Emmet Miserendino has become a fixture in the Revitz House lobby on Sunday mornings sitting at the chessboard with his friends. (Photo credit: Jerry Frishman Photography)
Emmet Miserendino was bothered after visiting his great-grandmother at her assisted living facility in North Carolina. He couldn’t stop thinking about all the residents who didn’t have any visitors.
“I wanted to help,” the now-eighth grader at Cabin John Middle School said. He talked to Senior Rabbi Michael Safra at B’Nai Israel Congregation about how he could get involved. Since February 2024, he has has visited residents at Revitz House, an independent living facility with the Charles E. Smith Life Communities in Rockville.
He has become a fixture in the Revitz’s lobby on Sunday mornings as he sits by the chessboard with his friends Ron Sigelman, 83, and Jerry Jacobson, 86. During visits, they also discuss sports, especially the Baltimore Ravens.
These weekly visits turned into his bar mitzvah project and will continue “indefinitely,” Emmet said. “It’s just kind of fun. I feel happy that I’m really helping.” Also quite happy are his two friends, who at various times during a discussion with Washington Jewish Week called Emmet an expert chess player and a great kid.
Sigelman recalled that a few years ago, he placed an ad in the Revitz newsletter seeking a partner to play chess. The next thing he knew, he was playing chess with someone decades younger than him who ended up “teaching me some things. We have a great time.”
Jacobson has been playing chess for 70 years and calls himself “a very strong player.” Emmett said he has only beaten Jacobson once. He has more success with Sigelman. “I think of all the games we’ve played, I’ve won all but two or three times,” he said, adding, “There were one or two draws.”
Chess “is a good game against Alzheimer’s, which we don’t want to get. It’s good for your brain,” Jacobson noted. He described himself as “young at heart, young at spirit and young at mind.”
“Every generation is concerned about the youth coming up,” Jacobson said, adding when he spends time with Emmett, “You see the future, and the future is encouraging. The future is in good hands.”
Added Sigelman, “I’m from the generation that the grandparents moved in with the family.” That doesn’t happen as much now so the idea of a young person coming to where he lives “is really an interesting concept. I find it spectacularly uplifting to have a young person visit. He’s a wonderful young man.”
They have their moments. When Emmet said, “They are very old, and they are getting older and have nobody to visit,” Sigelman gently replied, it would be better to say, “senior citizens, not old people.”
The two men both have loving family members who do visit. Jacobson’s daughter and grandchild come, and Sigelman’s son and twin grandchildren visit as well.
Both men were invited to Emmett’s bar mitzvah on June 26. Sigelman attended. “I really felt like I was an honored guest. The rabbi had explained about our playing chess weekly. I just felt like I was with family. It was special.”
Emmet has tried to convince some of his friends to spend time with residents living in senior facilities to no avail. “I do, but they don’t listen,” he said.
Even though he really enjoys the friendship and chess games, Emmet stressed, “I did it solely for my great-grandmother and for the people around her.”
Suzanne Pollak is a freelance writer.