearings. When Harris Wofford is appointed senator, Laibe's 20-minute briefing on the settlements dispute turns into a long tutorial; the tape cuts off mid-story.

Laibe's daughter-in-law, a social-work graduate, took her first job as an AIPAC fundraiser, and through her he joined the pro-Israel lobby in the late 1980s. That work led him to become a close supporter of Senator Arlen Specter.

Laibe describes Specter's Senate race against Lynn Yeakel, whose church had hosted speakers he considered anti-Semitic. He arranged a published endorsement by Democrats for Specter in the Jewish Chronicle.

After Senator John Heinz's death, Laibe was sent to lobby his appointed successor, Harris Wofford, on West Bank settlements. A 20-minute appointment stretched to an hour and a half, and Wofford became an ally whom Laibe introduced to the Jewish community.

At AIPAC's request Laibe raised $3,600 to send young Congressman Rick Santorum to Israel. He refused to back Santorum against Wofford, then supported him once he won, and he argues that Jewish money and education explain broad Senate support for Israel.

Laibe recounts introducing Tom Ridge, Sandra Newman and others to Pittsburgh's Jewish community, hosting Ridge's gubernatorial reception at his home, persuading a Jewish candidate to step aside for Bill Coyne, and lobbying Congressman Ron Klink on foreign aid.

Laibe sets the stage for the 1991 clash with the Bush administration: Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel, Israel's request for U.S. loan guarantees, and the Jewish community's agreement to delay a congressional vote without securing a firm deadline.

Laibe defends Israel's settlement policy as a security and final-status plan and recounts how Baker's visit to Israel in 1991 led to a furious meeting with AIPAC's leaders.

Over Labor Day 1991 the Conference of Presidents voted to press ahead with the loan guarantee request rather than lose faith with supportive senators. Baker's six-point plan failed to rule out linkage, and he then courted senators with no Jewish constituencies.

Summoned to the White House at 7 a.m., AIPAC president Mayer Mitchell told President Bush that a 1939 refugee ship turned away with no one to speak for it was why he devoted his life to this work. Bush listened but went public at noon.

Bush's surprise noon press conference attacked the roughly 1,200 AIPAC lobbyists on Capitol Hill that day. Back in Pittsburgh, Laibe reads the next morning's newspaper story quoting him among the 41 Pittsburghers who lobbied.

AIPAC officers met with Senators Kasten and Inouye and accepted a 120-day delay brokered by Phil Gramm; Laibe then chaired Pittsburgh's synagogue letter-writing campaign. He recalls predicting in fall 1991 that Bush would lose re-election.

Laibe contrasts Clinton's warmer attitude toward Israel with what he lists as the Bush administration's slights: calling East Jerusalem a settlement, praising the PLO's compliance, and linking Soviet Jewish resettlement to settlements.

Laibe notes that Pittsburgh now sends busloads to lobby and raises about $100,000 for AIPAC. He recalls a young foreign student who wept after speaking to a congressman, amazed that she could.

Laibe explains the two founding strands of Pittsburgh Jewish philanthropy: German Jews who built hands-on local charities such as the Irene Kaufmann Settlement in the Hill District, and later worldwide relief through the United Jewish Fund.

The newly successful immigrant families clustered around three wealthy patrons, Edgar Kaufmann, the Falks and Charles Rosenbloom, each with loyal followers. Laibe recalls his friendship with Rosenbloom and his harpist wife, and the 'Health Club' men of the YM&WHA.

Sidney Stark, a tyrannical but tireless fundraiser for the Jewish Home for the Aged, treated Laibe as a rival until the morning Laibe, the home's young physician, made rounds through a city frozen solid. From then on they were fast friends.

The German-Jewish Concordia Club excluded Eastern European Jews until postwar costs and returning veterans broke the barrier. Laibe says Rodef Shalom still held to the old outlook and alone refused to join the loan guarantee campaign.

In 1947, a stranger phoned Laibe at the Ruskin Apartments using the name of his Penn State fraternity brother Arthur Jaffe, who had joined the Haganah. They met in secret at the Webster Hall coffee shop.

Laibe lays out the 1947 situation: Holocaust survivors stranded in Europe, British blockades and Cyprus camps, oil politics, and the Haganah training with broomsticks and turning to America for money.

McKeesport's early Jewish families lived around Mulberry Alley in the First Ward before moving up the hill to Christie Park and beyond. In World War I, Uncle Phil and cousin Jake Pildish were socialist conscientious objectors who served in the Quartermaster Corps.

Laibe's only sibling, his sister Adelaide, was born in 1918 and was famous in town for her looks. She went to Pitt, taught shorthand, married Gilbert Farkas, and moved to Cleveland. Laibe proudly describes their two sons, including one who was elected class president every year.

Egon Pessin, a German-born would-be opera singer who once sang in the Metropolitan Opera chorus, ran Temple B'nai Israel without pay and filled the gap left by Laibe's father. The temple was the center of the boys' lives: basketball, Scouts, Hebrew school, plays, and a 7 a.m. minyan every morning for four years after bar mitzvah, rewarded with a watch Laibe still has.

Laibe describes how isolated Jews were in the 1930s and how the shared hardship drew McKeesport's Jews together. Asked about personal anti-Semitism, he tells a story he says he had never told anyone: in eighth grade, despite being class president and newspaper editor, he was passed over for school patrol captain without a word.

With the business gone and Uncle Phil bankrupt, Laibe's mother went to work for $79 a month. A New Deal home loan in about 1936 finally lifted the fear of losing the house. Laibe's uncle, the lawyer, who had come straight from his law school graduation to Laibe's father's funeral, moved in with them, repaying the brothers who had put him through school.

His mother, commuting to a government job in Pittsburgh, won Adelaide a four-year senatorial scholarship to Pitt and moved with her to the Ruskin Apartments in Oakland around 1939. Laibe stayed behind for his senior year, in his old room in the house his uncle took over.

Adelaide's suitors included All-American Marshall 'Biggie' Goldberg, and through her circle Laibe met Penn State fraternity men he admired. Uncle Phil promised the family would pay for college, Penn State turned out cheaper than Pitt, and Laibe joined Phi Epsilon Pi. The tape closes with recorder chatter as Sydelle arrives.

With British agents watching for Haganah money, Laibe gathered ten veteran friends at the Seventh Avenue Hotel and started a chain of house meetings that raised $30,000 in cash in 30 days. He recalls a crate of 'books for Palestine' that burst open on a New Jersey dock, revealing guns.

Back in Pittsburgh in 1961, Laibe was delighted to find a classical station, WQED-FM, and volunteered to raise money. He and Sydelle grew close to station head Jack Summers and his family; Summers's stepson Chris learned piano on the Kesslers' grand piano.

WQED-FM ran on a $62,000 budget, so the Kesslers gave and raised money. At Jack Summers's suggestion Sydelle, a former New York classical singer, hosted a weekly opera program, and the couple raised the money for her $5,000 stipend themselves.

After the Kesslers hosted a WQED party for a visiting Chinese opera company, the newspaper item omitted every Jewish name and even their home, and also neurosurgeon Peter Sheptak, who was not Jewish. Overhearing a conversation at Montefiore explained why; WQED's reply blamed the newspaper.

Nothing was said at a later dinner with the Summerses, the opera program ended, and a blue-ribbon support committee Laibe convened in his home was quietly dropped. Jack Summers died before they could reconcile.

The Kesslers' circle was more musical than medical: patients in the orchestra, friendship with William Steinberg, parties for visiting artists, and Sydelle's childhood friend Beverly Sills staying with them. Yet they were never asked onto the symphony board, which Laibe calls subliminal anti-Semitism.

Through Beverly Sills the Kesslers hosted Pittsburgh Opera's Tito Capobianco and his wife Gigi, but again saw a corporate board with almost no Jews. Laibe notes Sydelle chaired many committees, and briefly says the Hebrew Institute ran out of students.

Laibe recounts the Hebrew Institute's founding by Rabbi Abrams to teach immigrant children and its peak of 1,000 after-school students. By his presidency it was down to 70-80 students as synagogue and day schools took over.

In 1953 Dr. Aaron Kessler arrived to head a separate School of Advanced Jewish Studies rather than work under the Abrams family, saddling the Federation with two institutions for decades. Laibe also describes the day school that grew up on the Institute's premises.

Laibe's outreach and capital-fund plans to save the Institute were blocked, and he defends Saul Abrams, who taught, ran the school and even got children onto buses on cold mornings. In 1992 the Institute was folded into the new Jewish Education Institute.

Left off the new board, Laibe was later persuaded to join it, attended one meeting, and quit at 70. He sets out his philosophy: boards should raise money and hire good professionals, then leave them alone.

Now chairing the UJA Midwest Maimonides executive committee, Laibe explains why physicians are the community's new strength and defends Jewish doctors against charges of stinginess. When he started medical school there were perhaps 100 Jewish doctors in Pittsburgh; now there are 800-1,000.

Laibe updates the story of the Jewish Family Assistance Fund, founded with Herman Lipsitz in 1985. He will become board president in June and plans to work with the Federation and Jewish Children and Family Service. The tape ends mid-sentence.

The second session opens. Laibe recalls AZA and an all-Jewish Boy Scout troop, and says he took separation from Gentiles for granted until college. At Penn State's Phi Epsilon Pi, students ran the house themselves, down to hiring the cook, and visitors included Post-Gazette critic Harold V. Cohen and the Hollywood Epstein brothers.

Through Hillel, and after volunteering in the Pittsburgh UJF office his mother managed, Laibe chaired Penn State's first United Jewish Appeal drive in 1941 and raised about $1,500. He credits UJF figures Maurice Taylor and Arthur Rosichan, and laughs that his assistant, future Federation president Jesse Cohen, gave the largest gift: ten dollars.

Laibe led the campus tribunal, his fraternity house, and the lacrosse team as manager. When news of Pearl Harbor came, the students thought war sounded glamorous. Soon the campus was in uniform, with rationing and their fraternity house leased to the Army, while pre-med students like Laibe were deferred.

Pitt's medical school took 85 students a year and held Jews to about ten percent, alternating nine one year and eight the next, and nobody objected. Laibe applied only to Pitt. Dean McElroy told him to wait for an opening, and community leader Charles Rosenbloom intervened to secure his place for the following year.

Waiting for medical school after graduating in October 1943, Laibe enlisted in the Navy, to his mother's dismay. She lobbied Congressman Sam Weiss of Glassport, a boyhood friend of Laibe's father, who assured her the Navy would send Laibe back to school. Boot camp at Great Lakes was the coldest experience of his life.

The only college graduate in a company of mostly Appalachian draftees, Laibe was assigned to teach the men to sign their names, and he heard country music for the first time (he hated it). As the only Jew, he overheard a recruit call him a 'Yankee Jew', challenged him to a fight, and got an apology.

The group ahead of Laibe on the posting list went to the Pacific, but he drew Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, near Washington. He spent a year there as a pharmacist's mate third class, a rating given to anyone with a college degree, until orders came to return to medical school.

As a pharmacist's mate, Laibe ran his own dispensary at an outlying test field where pilots dropped radar-jamming foil and practiced short takeoffs. When his medical school orders came, the commanding officer asked why he hadn't said he was going to be a doctor. Laibe also recalls a $60 1936 Chevrolet that carried him and a friend to weekend dates in Washington.

Back in Pittsburgh, Laibe lived with his mother at the Ruskin Apartments and began medical school in 1944, with mornings of dissection and studying until midnight. His one indulgence was piano lessons at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute, which he practiced an hour a day until internship.

In 1946, as fraternity brothers came home from the war, Laibe asked six of them for $100 each for the United Jewish Fund. They included Al Moses, captured at the Battle of the Bulge. The UJF office was thrilled, and the gift became the seed of the Young Adult Division, which Laibe organized with Joe Silberstein.

Laibe chaired the first Young Adult conference at Emma Farm Camp, which drew 125 people. The division hired staff, raised about $60,000 under first chairman Lester Hamburg (later Laibe's stepbrother), and got young people seats on agency boards. Many of its members, Jesse Cohen among them, later led the Federation. Laibe also mentions the division's newspaper, The Reflector.

Around 1950 Laibe opened general practices at Darlington and Murray in Squirrel Hill and at Kirkpatrick and Centre in the Hill District, which he shared with Shep Isaacson. He made 2 a.m. house calls with his black bag and treated prisoners in withdrawal at the police station. Once, the whole neighborhood surrounded his car to stop a patrolman from ticketing it.

The Korean War doctor draft, which Laibe calls discriminatory, threatened to call him up a second time, so he enlisted in the Air Force as a flight surgeon and captain. Stationed in France instead of Korea, he flew to Rome or Paris for lunch and served on the committee that opened Orly Airport to American military flights.

On graduating from medical school in April 1948, Laibe spoke at a national federation meeting in Chicago. With help from Kitty Falk and Harry Rosen, he then toured Europe for three months as a 'VIP I'. He visited children's homes, displaced-persons camps, Theresienstadt, and Dachau, where the victims' belongings were still in place, and saw a starving continent where American cigarettes were the only real currency.

The interviewers open the session, and Laibe explains that his mother paid for the trip as his medical-school graduation present. He reads the Joint's letter of introduction describing him as one of the most active youth leaders.

In Paris in April 1948 Laibe saw refugee children's homes and displaced-persons camps, met Chaim Weizmann as he waited for word from Truman, and learned how the Joint recruited army quartermasters and their supplies. He noticed that people now claimed to be Jewish because the Jews were the ones being fed.

Laibe passes through Geneva and Lausanne, where he met Saly Mayer, and recalls the Joint's Paris chief Joe Schwartz. In Milan he visited children's homes, one of them in a former Goering mountain retreat, and found Italians had done more than most to save Jews.

In Rome a Dr. Finkelstein showed him hospital rounds, and the Haganah talked him out of continuing to Palestine. Instead he was invited as an honored guest to the raising of the Israeli flag in Rome when the state was declared in May 1948.

On a four-day holiday in Capri, an English couple named Kellner approached Laibe and asked him to help their sister leave Communist Prague. The request set up his later visit to Czechoslovakia and a lasting friendship with the family.

With the Joint's Vienna director Harold Trobe, Laibe toured a city where about 10,000 of 165,000 Jews survived. He visited orphan homes and Zionist training farms where children prepared for Palestine.

At the first Friday-night service in Vienna's bombed-out main synagogue, every person in the congregation rose for the memorial prayer. Laibe, who had said Kaddish alone as a boy after losing his father at seven, says that night showed him the Jewish people are one.

Crossing into Czechoslovakia, Laibe was searched thoroughly for the first time and found Prague silent and watchful. He tracked down the Kellners' sister and asked her to come to England, but she refused; he later learned she married and stayed.

Laibe recalls a lost book of Holocaust photographs from Munich, then the execution wall and dispensaries at Theresienstadt, and a driver who had been a prisoner there yet denied it all. At Dachau, still untouched since liberation, he picked up a German autopsy report from the dispensary floor.

After Frankfurt and a return to Paris on June 7, Laibe went to visit the Kellners in the north of England. Food was scarcer there than on the Continent, and he only later learned the family had saved their whole egg ration so he could have one every day.

Asked for summary thoughts, Laibe describes the empty camps and explains that he entered Czechoslovakia on International Refugee Organization travel papers, which he still has. He discusses the mood after Jan Masaryk's death and the four-power occupation of Austria.

Laibe calls the crossing home on the Queen liner the most enjoyable week of his life, spent with Carmen Miranda's touring band. In New York journalists sought his first-hand account, and the experience fueled his work building the Young Adult Division.

During his rotating internship at Montefiore, Laibe flew out after work to speak in several cities about Europe. Ignoring Sidney Bergman's advice to specialize, he opened general practices in Squirrel Hill and the Hill District, as his professor Dr. Caldwell had urged.

Called up under a doctors' draft law during the Korean War, Laibe served two years as an Air Force flight surgeon in Europe and saw the Marshall Plan's effects. Back home he found patients wanted specialists, so with Yale David Koskoff's encouragement he trained in neurosurgery.

Asked whether a people person belongs in surgery, Laibe says operating has given him both the best and worst moments of his life. He traces his training through Boston and the Bronx and his return to Montefiore, where he did NIH-funded cerebral blood flow research.

The interviewers open the session, and Laibe explains that he came back to Pittsburgh largely to make Montefiore Hospital his base. He gives this tape its title: the rise and fall of Montefiore Hospital.

Laibe recounts how the Ladies Hospital Aid Society turned down free University of Pittsburgh land to keep control of the hospital, and how Dr. Thomas Schubb's large surgical service kept Montefiore busy through the Depression. He remembers specialists who made house calls for fifty cents.

With only eight or nine Jewish students per class at Pitt Medical School, Montefiore pressed them to intern there, warning they could not otherwise practice there. A family friend telephoned Laibe's mother to secure his commitment, a promise he now feels the community broke.

Sidney Bergman repeatedly called intern Laibe to his office to urge him toward a specialty and community leadership. Laibe joined the Federation board, helped organize medical care at the Jewish Home for the Aged, worked there mornings alongside two private offices, and found a donor for the hospital's first paging system.

Warned by the draft-board head, who was his patient, Laibe enlisted in the Air Force for two years during the Korean War, after earlier Navy service as a pharmacist's mate. Military medicine ranked general practitioners lowest, and he returned ready to train in neurosurgery under David Koskoff.

Around 1953 Montefiore was split among three rival surgeons who rotated as chief every three months, and staff resented a non-physician administrator. The board, led by I.D. Wolf, made Koskoff the first salaried full-time chief of staff.

Under Koskoff, Laibe split his days between general surgery and neurosurgery, and the two built the Montefiore Institute of Research with a primate laboratory. Their consultant, MIT's Warren McCulloch, was perhaps the most brilliant man Laibe ever met, though Laibe says he understood none of it.

When I.D. Wolf fell ill and Stanley Kahn became board president, Kahn ordered Koskoff out of his office overnight. Laibe, then a resident in New York, was asked to call his stepfather Elmer Hamburg, the hospital's vice president.

Laibe describes Robert Grauer, the brilliant Orthodox laboratory chief at Allegheny General, and how rivalry over whether Jewish medicine should center on one hospital undercut Montefiore's research. Jewish doctors were still unwelcome at university hospitals; Laibe himself could not join Presbyterian's staff.

In the late 1950s young lay leaders from the Young Adult Division, among them Lester Hamburg and the Halperns, decided Montefiore must affiliate with the University of Pittsburgh. At Lester's home around 1959 they told Laibe to stay out of it, and the university's terms stripped the hospital's autonomy.

Laibe lists what Montefiore had, including 200 active physicians, nine board-certified cardiologists, and a research neurosurgeon. When the doctors packed a meeting to protest, about 1962, his stepbrother Lester Hamburg told them they could leave, which Laibe calls the start of the hospital's downfall.

Doctors Stanley Rosenbloom and Hal Zubrow, with developer Jimmy Cooper, founded Central Medical Pavilion as an independent hospital; its first meeting of about 40 physicians took place in Laibe's own living room. Laibe had visited Rosenbloom on his deathbed two weeks before this interview.

To qualify as a university hospital, Montefiore accepted full-time chairmen approved by the university, Philip Troen in medicine and Mark Ravitch in surgery. Laibe gives a scathing account of Ravitch.

Recorded in Laibe's kitchen on 7 March 1995, he resumes his account of Montefiore's decline: the board began importing full-time department chiefs such as Dr. Ravitch, and Dr. Troen pushed a hospital run by full-time staff and residents rather than private attending physicians.

Laibe explains the 'tempest' over who controlled the patient, argues Montefiore could never be the university hospital, and cites how Presbyterian's neurosurgery residents failed their boards until the old-time attending surgeons were invited back.

Montefiore had no referral network like the university, and in the mid-1960s other hospitals began accepting Jewish doctors and offering kosher meals. Laibe recalls Allegheny General inviting him onto its staff and George Magovern's story of once being turned away as a Catholic.

Cardiologist Larry Adler was barred from doing cardiac catheterization at Montefiore while a hired full-timer struggled at the procedure next door to Laibe's X-ray room. Adler sued on principle, with Laibe's backing, and lost.

When the 'Concerned Physicians' sued Montefiore, Laibe wrote a petition of support and reads it aloud; all 39 surgeons signed. The doctors lost in court, and many left for the Central Medical Pavilion and newly open hospitals, as Lester Hamburg had told them to.

Asked why Jewish doctors suddenly became acceptable everywhere, Laibe points to the times, civil-rights law and specialization, recalling his 1948 Paris diary's surprise at Black diners in restaurants. He names doctors who moved to St. Margaret's.

Laibe explains that he is dictating his 1948 diary, then describes about 30 orphans leaving for Canada, a French woman's years in hiding during the occupation, and a former Polish professor learning to be a cobbler.

At ORT training centers in Paris, survivors learn trades for countries they have not yet found. Laibe stops to explain 1948 conditions: the importance of the Joint, cigarettes used as money, and the U.S. quotas that kept most survivors out.

A chance evening with an acquaintance from Baltimore, who would not drink at a bar beside a Black man, leads Laibe to wonder about America's future and what it holds for Jews.

At a JDC transient home, Laibe finds residents too demoralized to care for themselves. An old woman's question in Yiddish brings him to condemn the countries whose quotas keep these people stranded.

After an evening with Dr. Morgenstern, a former member of the Resistance, and his family, Laibe tours JDC-funded OSE children's homes in the French countryside. He finds the children healthy and bright but argues that they need love and homes more than money.

Laibe sets out the numbers: 150,000 children receiving aid and only 1,700 places offered abroad. He explains why older orphans fail other countries' admission rules and why no solution is in sight.

Madame Benatar, a lawyer running JDC work in North Africa, describes the second-class status of Moroccan Jews. Laibe relates her account of mothers wading into the Mediterranean, begging a Haganah ship to take them to Palestine.

At a JDC-funded COJASOR canteen, Laibe meets a woman taking her father to Argentina and teenage boys who dream of America but would go to Palestine. A social worker's story about 400 DPs sent to Sweden leads him to conclude that many survivors are deeply traumatized.

A former Foreign Legionnaire tells Laibe he may fight for the Haganah. On his last night in Paris, Laibe writes with warmth about the French: long lunches, paid holidays, flowers, wine and bicycles.

Laibe describes France in 1948 as the most tolerant place he has seen: no restricted neighborhoods, Jews well represented at universities, and an open door to displaced Jews. He wonders whether it can last between communism and de Gaulle.

A JDC-backed union of French Jewish students supports needy students, among them boys expelled from Beirut. Laibe worries about 500 unsupervised young people over 18 who depend entirely on the Joint.

Laibe reaches Milan and meets JDC staff and the economist Harold Glasser. He recalls Jewish students from Palestine dancing to Hebrew songs in Geneva and asks why American Jews hide their own identity.

In his first real displaced persons camp, Laibe walks among rows of cots and is greeted with 'shalom'. He tells of a hunger strike against the IRO's plan to move the camps south, Polish farmers training for a cooperative, a good medical setup, and an Italian Jewish JDC worker.

Writing in Rome, Laibe recounts a tense conference in Milan at which the IRO, the State Department, Italian officials and the Haganah argued over moving a defiant camp. He criticizes the IRO's refusal to treat chronically ill DPs.

Laibe reviews the JDC medical program in Milan, including the admission camp, a dispensary with 40 doctors, hospitals and a convalescent home. He lists disease statistics and pays tribute to DP doctors who were themselves survivors.

Stories of Italian kindness to Jews, including a JDC director's son riding baggage carts, a stranger who walked Laibe to a restaurant, and a village that asked for its DPs back. Then a banker's sour view of America, passed on by Harold Glasser.

At 1:30 a.m. on May 15, 1948, Laibe describes Rome's celebration of Jewish statehood, with toasts in many languages. He visits hachsharot training groups and concludes that the dream of Palestine has healed survivors like no medicine could. The side ends with a stray fragment of a medical dictation.

Laibe describes busy days in Rome: the Re degli Amici restaurant, a JDC convalescent home in a villa Goering once used, lunch with JDC director Lewis Horowitz, the night of Jewish statehood, and sightseeing at St. Peter's and the Palatine.

Laibe's last nights in Rome: fettuccine at Alfredo's, love songs in the ancient Ulpia cellar café, tennis at a club that did not exclude Jews, tea with a cancer researcher, and a double bill at the opera before a dash for the Naples train.

Laibe crosses to Capri past Vesuvius and Sorrento and describes the island's steep lift, narrow streets and bargaining shopkeepers. On the piazza he meets a British couple worried about their widowed sister in Prague.

Speaking in 1995, Laibe looks back on the postwar intrigue around his planned trip to communist Czechoslovakia shortly after Jan Masaryk's death. Strangers somehow knew he was going to Prague and asked him to reach their sister there, and he promised to do so.

Laibe has fun with four Finnish women and grows close to one of them, a Swedish actress. He leaves Capri reluctantly, stops in Venice with two American women traveling on almost nothing, and crosses the Brenner Pass toward Vienna.

In occupied Vienna, Laibe explains how aid was divided among the Austrian economy, the IRO and the JDC across four armies. He tours the ruined Rothschild Hospital and an old people's home where survivors keep pictures of Roosevelt.

Laibe watches once-proud community leaders humbly accept JDC budgets and attends a packed Friday night service, where everyone stands for Kaddish. He contrasts 165,000 Vienna Jews in 1938 with 9,000 in 1948, condemns Austrian attitudes, and recalls lighter moments, including a visit with a family from Beaver Falls.

Laibe flies to Prague and tours the Theresienstadt Small Fortress with Mr. Spitz, a driver who had been imprisoned there. He also visits the Jewish Museum the Nazis founded, the crowded old cemetery and the Old-New Synagogue, and hears Beethoven at the music festival.

Laibe meets the Capri couple's sister in Prague. She lost her parents, three brothers and husband in the camps, survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Hamburg and Belsen, and now cannot leave Czechoslovakia to join her sister in England.

Laibe finds well-run JDC institutions in Prague but growing fear of communist control. Over an $8 dinner he talks with Hannah about how hard escape would be, and the people he speaks with lower their voices in locked rooms.

At a hachshara training farm, 20 young people work 60 acres to prepare for life in Palestine. Laibe admires their idealism but doubts it will last, and adds that he will be gone and forgotten before such a way of life wins out.

Laibe visits Lidice, the village the Germans destroyed after Heydrich's assassination. Back in Prague he questions Western reporting on the communist coup and records ordinary Czechs' fear of the government and of another war.

Laibe weighs the Czech situation: equal food rationing, free education and the arts against a communist takeover, a single-list election with 89% approval, and Masaryk's mysterious death. He concludes that the people are afraid, mostly of another war.

Laibe flies to Frankfurt, which is half destroyed, and is briefed by JDC director Abe Cohen. He tours a camp of 2,600 people, explains the rations system, and describes why DPs would not leave the camps to live among Germans.

An evening at Kronberg Castle with Major Hyman, the Army's adviser on Jewish affairs, whom the DPs revered. Then Laibe visits the Bensheim camp, the Lindenfels children's center, and an IRO doctor short of the right needles.

In Munich, JDC's Mr. Haber shows Laibe the Neu Freimann camp and a 4,000-person camp with its own small shops. On the way they pass Ulm, Einstein's birthplace, and stop at a Haganah staging area, where Laibe treats a trainee's leg.

Laibe chooses to spend his last day in Munich at Dachau. He walks the barracks, the gas chamber labeled 'bathhouse' and the crematorium in drenching rain, then leaves for Paris on the Orient Express.

Laibe analyzes the demoralization of Germany's Jewish DPs: black-market trading, people waiting years to emigrate, too few staff, and American policy that left many feeling betrayed. He argues that only governments, not charity, can solve the problem.

Laibe leaves Germany bitter about German attitudes: denials around Dachau, a town that let typhoid spread, and an Allied policy of rebuilding Germany against Russia. He writes that the humanitarian problem is being pushed into obscurity.

Back in Paris on June 5, 1948, Laibe feels as if he has come home. He spends his days at dinners and in political talk, including with the editor of Combat in his garret, sees Lucia di Lammermoor, and hears a Romanian woman's hatred of the Russian occupiers.

On the boat train to London, Laibe answers a call for a doctor and helps diagnose a Scottish couple's sick baby. He reflects on Churchill's memoirs and finds postwar London still living as if at war, with queues everywhere.

Laibe travels to Shipley to see the sister of Hannah, the Prague survivor. The Kellners welcome him, and he spends days of Yorkshire hospitality: Bolton Abbey, playing a nine-foot piano, tea in the garden, and a formal dance in Harrogate with Amy.

After a little microphone setup, Morris gives his birth in Proskurov in 1906 and describes his father, a baker, going alone to McKeesport, where his sister lived. His eldest brother followed, the two became produce hucksters, and they sent tickets for the rest of the family.

Cousin Jake Pildish refuses to be left behind and nurses the seasick family on the crossing. They land at Ellis Island, take the train to McKeesport and arrive in snow, at Thanksgiving, at the father's apartment at 206 1/2 Market Street.

The children watch the blacksmith across the street. The huckster business grows to two horses, Fred and Belle, and about 1915 the father opens a grocery where penny candy is sold and mill workers buy on credit. Morris delivers orders on his way back to school.

Philip is drafted in 1917, and Jake Pildish gets him transferred into the Quartermaster Corps before he can be shipped overseas. As McKeesport celebrates the Armistice, the family mourns the father, who died of Spanish influenza on November 4, 1918. Their mother dies the next October.

Philip marries Eva of Connellsville, runs a junk business, then returns to McKeesport with a popcorn-and-soda confectionery on Fifth Avenue. The orphaned siblings crowd into his small Seventh Street apartment until, one by one, they marry and leave.

Morris finishes first in his eighth-grade class and, though only about four feet tall, gives the graduation speech at the Hippodrome on the League of Nations and the Monroe Doctrine. He does it again as second in his high school class, and his brothers take for granted that he will go to college.

Morris plans to become a lawyer and works at his brother Abe's fruit store at 545 Fifth Avenue, scrubbing lettuce and celery on Friday nights and selling bananas from Jordan, the local banana king. An Easter snowstorm ruins their stock. Philip then brings Abe into his real estate and insurance business during the 1920s boom.

Philip prospers and moves the family to 901 Sixth Street and then to a new brick house on Foster Road, where Morris has his own library. After a phone call interrupts the recording, he tells how he and Uncle Milton studied late and walked to meet each other halfway, and describes his long trip to Pitt by foot, train and streetcar.

Tuition is cheap, and Morris earns his weekly $5 on Saturdays at Max Lebowitz's clothing store. Philip, a speculator, puts up the three-story Kessler Building in 1928 and loses it to foreclosure in the Depression, just as Morris finishes law school and is admitted to the bar in 1930.

Abe dies of pneumonia the day before Morris's bar exam in 1930. Morris opens his law office in the Kessler Building, and the elderly bank president Mr. Shaw lends him $500 on the strength of the Kessler name.

Abe's widow Elizabeth goes to work for the United Jewish Appeal in Pittsburgh, and through its leader Mr. Rosenblum she gets scholarships for Laibe, who becomes a neurosurgeon. Philip, broke after the crash, becomes a star Reliance Life Insurance salesman on Morris's advice and later returns to real estate in Mount Lebanon.

Morris was a reluctant Hebrew-school student whom the rabbi favored and never hit. The family's tiny synagogue was nicknamed 'Cox's Army', and his father, then Abe, then Philip served as its president.

Philip, a political activist since arriving, led McKeesport's Socialist Party, and twelve-year-old Morris typed its notices as 'secretary'. Morris sat beside Eugene Debs at a McKeesport rally and met Morris Hillquit, Victor Berger and Norman Thomas.

The Kessler brothers were Jewish community leaders in McKeesport. In Mount Lebanon, the real estate board turned Philip down because he was Jewish, and he went on to sell what Morris believes was the first property there to a Jewish buyer.

Morris opens a Pittsburgh office near his law-school friends and rides the B&O daily for decades. He meets Rose on a McKeesport tennis court and marries her on March 9, 1939. They rent Elizabeth's house, where teenage Laibe lives with them, and after Elaine's birth in 1940 they move to Duquesne Avenue.

Morris takes his daughters on train rides to his Pittsburgh office, where his glamorous secretary Miss Jarvis treats them to lunch, and one of them asks her mother to be more like her.

Rose and Morris used to sit on the wall near a house they admired. One day his client Jim Balsamo offers it to Morris for $8,000, and Morris secures it with a $100 check. He surprises Rose on an evening walk, and the tenant slams the door on them. The deed turns out to include the lot next door.

In 1939 the newlyweds put furniture money toward a Bermuda cruise with Dr. Frank Bondy and kept Elizabeth's old bedroom suite for twenty years. In World War II Morris is deferred as a father and serves as a fire warden, while little Elaine asks whether Daddy will come home every night.

The girls do well in school. Appointed to the school board, Morris hands Elaine her diploma, but he refuses to let her stay out all night after the prom or join the next-day trip to Ligonier, and he keeps chaperoning proms afterward.

Elaine chooses Chatham, works as a camp counselor, and later teaches at Baldwin instead of in McKeesport. Susie applies to Michigan and Western Reserve and goes to Western Reserve. The tape ends with Elaine driving to school in a snowstorm, only to hear on the radio that schools are closed.

Homesick at camp and later unhappy at Western Reserve, Susie is looked after by Dick, her former counselor, who had moved to Cleveland. Grandma, who lived with the family, is the first to notice that the boy likes Susie.

Asked about earlier generations, Morris describes his paternal grandfather, whom Philip brought from Europe after the war: a small old man with a long white beard who boasted of running a big farm. The family hid his son's death, until one Sabbath walk to shul when the old man told young Morris he knew. Philip later arranged a match for him.

Morris knows little of his mother's family: her mother was remembered as 'Baba Brana', and a Silverberg relative in London once wrote to Philip for help. He also remembers cousin Motel, who deserted the Russian army, crossed Siberia to Japan, and was brought to McKeesport by Philip.

Philip dies of heart trouble on Christmas Day. That night 16-year-old Elaine skips her formal dance. Morris recalls seeing him at the office a day or two before, complaining of his heart.

Over 11 or 12 years on the McKeesport school board, Morris serves as president and leads the opposition to continuing Bible reading after the Supreme Court ruling, as new members push to censor books and teachers. He helps recruit a new superintendent, then declines to run again.

The mayor calls to offer him a vacant city council seat as the one person the divided council can agree on. Morris accepts on two conditions: he will not run again and will join no faction. He takes charge of garbage, parks and municipal property but cannot bring himself to cut a politically connected secretary.

Morris breaks up a foreman's 100-percent-interest lending racket by handing out paychecks himself, gets the city new garbage trucks, and persuades a bank marking its anniversary to fund all-weather tennis courts. He keeps his promise not to run again, though he later regrets it.

Friendships with Tom Mayfield and Bill Harrison bring Morris the bank's mortgage and consumer-credit work. The business fades once the bank has grown to two billion dollars and his friends have retired, though it once sent his associate to Puerto Rico.

His secretary introduces Harold, a former schoolteacher teaching at Duquesne, who joins Morris's practice, takes over his McKeesport evening office, and moves within a block of him. Harold was brilliant, though a judge warned Morris about his lecturing of juries. He was with Morris for about 15 years until his death.