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neighborhoods in sections of the east Bronx may have been largely Jewish. Not where I lived. In the Concourse-Fordham area the sense we had was that we were in a half Catholic, half Jewish neighborhood.
    Peter Decker, the former archivist for the The Bronx County Historical Society, lived a few blocks north of my apartment on the northern side of Fordham Road. He has written that he estimated his neighborhood was 40% Jewish, 60% Christian, the Christians overwhelmingly Catholic.
    With several Catholic churches, a Catholic university — Fordham University — the Catholic schools, St. Simon Stock and St. Nicholas of Tolentine in the neighborhood, and with the widely known Cardinal Hayes High School a bus ride away, the Concourse-Fordham area was a magnet for Catholics.
    The Catholic presence, not only in the neighborhood, but in the city at large was always apparent to me. The Daily News , which came into the apartment every day, was intimately allied with the Catholic Church in a conservative political and cultural outlook. Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, an outspoken conservative in church and non-church matters, was a major celebrity within its pages. Another luminary frequently featured in news stories — and this was the tabloid Daily News , crime was its beat — was the Catholic Manhattan District Attorney, Frank Hogan. The upper echelons of the Police Department and the Fire Department were dominated by Catholics and The Daily News was particularly thorough in covering Police and Fire Department officials and activities. The Catholic William O’Dwyer became Mayor of New York in 1946.
    The most important Catholic in the world, Pope Pius XII, whom we saw in newsreels and in the newspapers, was so spiritual looking with his gaunt, solemn face, he seemed otherworldly and very religious. The Jews had no one who looked quite like him.
    Some of the Catholics in the neighborhood went to church on Sundays. Given the large number of synagogues in the Bronx, some Jewish families must have been attending Sabbath services, as well. Not my family or the families of my friends.
    Movies of the time, The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Going My Way, The Miracle of the Bells , with good priests and good nuns doing good deeds, contributed to the idea the Catholics had something going for them that we who were Jewish did not. We were not given The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston as Moses until the mid-1950s.
    In 1945, after Joseph Vitolo Jr. said he saw the Virgin Mary in a vacant lot a few subway stops north of where we lived, people began to hold a vigil for the Virgin Mary’s return there. The devout, along with the ill seeking to be cured, came to pray and to be touched by the boy. Candles were lit, flowers were placed. Eighteen days after he first made his claim, the crowd coming to the site reached the estimated 30,000. For Jewish children of my age — I was nearly ten, about the same age as the boy — the situation was beyond our capacity to understand.
    The boy did not have the vision again. A small shrine was erected facing the Grand Concourse after the crowds dissipated. The shrine was still in view when I traveled home on the bus from high school. It is there still.
    The Catholic children who did not attend parochial school might have resented the fact that they had to go to school on days we were excused for a medley of Jewish holidays. I didn’t even know what some of those holidays were for. What was Shemini Atzeret? And yet we were usually given two days off from school, the second day for the supposedly more religious among us. “Is it allowed?” was my standard question of my mother concerning these Jewish holidays. “Is it allowed to go to the movies?” “Is it allowed to play ball?” “Is it allowed if I play ball, but I don’t run?” The rules for me became — no ball playing or movies on the High