‘Being a Jew made me a better naval officer’

When Herman Shelanski joined the United States Navy in 1980, he planned to serve one five-year tour.

He had just graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I studied molecular biology,” he said. “I was pre-med; I had taken the MCAT. My dad was a doctor, my mom’s a nurse, so that was a huge influence. I’m one of five, and I was the only one of the five that had any inclination to do that.

“And so they were, of course, ecstatic that one of their kids was going to be a doctor. And I was well on my way to do that.”

But Mr. Shelanski wasn’t ready to go to medical school right away. “I felt in my own heart that I needed to do something,” he said. “I wanted to give back to our country.”

He had grown up in an upper middle class Jewish family “with lots of privileges,” he continued. “Being able to pray and exist as Jews in a world that mostly hated Jews” was not something he took for granted. He thought about the Holocaust and about what was happening in the Soviet Union. “Jews were still being repressed and were unable to leave during that time,” he said.

He also wanted a break from school and a little bit of adventure.

Herman Shelanski ultimately made the Navy his career.

During his 38-year tenure, he flew Cold War missions and served in a variety of operational and leadership assignments, including as executive officer of USS Ronald Reagan and later as commander of USS Harry S. Truman, both huge aircraft carriers. After his command at sea, Admiral Shelanski served in several senior leadership positions, including as director of Navy Environmental Readiness, deputy director of the Department of Defense review of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” senior military advisor to the deputy secretary of defense, director of Navy staff assessments for the chief of naval operations, and commander of Carrier Strike Group TEN.

Eventually, Mr. Shelanski retired as a vice admiral and the naval inspector general.

Mr. Shelanski will speak about his service at Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck after services on Shabbat, November 7, as part of the shul’s Veterans Day Recognition program. Two nearby congregations, Beth Sholom and Bnai Yeshurun, will be participating in the event. (Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, like Rinat, is modern Orthodox; Congregation Beth Sholom is Conservative.)

The beginning of Mr. Shelanski’s time in the Navy was not easy. “Basic training at Aviation Officer Candidate School is very intense,” he said. “And in the very first couple of weeks, I was singled out for being a Jew.” He found that somewhat ironic. “My reasons for joining the Navy were very much about my Judaism, about Jewish history, about American Jews, and about my family in particular,” about the benefits of living in the United States and the religious freedom American Jews enjoy. “I never thought that joining the military, joining the United States Navy, that I was going to be immediately identified and have to do something about my consciousness about being a Jew.” And he had not considered how that identification would affect him.

But it affected him deeply.

“It created for me this immediate kind of lifetime career goal, even though at that point, making the Navy a career was not my goal. It created in me a better sense of my Judaism. If I was going to be called out for being a Jew, then they were going to see that I was a proud Jew, and I was not going to back down from who I was and what I believed in. That became a defiant message for me and, frankly, shaped my whole career.”

So instead of discouraging him from staying in the Navy, those initial weeks actually encouraged him to continue. “It became a driving piece of who I was,” he said. “I was able to celebrate my Judaism throughout my career, unabashedly, openly, in many wonderful ways, and to share with my peers, my fellow sailors, especially when I became more senior.”  He would celebrate Passover on ships and “share what that meant with non-Jewish sailors and the small number of Jewish sailors that were part of the crew.” And he arranged the dedication of Holocaust-era Torah scrolls on two aircraft carriers.

During that original five-year term, Mr. Shelanski also came to a number of realizations. “I found that I loved what I did,” he said. “I woke up every morning with this knowledge that what I was doing was important, not just for the United States, or for me as a Jew, but for the world. I felt that I was really giving back to something greater than myself.”

And he loved what he was doing on a daily basis. “I flew on and off aircraft carriers.”

He also discovered that “I was actually very good at what I did, and people recognized me for that talent. So I had found a real home for myself. I think I had found my real niche, my superpower, so to speak, and I stayed.”

Throughout his career, Admiral Shelanski consistently brought his faith and heritage into his military service, he said. “Being a Jew made me a better naval officer. And the reverse is also true  — being in the Navy made me a better Jew.”

As a naval officer, he took “the teachings of Judaism, of moral and ethical existence, and put them into my decision-making, and they had a huge influence.

“There were times I was challenged with going with the status quo, or being told to do something which I felt was incorrect ethically and morally, and I would be unable to support that. It meant standing my ground, and it meant speaking up, and it meant making change within the Navy itself. There were times when I thought I would be fired for saying what was on my mind and doing things like that. But luckily the Navy saw the value in what I had to offer, and the type of decisions I was making, and they kept me.”

His Jewish values also informed his leadership style. “There are lots of ways to be a leader,” to think about “how you treat people,” Mr. Shelanski said. “You can be a total tyrant and still be successful.

“I eventually decided to create an organization that would build the people that worked for you to love what they were doing the way I loved being in the Navy,” an organization that would nurture in others the type of passion that he brought to the job. The aim was “to give them the opportunity to be the best that they could be and create a culture where they could succeed at that.” That meant spending “a lot of times listening, and making changes to the things that were going on that would affect their lives, their environment.”

It was an effort to help the service members “find value — find value in themselves and find value in what they did,” he continued. “I wanted them to wake up every morning like I did and say ‘I’m excited to get started with the day because what my job is today, no matter how seemingly insignificant or menial, it has value to the whole, and the whole has value to the greater good, which is national security, which is ultimately world peace.’ And for them to know that, and to put their heart and soul into that, and do the best at that job for that moment in time, became the foundation of the type of culture that I was building.”

His goal was to help the people working for him to create fulfilling careers and fulfilling lives, and at the same time, to strengthen the collective and make it more effective. “To me that’s in essence tikun olam,” he said. “That’s making what you’re given better, leaving a better world. And every time, whatever command I was in, whatever duty station I was in, my goal was to ensure that when I left, I would leave with the feeling that I left it a better place than I received it.”

After he retired from the Navy, Mr. Shelanski became the vice president of business development and strategy at Newport News Shipbuilding. He’s now the CEO of Winning in the Workplace Consulting, where he advises organizations on leadership and workplace culture, and as the vice president of Nordic Nexus, a veteran-owned company bringing advanced digital defense technologies to North America.

He still is involved in public service. He chairs the board of Scouting America’s Transatlantic Council. “I’ve always had a passion for  scouting,” Mr. Shelanski said. “I was a Boy Scout; my son was a Boy Scout. It’s a great place, in my mind, for a young person, whatever religion, to grow up in, because of the ethical and moral foundation that it builds in your character. It makes you very self-sufficient and ready to take on leadership positions. The organization produces young people that go on to make the world a better place.”

Mr. Shelanski also sits on the board of VAW/VRC/VUQ Foundation, which mentors naval aviators and provides college scholarships for the children of fallen aviators, and on the Norfolk Military Economic Development Advisory Committee. He’s involved in the Jewish community too; he serves on the boards of the Jewish Federation of Tidewater, and of his Conservative shul, Congregation Beth El in Norfolk, Virginia.

He’s grateful for the opportunity to speak at Rinat. “I think any Veterans Day program is immensely important,” Admiral Shelanski said. And he believes this type of program is particularly important in Jewish communities.

“Knowing and acknowledging that there are Jews who have dedicated their lives to protecting the United States of America, where we have found so much freedom in all these years since its birth,” is important, he said. “We’re very patriotic Americans, and it’s a story that I think needs to be heard over and over again — that we’re proud of being Americans and proud of those of us that have contributed, not only in the world of medicine, science, politics, in the civilian world, but of those who contributed in the military as well.”