Sandy Koufax and the Lost Legacy of Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School

Real estate developers in New York City care little about preserving the city’s history and our memories. And teachers are also surprisingly reluctant. I walked past Lafayette High School, where students had painted beautiful murals in honor of their fellow students who passed away. They updated them every year, using the walls of the handball court as a canvas. Shockingly, the school — now divided into several schools — has now painted them over with gray paint, gray after gray after gray.

Teachers and school administrators have laid claim to the area next to the handball courts and park their cars on the large concrete softball field that was the scene of so many great games fifty years ago. No one can use it for softball today, it’s full of cars. The school also re-fenced the holes we had created – how many decades ago was that? – so we can sneak through late at night and hang out with friends on the high school steps. A new sign indicates they’ve expanded the only grassy baseball diamond in Right Field to 350 feet from home plate, 80 feet deeper in Right than Yankee Stadium’s infamous short right porch.

There was a time when young people in the Gravesend and Bensonhurst neighborhoods would gather there at midnight, before their families could afford their own air conditioning, because the nights were hot and sticky. Teenagers rushed out of their parents’ apartments and gathered (and “made out”) after midnight in Lafayette, until the new air-conditioned, all-night Pathmark supermarket came to nearby Cropsey Avenue, where the ice cream departments became a beloved and chilled meeting place .

My friend, math teacher Jack Shalom, went to Lafayette a few years ago and explored the unknown high school. He discovered a blocked plaque behind a closed door – whose? Jack squeezed behind the door and looked intently at the plaque. It honored baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax, the school’s most famous alum! (And what about the great musician Howie Cohen? radical Red Balloon Collective troublemaker Doug Appel? former NY Mets owner Fred Wilpon? and infamous billionaire Jeffrey Epstein (!)? All visited Lafayette HS Wilpon was Koufax’s friend there long before he bought the NY Mets; the others went to high school there around the same time ten years later.)

Koufax, as any self-respecting Brooklynite knew in the late 1950s, was a hometown hero, then brought to Los Angeles by the Dodgers, where he became one of the greatest pitchers of all time after adjusting his mechanics in 1961. In the years that followed, he threw four no-hitters, including one of the rare “perfect games.” The black players on the Brooklyn Dodgers—Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe—protected the young Jewish Koufax from the persistent anti-Semitism of their white teammates and management, as Newcombe would report years later.

Jack Shalom pointed out to a guard the hidden Koufax plaque he had discovered behind the chained door. “Who is that,”? the guard asked as he stumbled over pronouncing Koufax’s name. Jack was too shocked to say, “Koufax was the best pitcher ever in baseball six years in a row.” Nor did he mention that, strangely enough, Koufax was best known for the one game he refused to pitch in October 1965, during the World Series against Minnesota, because the game fell on the first day of Yom Kippur.

“Koufax’s decision to celebrate Yom Kippur in 1965 initially drew no special media attention,” writes Steve Lipman in a 2014 article for the NY Jewish Telegraph Agency. “The New York Times and New York Post matter-of-factly reported that he would miss the start because it was ‘the holiest of Jewish holidays.’ The Daily News went on hiatus that week. Its predecessor, the Jewish Week & American Examiner, made no mention of the game.”

“But through word of mouth in Jewish circles, everyone knew. Over time, the game took on mythic proportions. … Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna tells The Jewish Week. “In an era when many Jews thought it was best to keep their Judaism quiet,” Koufax’s act “emboldened some Jews to be outwardly Jewish in other ways — by wearing a Jewish symbol, demonstrating for Soviet Jews, or something like that.”

Steven Schnur, an author and professor at the university, says that because of that one game that wasn’t played, Koufax “became the universal symbol of a Jew who made a choice that we as a community admired. “It has nothing to do with an Orthodox lifestyle, or a commitment to halacha,” Schnur says.

Today, Judaism is unfortunately and wrongly equated with Zionism and the State of Israel. Lipman notes: “Koufax…was (and remains, as far as we know) devoutly secular, with little formal Jewish education and (by all accounts) no bar mitzvah. He married twice and divorced twice; he has no children.”

“A secular, non-practicing Jew,” Jane Leavy describes him in her book Sandy Koufax: The Legacy of a Leftist. A secular Jew who became a symbol for the entire Jewish community.

“When Sandy Koufax indicated that he would not pitch on Yom Kippur, many Jews in America stood up a little straighter and had better self-esteem and Jewish pride,” even though Hank Greenberg, who played for the Detroit Tigers 30 years earlier, had also refused to play on Yom Kippur. “That was as true of the Orthodox community as it was of the general Jewish community,” says Rabbi Berel Wein, an Orthodox scholar and historian now living in Jerusalem. “His refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur influenced that generation of American Jews to behave more assertively in public and to be less ashamed of their Jewishness. Koufax’s decision to do the Jewish thing so openly and in such a typically American settings like the World Series gave that generation of American Jews a new self-confidence.”

Also during Koufax’s heyday, Pope John XXIII changed the liturgy so that it was no longer drummed into the heads of Christian churchgoers every Sunday in every church that “the Jews had killed Jesus.” Vatican II did not stop me from being chased and sometimes beaten by the Italian Catholic Corraggio twins of Marlboro Projects, who lived in the next building. “You killed Jesus,” they shouted as they chased me through the projects. Unfortunately, I never thought to shout back, “What about Vatican II?” Hey, I thought in a strange acceptance, “Do you want to scream that ‘we’ killed Jesus? Then let’s own it! There is power in being able to kill their God, I decided – a means of self-protection and assertiveness. “The Jews killed Jesus” is a slander that has never really ended; it just disappeared and is now resurfacing as a result of Israel’s subjugation and mass murder of the Palestinian people, in the name of Jews everywhere.

That’s another reason why the Jewish Voice for Peace, and if not now, when? are so important today.

Koufax is still alive and living in Florida. Yet these days, a black Jaguar with “Koufax” plates still slips through my Bensonhurst neighborhood every so often, parking at Lafayette HS. Is it Sandy? Sometimes I wait to see who gets out of the car, but my observation posts are too frayed to detect it.