Please read MMs post first, then I will give you the Paul Harvey: Rest of the Story.
https://www.elvis.com.au/presley/elvis-presley-and-his-jewish-neighbours.shtml
In the summer of 1954, Elvis Presley released his first single. He had one problem: He couldn't play it. The aspiring 19-year-old singer was living with his parents at 462 Alabama Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. With rent at $50 a month, his family was too poor to afford a record player. So, as he often did, Elvis turned to his upstairs neighbours for help - Rabbi Alfred Fruchter and Jeannette Fruchter, his wife.
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The two families were close. Gladys Presley, Elvis' mother, sat down most afternoons after work to chat with Jeannette Fruchter. When the Presleys were short on money, the Fruchters helped pay their electric and water bills. And
Elvis Presley even acted as a Shabbos goy
for the family, turning on the lights and gas stove for 'Sir Rabbi', as he called Alfred Fruchter.
It's no accident that these two families ended up neighbours. Mirroring a trend seen across the South, the Fruchters, like many Jewish families, initially settled in poorer downtown areas before eventually acquiring the means to move out to the suburbs. (Both the Fruchters and the Presleys paid rent to a Mrs. Dubrovner, the wife of a kosher butcher.) It's a trajectory encapsulated by Memphis's largest congregation, Baron Hirsch. Originally located in 'the Pinch', the downtown core of immigrant communities, the community moved first to Midtown in the late 1950s and then to lush East Memphis, where it now draws up to 1,000 worshippers on the High Holy Days.
The Fruchters moved to Memphis in the late 1940s when Alfred Fruchter became the first principal at the Memphis (now Margolin) Hebrew Academy, which he helped found partly in response to communal anxiety about intermarriage and lack of Jewish education. His children say he served as principal for three years without pay.
The Presleys moved to Memphis from Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1948, when Elvis was 13. Having made only $1,915 the year before, according to Vernon and Gladys Presley's combined income tax return, the family lived in rooming houses for nearly a year before settling on Alabama Street. At school, Elvis struggled in several classes - notably music, for which he earned a C, as his eighth-grade report card shows. When his parents bought him a guitar for his 11th birthday, he was upset; he had wanted a bicycle. Famously, he never learned to read music, but he did benefit from early exposure to the masters - of Jewish cantorial music. While many, including The New York Times, have scoffed at the idea that Elvis' music may have been influenced by cantorial greats like Yossele Rosenblatt and Moishe Oysher, Jeannette Fruchter made the case for it in a 1997 interview with The Baltimore Sun. 'My husband listened to his records every Sunday, with the windows open, because it was so hot in Memphis, and you could hear them all over', she said.
But her husband was far from convinced. 'Dad was so upset by that', Harold Fruchter remembered. 'He said, 'How could you think that Elvis' music was anything like great cantorial music?'
In fact, the Fruchters were stunned at how successful their young neighbour became. 'My parents didn't expect him to become famous', Judy, Harold's sister, said. 'They thought he had a nice voice, but they didn't think it was exceptional'.
One of Elvis' more famous contributions to the estate was a meditation garden, where he, his parents and his grandmother Minnie Mae Presley are buried. Watching over them is a looming marble statue of Jesus Christ on the cross, engraved with the name 'Presley'.
This impressive monument belies rumors, circulating over the past few years, that
Elvis may actually have been halachically Jewish through his maternal great-great grandmother.
That thought troubles the current generation of Fruchters.
'All this talk now about Elvis being Jewish - that's really disturbing', Judy Fruchter said. 'Because if he was Jewish, my father was making him desecrate Shabbat. He's probably turning in his grave'.
So, yeah… it makes sense that Family would be employed to trick everyone into getting a shot of shitbugs (polio is an ENTERIC virus) seeings that Elvis had (beyond herpes) Hirshsprung’s (sounds Yiddish to me) disease that is a horrific form of constipation that leads to Mega Colon.
He had to have an enema every day to have a bowel movement.
Translation: Elvis was FULL OF SHIT.
Great stuff Pat. I'm pleased to have provided the lead to your post. I had no idea of the Jewish angle.
As you once told me....If you want to make it in the music biz ... You must be Family.
I suppose one could get there by selling their soul ...or BOTH.