YMCA executive director to retire

HARDYSTON — Larry Lev was 17 the first time he ventured beyond his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and 19 when he left the Buckeye State for the first time to attend a bar mitzvah in New York City.

“I thought I would always be in Ohio. Little did I know then what life would have in store for me," said Lev, who has lived in nine communities across the United States and in Israel during a 47-year career with the YMCA.

Lev, who was 16 when first hired as a lifeguard at his neighborhood YMCA, will retire Sept. 1 as senior vice president/chief operating officer of the Metropolitan YMCA of the Oranges. The Sussex County YMCA is one of six branches of the Metro YMCA, the largest Y association in New Jersey serving 35,000 people.

“The Y has shaped who I am. It’s who I am,’’ said the married father of two.

As a boy, Lev would walk to the YMCA less than three blocks from his home to shoot pool, do arts and crafts, play board games and learn ping-pong.

"(Born with a physical disability), I always got picked last in sports," Lev said. "(But at the Y), there was always a sense of fairness and equality."

He worked part-time at his hometown YMCA for two years, and was then hired full-time as physical director in 1971 after earning a bachelor’s degree in social work and drug counseling at Cleveland State University.

In 1976, the international division of YMCA of the USA offered Lev the position of youth and camp director of the YMCA in Jerusalem, Israel.

“I was running programs for 500 children who spoke Hebrew and a staff that spoke Hebrew, and at the time, I didn’t speak a word of it," said Lev, who quickly learned the language.

During Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in November 1977, two Secret Service agents approached Lev on behalf of U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale, who was staying at the King David Hotel, across the street from the YMCA.

“They said the vice president would like to play tennis, and could I accommodate him. Of course I said yes!" he said. During the time Lev hosted the vice president, the Secret Service agents kept tabs on the young YMCA employee.

Lev’s next Y assignment took him to Washington State, where he was camp director at Camp Dudley in Yakima, a residential YMCA. It was during that eight-year stint that he married his childhood sweetheart, and they had a son, Ariel, and a daughter, Shoshannah, a year later.

He vividly recalls May 18, 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted.

“A bright sunny day turned black as coal. Ash started falling from the sky," Lev said. The YMCA, located 75 miles from Mount St. Helens, accumulated three inches of ash on the ground.

As Lev moved up the ranks at the Y, he continued to relocate across the country. Lev became an associate executive director at a Y in Aurora, Illinois, and then the executive director of a branch in Dayton, Ohio, where he was promoted to chief operating officer after four years.

After a brief stint at a Y in Texas, Lev was recruited to oversee the first merger of a YMCA and a Jewish Community Center in Toledo, Ohio.

“We did it in such a way that the organizations could co-exist without feeling we were out to get one another. It was really forward thinking at the time," Lev said. In 2010, Lev did the same thing in New Jersey, as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association became the sixth branch of the Metropolitan YMCA of the Oranges.

“Only three YMCAs in the world have departments of Jewish programming, and I’ve worked at all three," he said. Lev became a Y-USA national trainer in 1993 and in 2011, he was appointed to the National YMCA Leadership Training Board, which expands training opportunities for staff and volunteers.

Leaving the Y will be difficult for Lev, who has seen time and again the impact the organization has made on children, families and individuals. He noted a grandfather who suddenly became the guardian of his three young grandchildren when his daughter no longer could care for them. “We got the children into camp for the summer, for free. He had tears in his eyes, he was so grateful," Lev said.

“I am going to miss all the great professional people and tremendous volunteers I’ve worked with,’’ Lev said.

He’ll also miss the perks – getting to change out of his three-piece suit and into shorts and a tee-shirt to read Dr. Seuss books to Y preschoolers.

Lev said he would join the local Y when he and his wife relocate to Sarasota, Fla. He explained his attachment to the Y this way: “When I was a kid, my mother said, ‘go to the Y’ – and she hasn’t said to come home."