Marty Hecht: A good man, a model for us all

Think Schindler's list.

Think Martin Hecht.

Those thoughts have more than a little in common. Both, for example, are amazing stories.

"Schindler's List," the movie, told the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman and Nazi Party member who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews by employing them in his factories during the Holocaust.

Marty Hecht, a Cape Girardeau native and distinguished businessman who died last week, along with several others helped save tens of thousands of Russian Jews in the 1980s during the Cold War. It all started with a list of 1,200 names of Jews who had applied for permission to leave Russia. That list came from Marty and his wife, LaVerne (better known here in Cape Girardeau as Tootie), who had a cousin active in the effort to extract Jews in Russia seeking freedom in the West.

This was no small matter for the Hechts. Marty's mother had fled from Russia and escaped certain death at the hand of the Cossacks. She found her way to American, where her husband started the business in Cape Girardeau that was later taken over by Marty.

The following short summary will hardly do justice to the amazing story that involved the Hechts. But it deserves to be told widely.

Among the important players in this 20th-century drama is Marty's brother, Jacob Hecht, better known as Chic. As it happens, Chic was elected as a U.S. senator from Nevada. Chic and Marty became involved in assisting Russian Jews after meeting with key Jewish leaders in New York.

At the same time, President Ronald Reagan was holding talks with Soviet Premier Gorbachev, discussions that led to the reunification of Germany and the end to the Cold War. These talks were not highly publicized, because there were powerful political forces in Russia who wanted Gorbachev to fail.

Just prior to a 1986 meeting, in Iceland, between Reagan and Gorbachev, Chic Hecht met with the president and urged him to appeal to Gorbachev for a more tolerant policy regarding Jews who wanted to emigrate from Russia -- potentially millions. And the senator gave the president the list with 1,200 names.

Reagan passed the list on to Gorbachev, who made no promises. But within a few weeks of that meeting in Iceland a trickle of Jews was granted permission to leave Russia. Then hundreds more. Then thousands more. Estimates are that tens of thousands Russian Jews found new lives in the West as the result of the efforts initiated by the Hechts.

Years later, Marty Hecht was consulting a doctor in California who wondered if Marty might be related to Sen. Chic Hecht. Marty said, "He's my brother." The doctor told Marty that, as a result of easing of restrictions on Jews leaving Russia, his wife, mother and father-in-law had fled their homeland.

After leaving the Senate, Chic Hecht was serving as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas. He and his wife were invited to a party with the Reagans, who were vacationing there. Chic asked the president why he had not drawn more attention to the successful effort to help so many Jews in Russia. Reagan said it had been Gorbachev's request, for fear that opposition forces might clamp down on the exit visas.

This amazing story is just a slice of Marty Hecht's lifelong efforts to make the world a better place. I knew Marty only casually, as he was a longtime and faithful member of the Rotary Club of Cape Girardeau. He was a delightful conversationalist whose interests included the goings-on around Cape Girardeau as much as world affairs.

But if you ask almost anyone who has been in business in Cape Girardeau for very long, you will hear even more amazing stories about the many ways Marty helped to turn what appeared to be the brink of failure into a success.

I wish I knew more about some of the particulars of Judaism. What I do know is that Jews have a strong belief they were fortunate enough to be given human life in order make the most of that life and to leave the world a better place.

Marty Hecht did that. In doing so, he served as a model for all of us.

I'm Irish. Marty was Jewish. I don't know Hebrew. I'm guessing Marty didn't know Gaelic. But there's a bit of Gaelic that applies to Marty. Imagine a Universal Creator saying to Marty Hecht:

"Cead mile failte!"

A hundred thousand welcomes.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.