Town of North Hempstead Councilwoman Lee Seeman might never have gotten involved in politics at all if her mother hadn’t nudged her.
Her mother, Molly Sachs, was a buyer who worked in Manhattan’s garment district and traveled to stores throughout the south when she was 19 years old.
“My mother was a liberated woman,” Seeman recalled.
So when Seeman moved to Great Neck with her husband, Murray, in 1955, her mother encouraged her to get involved in the community.
As the presidential election of 1956 approached, Seeman said she became very interested in the candidacy of Democrat Adlai Stevenson and contacted local Democratic leader Bertram Harnett – who eventually became a New York State Supreme Court judge – to see how she could get involved in the campaign.
She was invited to a meeting with Harnett and her first mission was as an usher at an local event where Sen. Estes Kefauver, Stevenson’s running mate for vice president, appeared.
“I was excited,” Seeman said.
Seeman’s involvement with the local Democratic party grew from there. The following year, she became secretary of the Great Neck Democratic Club and in 1959, she was elected Nassau County committeewoman in Great Neck.
he continued to steadily rise through the ranks, and became a New York State committeewoman and 16th state Assembly District party leader in 1970, working with state committeeman Frank Lesser. She worked on successive campaigns of longtime state Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli over a period of 20 years.
“I was the person who would knock on doors to find out what issues people were interested in,” Seeman said. “There was some strife in the party. But I was able to work with both sides.”
She also worked closely with former Town of North Hempstead Supervisor May Newburger, who she describes as an “extraordinary woman” and a role model.
When Daniel Patrick Moynihan ran for the U.S. Senate in New York in 1976, Seeman ran the first fundraiser for him.
While she became more involved in politics, Seeman maintained a career as a life insurance agent. Her father, Leon Cohen, needed her to help with his life insurance business after she left college in Miami, so she responded to that call.
“I was helping my father. That was very important to me,” she said.
Whether she was dealing in the unfamiliar terrain of selling life insurance or the business of politics, Seeman said she was always firmly determined to handle the tasks she set for herself.
“When I made up my mind to do something, I did it,” she said.
In 1966, she was planning a trip to the Middle East with her husband, and wrote to the queen of Iran with a request to meet her and discuss women’s issues. The queen, Farah Pahlavi, wrote back and granted her an audience.
When she and her husband reached Tehran, she was told the queen was at her summer palace on the Caspian Sea. When Seeman said she’d travel to see her there, she was told it that no one visits the queen at the summer palace. But she persisted.
She and her husband drove to the summer palace, showed the guards the letter from the queen and – despite being discouraged by them – sat down for what became a four-hour wait.
“I wasn’t leaving,” she recalled.
Finally, a car arrived and she and her husband were taken to another part of the palace compound, where they were ushered into a room for afternoon tea. And she still remembers seeing the queen traversing a long hall to enter the room, dressed in a pink outfit, including pink bandana and shoes.
“She did most of the talking,” Seeman recalled.
In her political work in Great Neck, Seeman said she maintained a low profile and “liked being behind the scenes helping people.”
But when Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jon Kaiman approached about running for town council in 2005, she said she saw the chance to serve on the council as “a continuation of working with the people.”
Currently serving her second term as a councilwoman, she represents the communities of North New Hyde Park, Garden City Park, Floral Park and the villages of Saddle Rock, Great Neck Estates, Great Neck Plaza, Russell Gardens, University Gardens, Lake Success and other unincorporated areas.
“It’s serious business, but it’s a lot of fun,” she said.
In addition to her role on the council, she was program director of the Great Neck Chamber of Commerce for 35 years. She has brought the Consul General of Cyprus and the Ambassador of Belize to Chamber events. When Persians started moving into Great Neck, she said she ran programs to introduce them to the community.
But her interests have extended far beyond the boundaries of Great Neck and her council district.
In 1995, Seeman was appointed to the United State Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad by President William Clinton after working locally on Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1972. She was later reappointed by President George W. Bush.
Honoring her Jewish heritage of her family and her husband’s family, she played a key role in restoring Jewish grave sites in Riga, Latvia, a project completed last year. The first project she undertook was in Wyszkow, Poland, where Jewish gravestones had been removed from the cemetery and used as the foundation for a barn and to shore up a river bank. The Wyszkow memorial, an 80-foot monument surrounded by 250 headstones, was completed in 1997.
Seeman vividly recalls the dedication ceremony that included 32 people from Israel whose forebears had lived in Wyszkow and a cantor who sang Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
“I’m so fortunate that I could have been involved in something like that in my lifetime,” she said.
In Serock, Poland, where U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman’s family lived, gravestones scattered on a hillside will soon be part of a monument dedicated to those who perished in the Holocaust. She also helped have markers placed at the sites of former slave labor camps in Estonia during World War II.
“I raised the money. I wrote to people. I met with people,” she said. “I love this because it has to do with Jewish heritage.”
Seeman also has been a trustee of the W.F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem since 1988. That has enabled her to bring archeologists to the community to describe their work in the Middle East.
But her primary focus remains her work on the town council, where she said the issues of people in all part of the district are important to her.
“I work on helping people when they call. New Hyde Park is as important to me as is Great Neck,” she said.
A member of the Sons of Italy Cellini Lodge in New Hyde Park, she said she relates to Italians because of her own background.
“I have an affinity for Italian people. Most of them are very family oriented,” she said.
She is also a member of the League of Women Voters, the World Jewish Congress, Hadassah, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She is also an active member of Temple Beth El of Great Neck.
At 83, Seeman still has a strong affinity for her work on the council, and plans to run for re-election next year.
“I feel good. I have the energy. I like the work,” she said.
She said she has high respect for Kaiman, but said she maintains her independence when she votes on issues.
“I vote because it’s a good thing,” she said.
She said that was the case on her recent vote to approve the town’s purchase of the Roslyn Country Club.
“I’m voting for open land and I hope that my grandchildren remember what I did,” she said.
Politics is a family affair for the Seemans. Seeman’s husband, Murray, was mayor of Great Neck Estates for eight years.
They raised four children together and have seven grandchildren.
