LEAH HAKIMIAN
Sybil and Barry Kaplan, a Kansas City couple who reunited after each of their marriages ended in divorce, first met in eighth grade, at a Halloween party. “The party was boring until we met,” says Barry.
They started dating three years later after meeting up again at a B’nai Brith Youth convention. Sybil remembers he was wearing gray pants and a pink sweater, hot colors at the time. Their mothers were friends. Sybil and Barry were both active in Jewish youth groups and they did what teens did in the 1950s. They “went steady.”
“Actually Young Judea was the cement that glued us to each other and to Israel,” says Sybil. In 1957, when she was 19, Sybil made her first trip to Israel – on a Young Judea summer program. Later that year, Barry made his first trip, for a year of study on a Young Judea year course.
Two years later they got engaged, intending to marry when she graduated from university. But Barry broke it off. “I loved Sybil, but I wasn’t ready for marriage,” he says.
They each moved on. Sybil made the big jump of moving to Israel in 1970, where she wrote “The Wonders of the Wonder Pot,” a cookbook that became almost a necessity for English-speaking immigrants. She married and, after a decade in Israel, moved with her husband to Chicago, where she gave birth to two daughters.
Barry, too, had left Kansas City, married, and had three children. When the marriage broke down and ended in divorce, he returned to the city of his childhood. He went back to the future, he says.
In the summer of 1986, Barry was driving down a street in Kansas City when he had a near-miss with a car backing out of a driveway. Sybil was driving and her mother saw who was getting out of the car. She said, “That’s Barry Kaplan.”
For old time’s sake, they had coffee that night. “I was on my way to a divorce,” says Sybil. They became friends when her mother died and she moved to Kansas City to take a position with theKansas City Jewish Chronicle. Sybil plodded three years through a divorce.
What happens when “the one who got away” comes back into your life? Donna Hanover describes this phenomenon in her book, “My Boyfriend’s Back: True Stories of Rediscovering Love with a Long-Lost Sweetheart.” Hanover had suffered a rather ugly and public divorce, as her husband was then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But 30 years after breaking up with her high-school sweetheart, Hanover reconnected, rekindled their love and married him.
Pamela Weintraub, a consulting editor at Psychology Today, concludes: “For those free to pursue a lost-and-found love without hurting others, the rewards can be great.”
People do not reunite with just any love from the past. Most go back to someone they loved when they were in their teens. Psychologist Nancy Kalish, the author of “Lost and Found Lovers: Facts and Fantasies of Rekindled Romances,” notes that many of the couples “spent formative years together and became each other’s standard for all romances since.”
“That’s what happened to Sybil and me,” says Barry. A “second chance” couple, they were married on June 9, 1991.
Sybil and Barry lived an active life in Overland Park, Kansas. Barry had his business interests and was very active in his synagogue, Kehilath Israel, where Sybil was the librarian also on the board and did publicity and public relations. She also wrote for the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle and supported Israel as the local chapter and then regional president of Hadassah. She went to work on the sixth seventh and eighth of her cookbooks, which include “Kosher Kettle” and “What’s Cooking at Hadassah College.”
Is Sybil a good cook? “Excellent,” replies Barry.
Maybe life was as good as it gets, but they wanted something more. They decided to return to Israel- he making aliyah and she as a returning Israeli-in August, 2008, at the age of 69.
“Both of my dreams have come true – to live in Israel and to be married to Barry,” kvells Sybil.
Mazel tov!
Godsend 