Howie Hirsch is an adventurer, photographer, orator, gardener, and a major Yankees Fan

By Cathy Miller

PERSONAL

Howie Hirsch was born in Queens, NY, but five years later his family moved to Somerset County. In 1987, he and his wife, Iris, came to Warren County and settled in Independence. They have three children – Sam, and twins Caitlin and Allison – and two granddaughters, five years old and five months old, respectively. This year he’s marking 23 years of sobriety. Howie considers himself a “computer nerd” and, as such, he handles technical sales for IBM cybersecurity division, helping companies understand if they’ve been breached.

TEMPLE

Howie Hirsch is a Lay Leader at The Jewish Center of Northwest Jersey in Washington, where he’s been deeply involved since he joined the Temple in 1994. He is the current president, having served in that capacity for 12 of the last 16 years.

One of the things Howie’s most proud of is the relationship the Temple has developed with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Washington. “At least once a year, we do a back and forth weekend, usually around Martin Luther King Day, where the AME Pastor will preach at the Temple on Friday night, and the Rabbi will go and preach on Sunday morning at the AME Church. In terms of differences and similarities in people, we’re different colors, we’re different religions, we’re different backgrounds, but we’re all people.”

Twenty years ago, Howie became treasurer of The Jewish Center of Northwest Jersey. One of his first duties (which caused him some trepidation) was to give the Yom Kippur Appeal, speaking in front of a large group of people. He opened with a joke: “Jerry Seinfeld says the number one fear of people in the United States is public speaking. The number two fear is dying. So, if you take that to its logical conclusion, if you go to a funeral, more people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.” Did it go over well? “Well, meh.” However, within two minutes of talking he’d become quite comfortable with it. “I only practiced the speech once, I was ad-libbing.”

“Fast forward seven or eight years: I’d been president for a couple years, I’d been giving speeches, I’d been talking in front of my congregation, when unexpectedly a job opened up to me, which was basically a public speaker,” he said. Howie is confident that what he learned in his Temple gave him the skills to land that job. “I try to tell people when you’re at a temple, in a church, you’re in a pretty safe environment for the most part. Use it to enhance yourself, build your skills, do something that pushes you out a little bit more.”

Some years, Howie has taken part in Washington’s Hometown Holiday celebration with the lighting of a menorah for Chanukah. It’s a beautiful way to share a holiday tradition through words and songs. At his request, Jinxx the clown concocted a menorah-shaped balloon hat for him one year after doing some quick research on her cell phone. She’s made balloon hats for him for years now.

BUCKET LIST

Howie has always had an interest in photography, but it’s evolved into a serious hobby.

He took around 3,000 photos during a trip to Africa in 2012. He and Iris observed ten silverback gorillas in Rwanda as close as 10 feet. He grew nervous when nine lions began milling around the five people in the open jeep. Their guide assured them they were safe since the lions considered the jeep a much larger animal than a lion, and thus wouldn’t attack.

They also went to Juneau Bay in Alaska, saw a pod of eleven humpback whales, and had the rare fortune to photograph them bubble net feeding. In this feeding method, a group of whales swim in a shrinking circle, blowing bubbles below a school of fish. This shrinking column of bubbles surrounds the fish, commonly herring, forcing them upward. The whales spontaneously swim upward through the “bubble net,” mouths wide open, catching thousands of fish in one big gulp.

He is now taking classes to understand technical aspects of photography, like depth of field. Photographing primarily wildlife and nature (and his grandchildren), he looks forward to upping his game.

His travels always include some adventure. He has also viewed blue-footed boobies and went snorkeling with sea turtles while in the Galapagos Islands. He’s gone skydiving with his daughter, Caitlin, over the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, jumping out of a “perfectly good airplane” to get a phenomenal view of the snow-covered mountains and the glaciers.

Another of Howie’s passions is scuba diving. Bonaire, an island by Aruba, is one of his favorite locations. He also likes the Caribbean. He’s gone diving in Egypt, the Red Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, and Belize. One of his most memorable dives was in the Bahamas with daughter Allison, his scuba diving buddy. They were on a wall about 75 feet down, and he looked up and saw something – didn’t recognize it – but it looked big. The dive master and photographer went to investigate and chased it down to them. It was a 17-foot whale shark. Howie knew whale sharks can’t eat anything bigger than a quarter, so he wasn’t concerned. “Whale sharks are not supposed to even be in the Bahamas that time of year, so it was really, really cool. Afterwards, we were looking at the pictures, and there’s a shot of me, Allison, and the whale shark.” It’s his favorite scuba diving picture.

This year, Howie will visit his seventh continent, Antarctica. It’s Caitlin’s dream trip, which she’s been planning for ten years. Howie, Iris, and Caitlin will travel through the Drake Passage, where the Atlantic and Pacific meet. The water between the southernmost tip of South America and the South Shertland Islands of Antarctica is reputed to be the roughest seas in the world and will take about 24-36 hours to pass through. On their way home from Antarctica, they’ll visit Iguazu Falls along the Brazil/Argentine border. Although not as tall as Niagara Falls, there are 275 drops over about 2 miles.

HOBBIES AT HOME

In addition to photography, Howie is also studying woodworking, referring to himself as “a fool with a tool” and went on to say, “I’ve got a lot of tools, just not sure how to use them.” His current project is building some flower boxes of his own design on their deck for his wife.

An avid gardener, Howie’s in the midst of installing a fern garden in front of his house by transplanting ferns from the woods behind his house. He’s moved more than 160 ferns over the past two years, along with 15 flowering ferns from the Philadelphia Flower Show. “I don’t know what a flowering fern is going to look like, but it sounded intriguing, so I bought them.”

Last year, 30 people from his Temple planted 500 daffodils around the temple’s Holocaust Garden. “It was a much bigger project than I thought it was going to be,” Howie quipped. It’s part of The Daffodil Project, established by a woman in Atlanta, and it won’t end until 1.5 million daffodils have been planted worldwide in memory of the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust.

He pondered the conundrum of “throwing around numbers like that, 1.5 million people, 6 million, the humanity gets lost. If I said your father got killed there, all of a sudden it’s right there. Unless you get personal stories, 6 million is just too big to even comprehend.”

The Daffodil Project was started in 2010. The total number of daffodils planted through January 2019 was 520,000. Howie’s considering ordering more bulbs to plant next year.

Howie is a huge Yankees fan, noting, “Right fielder Aaron Judge is a nice kid and hits the ball further than anybody I’ve ever seen.” He’s also a Giants fan, although with no particular faves on the team at this time. What else does Howie love? He’s a BIG Grateful Dead fan. When asked if that was from day one, he said, “No, I was more of an Allman Brothers fan and it morphed into something else. But those are my two favorite bands. I probably got to see Jerry (Garcia) play about 100 times or more.”

He is part of a band, which mostly gets together to jam, but which performed at his 60^th “surprise” birthday party (which he threw for himself) alongside local jammers, Quimby Mountain Band and Ezra Tarlowe.

PHILOSOPHY

Howie heard Mark Kelly (astronaut, husband of politician Gabby Giffords) address a conference. He talked about sitting in the space capsule, looking at planet Earth, and noted there’s nothing else around us. Kelly admonished, “We better be good to each other because there’s nowhere else to go.”

Shortly thereafter, Howie participated in an interfaith gathering in Johnsonburg as a guest speaker. He recalls, “I told the Mark Kelly story. I said we’re one race on this planet, we’re all human beings, we’re all God’s children, and if we can’t be good to each other, what are we here for? Pretty much that’s how I feel – be good to people. Treat everyone the way you want to be treated.”

Howie brought up another concept he’s been mulling over. “Change one word in the way you think about doing things and you can completely change your attitude.” For example, “When I’m home, not on the road, I take my granddaughter to preschool. I can think of this two different ways: it could be a chore – I have to take my granddaughter to preschool – so I have to stop my job, take a half hour, go pick her up, and bring her there. Or I can change the word ‘have’ to ‘get’ – I get to take my granddaughter to preschool, and it becomes a privilege and a pleasure. Switching that one word is such an attitude changer.”

One final tenet from Howie: “The only thing that you have any control over in your life is your attitude. Good things’ll happen to you, bad things’ll happen to you, you decide how you’ll react. With a positive attitude, at least you’re happy most of the time. I want to be happy.”

A real-time peek into Howie’s sunny outlook occurred when asked to confirm the spelling of his first name. “It’s spelled Howie, but if you want to put Howheee to make it look cool, that’s all right, too. I’m not an overly proud person, I can laugh at myself. My wife says sometimes people are laughing at me. So, I say that’s not a problem, as long as they’re laughing!”

The Jewish Center of Northwest Jersey is located at 115 Youmans Avenue, Washington, NJ 07882 and can be found online at www.jcnwj.org.

When it comes to the people and happenings of Warren County, you can count on award-winning photographer Cathy Miller to be there to record the moment.