Like many seniors, Irv Lazar goes to the gym three times a week to stay in shape and plays poker three or four times a week to keep his mind sharp.
He also goes to shul when he can at Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill, which his company built in 1989, although not as frequently as when he’d accompany his youngest son, Michael, to morning minyan.
The difference is that not many seniors reach the century mark, which Lazar did on Aug. 17, but he insists it really wasn’t that big a deal.
“To me it was just another day,” said Lazar, who was given the honor of having an aliyah during services to celebrate the occasion which happened to be on Shabbat, followed by a luncheon at the synagogue, then cake with friends and family back home. “What I do is take it day by day and hope tomorrow will be better than the one before.
“I always say good women and good liquor are the key to my longevity. I drink Crown Royal and I had 60 wonderful years with my wife, Shirley. Before she passed, she introduced me to Betzy at a shiva call.
“I attribute my health to my wife and to Betzy.”
Actually, Betzy Abramson had previously met him when she was working in the office at TBS. But they started getting more involved after that and have been together for over a decade.
“He’s easy to please,” said Betzy, who, at 82, still drives him to the gym and other places. “Every night he thanks me for a good day and a good dinner.
“To know him is to love him.”
Considering the way his life started, it’s kind of remarkable that Lazar turned out this way. He lost his father at 12 and his mother at 17, forcing him to rely on his older siblings for support. “I had an older brother and two older sisters,” explained Lazar, whose family owned a South Philadelphia grocery store. “That was the comfort I needed to carry on.
“My Pop and I were really close, but that’s the way it is. I accepted it and carried on. The fact that I went in the service was a big help to me also.”
Lazar entered the service at 18 in the midst of World War II and wound up spending three years stationed everywhere from New Guinea to the Dutch East Indies to Japan shortly after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. While never engaged in combat, he often faced danger from enemy snipers while building beachheads and clearing the roads of land mines and other potential hazards.
Looking back, he insists the time he spent in uniform, rising to the rank of sergeant, paved the way for the rest of his life.
“Every person, male or female, should spend at least a year in the military because they learn obedience and discipline,” he declared. “That’s so important.
“I thank the military for helping me out in my business. I learned a lot about construction and how to operate a bulldozer and crane. When I got out of the service I looked for jobs in construction, found them, stayed in it and made a nice living at it.”
Lazar left the service and returned to his roots in 1946, soon after meeting Shirley. They married in 1949 and started a family a year later. To support his three sons, Albert, Paul and Michael, Irv worked in the construction industry for a number of contractors for more than 20 years.
In 1968, he went out on his own, creating I. Lazar & Sons, where each of the sons would eventually join him.
“We were in the family business,” said his son, Michael. “We were general contractors who built commercial and industrial buildings.
“After the economy had a downturn which forced us to close our doors, Dad joined in a venture with a contractor and continued for another 15 years.
“He’s basically stayed healthy his whole life. Mom and he had a great marriage and he’s still sharp as a tack.”
Prior to closing his business, Lazar did complete one construction project that hit close to home: Temple Beth Sholom, which had been located in Haddon Heights and where he had attended services since moving his family from Mount Airy to Cherry Hill in 1966.
“I was on the steering committee and got to work with him,” said Dr. Alvin Stern, Beth Sholom’s ba’al koreh, or master of reading, who reads Torah when there’s not someone else doing it for some special occasion. “Irv’s been a fixture of my life at TBS since I first started going there at six years old and I have great respect for him.
“He’s a humorous guy with a heart of gold.”
That’s the man they honored on Aug. 17, just a few weeks after 94 of his family members and friends gathered at a local restaurant. Two of his six granddaughters, Debby and Brittany, joined him on the bimah to read Torah.
Watching it all unfold, Stern came up with an idea. “I had this brilliant idea, because we don’t celebrate 100th birthdays very often,” said Stern, a retired optometrist. “Those of us standing around the Torah area, including me, his granddaughters, the Rabbi (Micah Peltz) and the Cantor (Jen Cohen) kind of danced around him in a circle.
“He was very emotional about the aliyah and the dancing and we felt happy to be there with him.”
For 100-year-old Irv Lazar, the feeling was mutual.
Jon Marks is a Philadelphia-area freelance writer.
