For Hank Greenberg, baseball was religion. Rosh Hashanah made him choose.
Rosh Hashanah came relatively early 90 years ago, starting at sundown Sept. 9, 1934, to usher in the Jewish new year of 5695 - right smack in the middle of a tight American League pennant race. For 23-year-old Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg, baseball’s most prominent Jewish player, that posed a difficult choice: whether to play in the team’s important game against the Boston Red Sox the next afternoon or take off in observance of one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar.
Any game without Greenberg could jeopardize Detroit’s first shot at a World Series appearance in a generation. But the tall first baseman also felt a loyalty to his religion and to his parents, who were Orthodox Jews.
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” he recalled in “Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life,” his autobiography, with sportswriter Ira Berkow. “It became a national issue. There was a big question in the press about whether I would play first base for the Tigers that day.”
The summer of 1934 was a fraught time for American Jews. A pair of antisemites, Henry Ford and radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, were among the most famous Detroit residents. Open antisemitism was a fact of life in the United States, and Greenberg faced his share of it on the baseball diamond. “Throw him a pork chop,” an opposing player yelled at him. “He can’t hit it.”
Even teammate Rip Sewell mocked him that 1934 season as “you big Jew bastard,” wrote Aviva Kempner, whose documentary “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” was recently rereleased in 4K.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany the year before was very much on the minds of Jews as they began the 10 Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The New York Times reported that in their Rosh Hashanah evening sermons that year, many New York City rabbis denounced Hitler and Nazism.
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“I was in a terrible fix”
Greenberg was coming off a solid rookie season in 1933, when he hit .301 with 12 homers. But in 1934, he had blossomed into a superstar, batting .339 with 26 homers, 139 RBI and an MLB-best 63 doubles while slugging a monstrous .600. That only added to the pressure for him to play every game down the stretch.
On the eve of the game, Detroit was in first place in the AL with an 87-47 record, but the New York Yankees were keeping chase. New York’s lineup was packed with future Hall of Famers such as Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, in his final season as a Yankee.
There were no league playoffs then; the first-place team in each league advanced to the World Series.
“We’re only four games ahead of the Yankees now,” Greenberg told a reporter at the time, according to his autobiography. “Suppose I stay out of the game and we lost the pennant by one game? That will keep the boys out of the World Series after they have worked so hard all season to get into the series. Would that be justice? What’ll they think? And what will Detroit think?”
“The team was fighting for first place,” Greenberg recalled in his book, “and I was probably the only batter in the lineup not in a slump.”
Raising the stakes was the city’s excitement for the Tigers, whose last pennant had come in 1909, when 22-year-old Ty Cobb led the majors with a .377 batting average and 76 stolen bases.
The Tigers, who drew just 321,000 fans in 1933, nearly tripled their attendance in 1934 to an MLB-best 919,000, a great showing for a team during the Great Depression. Fans were doubtless hoping to see Greenberg in the lineup Sept. 10.
“He was a man for whom baseball was practically a religion, so his was not an easy decision - particularly because the Tigers were in a close race for the American League pennant, and he was a fierce competitor,” Greenberg’s granddaughter, Melanie Greenberg, wrote in a 2008 opinion piece for the Forward.
As the debate swirled about whether Greenberg should play, Leo M. Franklin, an influential Detroit rabbi, issued a statement to newspapers. “The rabbi said that the question lay strictly between Greenberg and his conscience and that the church had no right to grant him dispensation or criticize him if he played,” the Sporting News reported, using “church” as a generic shorthand for Jewish leaders.
“I got telegrams from rabbis and Jewish advisers from all over the country,” Greenberg told the publication for a profile a few weeks later. “Some told me of the mistake I would make if I did not observe the day properly. Others told me to use my own judgment. I was in a terrible fix.”
The Detroit Free Press gave him some love Sept. 9, the day Rosh Hashanah would begin at sundown. On the front page of its Sports section, under news of the Tigers splitting a doubleheader, the paper ran a mammoth photo of Greenberg swinging the bat, with the words, “And so to you, Mr. Greenberg, the Tiger fans say, ‘L’shana Tova Tikatevu!’ which means ‘Happy new year.’”
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Divine influence
In “The Story of My Life,” Greenberg recounted how a top rabbi in Detroit had observed that Jews had played games on Rosh Hashanah throughout history, so it was okay for Greenberg to play.
“That momentous decision made it possible for me to stay in the lineup on Rosh Hashanah,” wrote Greenberg, who nonetheless still had mixed feelings.
“I don’t mind telling you I was upset mentally and at heart when I went into that game,” Greenberg said to the Sporting News. But he didn’t suffer any bad karma. With the Tigers trailing the Red Sox 1-0 in the bottom of the seventh inning, Greenberg slammed a solo homer to center field to tie the score. Then in the ninth, with the score still 1-1, he drilled a game-winning homer, again to center field. Fans greeted him by yelling, “Happy new year!” and some swarmed Greenberg as he crossed home plate.
“The traditional tenacity of the world’s oldest and most beleaguered people today had played its part in a pennant race - winning a ball game,” the Detroit Times wrote, adding: “There was more than the mighty bone and sinew of Hank Greenberg behind those two home runs which went whistling out of Navin Field. ... They were propelled by a force of the desperation and pride of a young Jew who turned his back on the ancient ways of his race and creed to help his teammates.”
Heavy stuff.
“Some divine influence must have caught hold of me that day,” Greenberg said with a smile in his Sporting News interview. The newspaper, known as the “Bible of Baseball,” was glowing in its profile of Greenberg, but casually slipped in some Jewish stereotypes common in that era. “There is little suggestion of the Jewish characteristics about his appearance, the nose being straight, and he speaks with more of a Harvard than a so-called East Side accent,” the story observed, the latter a reference to his early years on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Despite his Rosh Hashanah heroics, Greenberg’s decision to play caused him considerable heartburn. When he came to the ballpark the next day, his teammate Marv Owen noticed that Greenberg was “down in the dumps” and asked him, “Goddammit, Hank, you won the ballgame with two home runs - what’s wrong?”
“When I got back to my hotel, my phone rang half the night,” he replied. “I caught hell from my fellow parishioners, I caught hell from some rabbis, and I don’t know what to do. It’s 10 days until the next holiday - Yom Kippur.”
Owen reassured him, “Don’t worry; when it comes, you’ll make the right decision like you did yesterday.”
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‘Henry obeyed’
Greenberg did so - with a little push from his father. A New York City newspaper reporter visited his parents in the Bronx and quoted his father lamenting that his son had promised he wouldn’t play on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.
“Yom Kippur was different,” his father said. “I put my foot down and Henry obeyed.”
On Sept. 18, Greenberg hit his 25th homer in a key game against the Yankees, helping Detroit win, 2-0, to open a 7½-game lead. The next day fell on Yom Kippur, and Greenberg sat. It was the only game he missed all season, and amazingly, the first time the Tigers didn’t start their four infield regulars.
“For American Jews, who were still only acknowledged as second-class citizens, his was a meaningful decision,” his granddaughter wrote.
Without Greenberg in the lineup, Detroit managed just two runs in a loss to the Yankees. But with only 10 games left, Detroit pretty much had the pennant wrapped up.
Poet Edgar Guest wrote a poem that ran in newspapers across the country. Its last lines were:
Came Yom Kippur - holy fast day worldwide over to the Jew -
And Hank Greenberg to his teaching and the old tradition true
Spent the day among his people and he didn't come to play.
Said Murphy to Mulrooney, “We shall lose the game today!”
We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat,
But he's true to his religion - and I honor him for that!
In his memoir, Greenberg recalled walking into synagogue at 10:30 that morning, when “everything seemed to stop. The rabbi looked up; he didn’t know what was going on. And suddenly everybody was applauding. I was embarrassed; I didn’t know what to do. It was a tremendous ovation for a kid who was only twenty-three years old, and in a synagogue, no less!”
The Tigers won 101 games that season, finishing seven games ahead of the Yankees. Greenberg went on to have an excellent World Series, batting .321 with two doubles, a triple, a homer and seven RBI, but the Tigers lost in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals, a fiery team known as the “Gashouse Gang.”
The next season, Greenberg won the AL MVP award and led the Tigers to their second consecutive pennant. This time, the Tigers prevailed in the World Series against the Chicago Cubs, although Greenberg was limited to six at-bats because of a wrist injury.
Greenberg, the first Jewish player inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, said that during his baseball career, he resented being singled out for his religion.
“I’m not sure why or when I changed, because I’m still not a particularly religious person,” he wrote in his memoir, which was published in 1989, three years after his death at 75. “Lately, though, I find myself wanting to be remembered not only as a great ballplayer, but even more as a great Jewish ballplayer.”
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