Arbisser Family Papers

Collection

Identifier: MS 0983

Staff Only

Finding aid note: Forms part of the Joan and Stanford Alexander South Texas Jewish Archives. Stored off-site at the Library Service Center and requires 24-hour notice for retrieval. Please contact the Woodson Research Center at 713-348-2586 or woodson@rice.edu for more information.

Content Description

Five boxes containing a 50th Anniversary quilt, correspondence, news clippings, a scrapbook, a photo album, yearbooks, educational and marketing materials, book: D'vorah Binstok Arbisser - Her Life Through Family and Food, LPs from KTRH radio titled "Congregation Beth Yeshurun," document the history of the Arbisser family and activities they were involved in from the 1956 to 2003.

Dates

Creation: 1956 - 2003

Conditions Governing Access

The material is open for research.

Stored off-site at the Library Service Center and requires 24-hour notice for retrieval. Please contact the Woodson Research Center at 713-348-2586 or woodson@rice.edu for more information.

Conditions Governing Use

Permission to publish material from the Arbisser Family Papers must be obtained from the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library. The Woodson Research Center use policy is that researchers assume sole responsibility for any infringement of privacy, literary rights, copyrights, or other rights arising from their use of the archival materials. In addition to any restrictions placed by donors, certain kinds of archival materials are restricted for the life of the creator plus 50 years. These materials include, but are not limited to, student grades, transcripts, and any job applications or recommendations.

Biographical / Historical

Rafael "Raffi" Arbisser was born in Warsaw, Poland, on December 12, 1924, to an observant Jewish family, with two older sisters and an older brother. His family moved to Palestine as a young child with his father and older brother leaving shortly thereafter to make a living in the United States. When in his early teens, he stopped going to school full time and worked as an assistant at Davar, a Hebrew language Socialist newspaper. He also participated in the Jewish defense militia, the Palmach. In 1946, Raffi joined his father and brother in New York. Soon after arriving in the US, he met his wife, D'vorah Binstok, and they married in June 1948. Raffi and D'vorah supported their college educations and their family as congregational parochial school educators in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Ohio, and Bangor, Maine, before arriving in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1951 where Raffi was the educational director at Congregation Beth Shalom for 16 years. In Kansas City, he established a Jewish day camp and oversaw the design and construction of a large school complex for the synagogue.

In 1967, he and the family moved to Houston, Texas, where Raffi served as educational director at Congregation Beth Yeshurun for 10 years. In Houston, he continued innovations in Jewish education. He set up scholarship programs to send children to Jewish summer camps. He worked with Louis Kaplan to acquire one of the finest Judaica collections as the foundation for a museum. He developed programs around each of the major festivals to entice children to come to the synagogue. For example, he encouraged families to build sukkahs by arranging for a lumber yard to make sukkah kits, enlisting the youth organization to assist in building the sukkahs, and having the children take bus tours of the sukkahs. Furthermore, Raffi established communal Israel youth pilgrimages.

He also was successful as an investor, which enabled him to retire at age 55 and move back to Jerusalem, where he and D'vorah lived from 1977 until 1999. Raffi died on June 18, 2018, in Houston, Texas, at the age of 93. D'vorah died May 6, 2021. Both are interred at Beth Yeshurun Cemetery.