A South Carolina couple dies as they lived — together
Arline and Gerald Polinsky were married for 64 years. Image by Courtesy of Joanna Berens
By Irene Katz Connelly May 14, 2020
They were married for 64 years. Then they died of coronavirus, within hours of each other.
When Gerald and Arline Polinsky, 89 and 86 respectively, died on the night of April 13, it was the conclusion to a quiet but enduring love story. They met in 1951, when Boston-born Arline Furman traveled to St. Louis to visit cousins. To show Arline a good time, the cousins conscripted a parade of young men to shepherd her around the city. When it was Jerry Polinsky’s turn, he took her to a basketball game at Washington University, where he was a student.
He was “very intelligent looking and tall,” Arline wrote in her diary that night. “He likes me.”
Not long after Arline returned home, she received her first letter from Gerald. After a four-year correspondence, a stint in the army for Gerald, and a brief engagement with another beau for Arline, the two reunited in Boston and quickly became engaged.
After a few years teaching history in Iowa, Jerry took a job as a professor at Voorhees College, a historically black college in South Carolina, in 1968. Although it made for a long commute, the family settled in the state’s capital, Columbia, which boasts one of the nation’s oldest Jewish communities. Arline had spent years driving her two young daughters, Joanna Polinsky Berens and Nancy Polinsky Johnson, an hour to the nearest Hebrew school — and she didn’t want to do it anymore.
Arline met Gerald, then a college student, when she visited her cousins in St. Louis. Image by Courtesy of Joanna Berens
Jerry began his new job at a moment when the legacy of segregation, legally curtailed a few years before, was evident everywhere. In the small towns near Voorhees, Berens, then in elementary school, saw general stores with separate doors and water fountains for black and white customers. For Jerry, it was the start of a decades-long career teaching and consulting at historically black colleges. In his later years, he focused on helping underfunded institutions navigate the process of accreditation, but he always kept one foot in the classroom, teaching night school history classes until he retired in 2014 at the age of 83.
“He was quietly doing his part,” Berens said. “He was way ahead of his time.”
Meanwhile, Arline was hard at work as well. In Columbia, where the family joined the Tree of Life Congregation, she dove into Jewish communal life, chairing rabbinical search committees, leading women’s groups and spearheading the synagogue’s food festival. In 2000, after years of traveling to other cities to attend Jewish film festivals, she decided Columbia should have its own. The festival she launched, now in its 20th year, impressed the organizers of larger gatherings with its ability to galvanize a relatively small Jewish community.
A prolific baker, Arline could whip up a platter for a dinner party or oneg Shabbat at a moment’s notice. “People knew to come to the Polinksy house,” Berens said, because Arline kept an extra refrigerator full of strudels and mandelbreads for guests. When her daughters brought friends home for Thanksgiving, she made sure their favorite desserts were on the table.
In the wake of their passing, many wrote to Berens recalling her parents’ gift for listening to others. One time, a friend wrote, Jerry was driving her and several other girls to a Jewish youth convention when she noticed a funny noise that turned out, when Jerry pulled over, to be a flat tire. Forty-five years later, she still remembered how seriously he took a teenage girl’s diagnosis of car trouble.
“They had an incredible gift of making each person feel like they were the most special,” Berens said of her parents.
After decades in Columbia, the Polinskys moved to Hollywood, Florida, to be closer to Berens and their youngest grandson, Samuel. By then, Arlene had Alzheimer’s disease and Gerald was receiving treatment for leukemia. But they were still Friday night regulars at Temple Solel, where Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin remembered Gerald as “supremely attentive” to his wife.
“They always presented themselves in that classic Southern Jewish way, with a calm loving dignity,” he said.
Amid growing concern about coronavirus, the couple took every precaution, even skipping long-awaited celebrations for Temple Solel’s 50th anniversary in mid-March. Nevertheless, when Gerald took a fall a few weeks later and went to the hospital, he was diagnosed with the virus. A week later, Arline joined him in the same room. Like so many families barred from hospitals by coronavirus, their daughters said goodbye in a video call.
On a final videocall with their daughters Joanna Polinsky Berens and Nancy Polinsky Johnson, the couple held hands. Image by Courtesy of Joanna Berens
Though they spent their last years in Florida, the Polinskys wanted to be buried in Columbia’s historic Hebrew Benevolent Society Cemetery, among the friends with whom they’d spent most of their lives.
Travel restrictions in Florida prevented Berens from attending the funeral in person. But until it’s safe for her to visit Columbia, local friends have promised to care for the graves. For her, it’s a testament to the generosity they extended to others over the decades.
“They were there for us, and I’m finding out now that they were there for everybody,” Berens said.
Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at [email protected].
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