ABOUT MARC GREENDORFER

I founded and run a non-profit civil rights advocacy practice that focuses on combating discrimination. I also run a small for-profit corporate practice.

In many ways, the reason I am running for office is tied to my family’s history. In short, I believe that America is the greatest country the world has ever seen and I owe my existence to this country’s generosity and freedoms.

Both of my parents’ families arrived in the United States as a result of antisemitism in Europe. My father’s immediate family arrived in the United States from a small village in Ukraine, near Lviv, before World War II started, leaving behind the majority of their relatives who ultimately were slaughtered by Nazis and their allies during World War II.

My mother, Hannah, passed away early in 2022 and the best way to tell her story is to repeat her obituary.

Hannah was born in the former Czechoslovakia, in the small village of Teplitz-Schönau, to her beloved parents Rudolf and Margarethe (nee Schorr).

Not long after her birth, her family was forced to move due to nascent Nazi activity in the region. First relocating to her father’s village of Klatovy, Hannah and her family continued to be persecuted and ultimately relocated to Prague.

Nazi forces invaded Prague in 1939 and Hannah’s family was targeted for extermination. Due to the fact that Hannah’s paternal grandfather had briefly lived in the United States in the 1800s, and obtained citizenship at that time, the Nazis realized that Hannah’s father had more value to them alive, as he could travel to the United States, a place he had never been before, to claim citizenship, which he did in the early 1940s, leaving his entire family behind in an attempt to save them from death camps.

While her father was in the United States to obtain legal citizenship and, hopefully, safe passage out of Nazi occupation in Europe, SS soldiers abducted Hannah, at age 8, and her mother from their apartment in Prague and then separated the two. Though Hannah never spoke about her memories of this horrific time, her mother provided details of Nazi soldiers executing Jews in the streets of Prague in front of Hannah and forcing her to play in Jewish cemeteries, and the trauma of the Holocaust was something that affected Hannah her entire life.

In the course of the year that her father was in the United States to save his family, Hannah and her mother were held in Nazi custody in various locations and camps. At the same time, the Nazis decided that only Hannah and her mother, and not the rest of the family, would be spared execution. Thanks to the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Europe and the Swiss consulate in Prague, Hannah and her mother, after being held by Nazis for over a year, received permission to leave Europe in exchange for German nationals being held by the United States. Hannah was put on a train in Prague alone to meet her mother in Liebenau, Germany (a camp where she was being held), and they would then travel across war-torn Europe to Portugal.

At the Liebenau stop, Hannah’s mother couldn’t locate her daughter; after frantically searching the train three times, she ultimately found young Hannah curled up under a seat on a train with a doll in her hand. They were reunited for travel through the heart of World War II Europe to Lisbon, where they then boarded the SS Drottningholm to Ellis Island. Shortly after Hannah and her mother left Europe, the rest of her extended family was rounded up and killed in the Theresienstadt and Treblinka death camps.

Though neither Hannah nor her parents spoke English, or even knew anything about the United States, and there were no government programs to provide language, financial or other assistance to refugees or immigrants, the family made its way to Seattle, Washington, where they established a new life.

It didn’t take long for Hannah to learn English and assimilate into American culture, and she soon made lifelong friends in Seattle’s Jewish community. Hannah excelled in school and was one of the few women to study to become a pharmacist at the University of Washington.
…
Though she faced many types of discrimination, Hannah quickly rose to the top of her profession and remained a trusted and respected pharmacist for the duration of her life, all while raising three rowdy children and making a home for her family. Hannah loved being involved in religion and was a cornerstone of the family synagogue, Temple B’nai Israel in Daly City, where she was active in the sisterhood and was famous for her cooking skills. Anyone who ever frequented the old Gemco in Colma was sure to have known Hannah, who was synonymous with the pharmacy there, and doctors across the Bay Area knew and respected her as a trusted and compassionate pharmacist.

Hannah and Leonard loved to travel both domestically and internationally and were fortunate enough to be able to explore Europe multiple times, Asia (including Japan, where Leonard served at the conclusion of World War II) and Israel as frequently as possible. In fact, the last international trip Hannah and Leonard took together was to Israel.

Hannah’s greatest joy was family and everyone in the family looked forward to Hannah’s famous meals, from the kreplach, matzo ball soup and brisket at Pesach to chopped liver and latkes at Hanukkah to her amazing homemade dill pickles throughout the year. In a nod to her European roots, Hannah could cook a roasted duck, red cabbage and potato dumplings that would make her Czech family proud.
Hannah was the ultimate Jewish mother (both to her own children as well as the community) and to her last breath, focused on the well-being and happiness of her three kids. It is no exaggeration to say that Hannah was everyone’s mother, and she had an endless ability to both care for, and set straight, anyone she met.

It is with this background that I will bring a new direction to representation for Bozeman and Montana generally. America, and our system, is a force for good in the world and we should celebrate and build the institutions that have spread liberty here and abroad.

I am a pro-liberty, pro-individual rights, pro-law enforcement, pro-parental rights, pro-common sense solutions to the problems that actually matter to Montanans, limited government constitutionalist who was raised with a full understanding of the risks of extremism and government overreach. If I earn your vote, I will work to retain our history and traditions while acting to promote fairness, liberty and a sustainable future for our constitutional republic and state.

My focus will be on the issues that truly matter to all of us, including

addressing skyrocketing property taxes, housing costs/availability and the cost of living generally;
ensuring that law enforcement has the tools needed to combat crime;
funding education and social services;
protecting the environment and public lands, including measures to prevent sprawl and over-development; and
defending rights for all, whether it's the right to choose who you love, whether you have children and how you practice your faith.

What I will not do is put political party interests above the interests of the people. As I said in an interview when I ran in 2022, I am a conservative in the truest sense. There is no way to reconcile government intrusion in private matters, whether it's LGBTQ rights, marriage, abortion, gun ownership or parental rights, with the core conservative principle of limited government and individual liberty.

How I got to Bozeman

In 1991, I visited Montana for the first time. My brother was stationed at Fairchild AFB back when there still was a Strategic Air Command and we drove to Montana for a weekend of fishing. I was stunned by the beauty of the state as well as the abundant and pristine natural resources, but I was also applying to law school and it would be several decades before I made it back to Montana.

In 1993, I moved to the antithesis of Montana, New York City, to begin law school and ended up living, studying and ultimately working at large law firms for approximately eight years, and then returned to California to be nearby for my aging parents.

Starting in approximately 2010, I began coming to Montana and Wyoming to hunt and in 2015, I was so intent on being in Montana that I bought a small bit of land in Meagher County, where I ultimately had a cabin built. At the time, my wife had not yet been to Montana but wanted to come with me on a trip to see why I was spending so much time here.

It took all of an afternoon in Bozeman for my wife to fall in love with the city and the state and proclaim that this is a place she could live. ]

By 2018, we had bought a dream house in Bozeman and began discussing how we could live in Montana full time while also taking care of family obligations in California.

With California going into shutdown over the COVID virus in early 2020, we decided to take the two dogs on a road trip from the Bay Area to Bozeman, with an expected return a month or so later.

Everything about Bozeman was right for us and as the weeks passed, we had to start talking about when we’d pack up and head back to California. Every time we started the discussion, we ended up realizing that Bozeman was where we wanted to live.

It didn't take long to become a part of the Bozeman community, meeting our neighbors, supporting local businesses and even becoming a vendor at the Gallatin Valley Farmer's Market, with my wife realizing her longstanding dream of baking and selling cookies. Among the many charities that we support are the Montana Science Center and the Compassion Project.

If you happen to walk down South Willson Avenue with your dog, you may even have seen our dog treat box on the tree in front of our house.

We never returned to California other than to visit family, bring our possessions to Bozeman and sell our house in California. We still joke about how we “accidentally” moved but there is nothing accidental about our commitment to our community and our new home.

When I'm Not Working or Running for Office:

Like so many others who have been drawn to Montana, the outdoors called me here. Hunting and fishing, in particular, were the initial draws for me. I've always been an active upland game and waterfowl hunter, but the big game opportunities in Montana have caused me to shift my focus to deer, elk and antelope hunting. I'm not the most successful hunter, and at times have ended a season with tag soup, but any chance I have to spend time in the outdoors is a successful day for me.

Once I moved to Montana, though, the bounty of public land and outdoors activities broadened my horizons to include snowshoeing, cross country skiing, snowmobiling and photography. My wife and I are also committed dog lovers, and we currently have two rescues (a cocker spaniel and a beagle/cocker mix).