When Renaldo Thompson hugs Miriam Ofer — a frequent occurrence whenever the two hang out at the JCC of San Francisco — it looks as if he could lift all 80-or-so pounds of her with one finger.
Instead, the towering one-time football player lifts Ofer’s spirits with his abiding love for the 92-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Ofer returns the favor with a smile, a touch and sometimes a quip that seems to come out of nowhere.
“I’m half dead myself,” she says to him with a mischievous grin.
“You’re too cute to be half dead,” he replies.
Thompson, a 57-year-old former construction worker left disabled after a workplace accident, says that Ofer, though beset with dementia, lifts his spirits with her undimmed zest for life. Three times a week, he drives his 20-year-old Mercedes to the memory-care wing of the Frank Residences at the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living. There he picks up Ofer and drives her to the JCC. The two have lunch together. She orders pancakes; he gets latkes. Then they take a swim class, during which he keeps her smiling and moving.
“We walk back and forth and we dance,” says Thompson, who says swimming is the only activity that provides him with relief from chronic pain. “She just makes me happy when I see her. We talk about everything.”
There is a lot to talk about.
Over their five years of friendship, Ofer has shared her dramatic life story with Thompson — a story told to J. by Ofer’s son, Abraham Ofer.
Miriam Ofer was born Miriam Brichta in 1932 to a Jewish family in Bratislava (now the capital of Slovakia). After the Nazis invaded in 1938, Ofer and her two siblings were sent to presumed safety in Hungary in 1941. Their parents were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where their mother was immediately murdered. Their father perished on the infamous 1945 death march as the Allies closed in.
Ofer told Thompson how she and her siblings survived the war by hiding, eventually making their way to British Mandate Palestine in 1946, not long before Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
“Mom was in an orphanage for girls in Jerusalem,” recounts her son. “She liked it. [During the blockade of Jerusalem], she got to Tel Aviv. Then she and her siblings lived in Jaffa.”
Upon Israel’s victory, the siblings put down roots in the Jewish state. In 1960, Miriam, by then married to a fellow Holocaust survivor Ben Ofer, immigrated to New York City and then to San Francisco with their two children.
Thompson likewise told Ofer of his own upbringing in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. The youngest of six children, he graduated from George Washington High School, married and became the father of two daughters.
As a Black man in America, he says, he has faced racism and discrimination, a pain that has helped him relate to his older friend.
“Most people who see us think it’s strange we’re friends, but I don’t see why,” he says. “I’ve always known about the Holocaust. The Holocaust and slavery were similar.”
Over time, Thompson learned more of Ofer’s history. Once settled in S.F., the Ofers obtained funds from Hebrew Free Loan in 1961 and bought Label’s Delicatessen on Clement Street between Arguello Boulevard and 2nd Avenue.
“I cooked seven days a week in the restaurant,” Ofer recalls. “I made everything. Kreplach. Kugel. I made the bagels.”
When asked where she learned to cook, Ofer replies, “God knows!”
“My mom was a terrific cook,” recalls her son. “She made blintzes, cheesecake, chopped liver sandwiches. People came from all over. They owned it for three years, and then dad went into real estate.”
The Ofers prospered. Their kids, Abraham and Naomi, attended George Washington High — just like Thompson, though they didn’t overlap. After the Ofer kids grew up, they moved to the East Coast. When their father died in 2002, their mother carried on with her life in San Francisco including exercise at the Jewish Community Center.
Then, Thompson entered her life. In the JCC pool one day, Ofer approached him and said, “I like your smile.”
He responded: “Well, I like your smile.”
That’s all it took.
“He’s an exuberant personality, a genuinely decent human being, a real mensch,” says Abraham Ofer. “They developed a genuine liking for one another and understanding. He’s very patient with her, and he likes to be around her. Even though she has dementia, she’s bright about day-to-day situations. She’s very with it in that way.”
For example, Ofer turned Thompson on to classical opera, while he introduced her to the soul music of Curtis Mayfield.
Says Thompson of the friendship, “It means everything to me. My mom would have been the same age as her. I truly believe my mom’s spirit is telling Miriam to take care of me. She treats me like her son. She tells me that all the time. She gives me hugs, she kisses me, everything a mother is supposed to do.”
Ofer and Thompson’s friendship has drawn attention. Whether in the pool or the center’s spacious atrium, people approach them, all smiles, to say hello. Local TV news KPIX aired a feature on the pair last month, and soon the JCC will launch a bus ad campaign featuring a photo of a smiling Thompson.
All that attention doesn’t divert the two from their main mission: keeping their friendship afloat, both literally and figuratively.
“To be able to hang out with somebody who has this much knowledge, who has been through so much pain, and to be so happy and so giving — ‘blessed’ isn’t even the word,” says Thompson. “She’s a beautiful soul, and she makes you feel better.”