Family commitments were central to Max and Adele's marriage. Sam Gass had placed some of his assets in the form of securities and real estate in his wife’s name. After she died the assets were transferred to the newly created Lena Gass Family Trust. One third of the trust’s income was paid out to Sam Gass. The rest was evening split among his five children. Following Sam’s death, Max and his brother-in-law Joseph Alter (Minnie Gass's husband) became the trustees. They divided the money and stocks among the children, leaving in the trust the real estate, a block of stores which Max Gass managed.

Baruch Korff, Max’s brother-in-law described Max’s business ethics succinctly:

“Mattes was the epitome of honesty and integrity. He wouldn't take a penny that belonged to his sisters.”

Max applied his morality to his interactions with his tenants. As Paul Gass remembered:

“The rents on the properties were too low. My father kept them low, because, he said, You only took what you needed. If you didn't need a lot of money, then you didn't charge a lot of money. My father used to keep all the books, which were really meticulous. To see the books was just absolutely unreal, because pennies would be split.”

Although Max made a living in the business world all of his life, he lacked the business acumen of his father and likely would have been happier and more successful if he had become a rabbi or followed another career path more in tune with his spiritual needs. Given a business problem, when all else had been tried, Max Gass sought a spiritual solution. A story told by Max’s first cousin Harrison Gass, who worked with him at Lion Shoe, illustrates this:

“Max was in the shoe factory, he’d been there for a few years, and we had a problem, a pattern problem. You have to have a design [for a shoe], like when you make coats, shoes, and things have to fit. And everything was fine except the shoes when they got out at the end, they didn’t fit.

“So we had all kinds of experts he brought in—we brought a guy from New York to figure what was wrong—and still it wouldn’t fit. And it was a big important shoe at the time. Finally we decided, well I guess we better throw it out.

“Max says, ‘No, don’t throw it out. Maybe I can help.’

 “‘Good, what you gonna do?’

“And he said he’s going to write a kvittel. A kvittel is a little note you write if you got a serious problem in life. You write your problem and you fold it up, and then you find some holy place, preferably in the cracks of the holy wall in Jerusalem, and you stick it in there. And somehow miraculously the answer would come back. So he’s going to write a kvittel and take it to the Grand Rabbi Korff.”  

As an observant Jew, Max chose to work in businesses where he would not be re­quired to come in on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays. Throughout his adult life he was actively in­volved in the Jewish community, occasionally serving as cantor at the Orange Street shul in Chelsea, and in the Winthrop synagogue, writing and delivering his own pray­ers. According to his son Paul:

“My father and his cousin, Hymie Razin, used to compete to be the cantor at the Orange Street shul. Hymie would get to be cantor during the High Holidays and Max would get to be cantor on Saturdays.”

Max also served as a chaplain of the Noddles Island Lodge of the Masons in Boston.

Max’s granddaughter Lisa Gass recalled that if you expressed interest in some aspect of Judaism it meant a lot to Max. He loved to take the time to discuss and ex­plain the intricacies of his faith. When she was 13, Lisa talked to Max about her coming Bat Mitzvah. She told him that if she was going to do it she wanted to go all the way, to put on the tefillin and the tallis. And Max was against it because, in Jewish tradi­tion, only males did these things.

Max then went to the Talmud and consulted rabbis trying to find a source in Jewish law where it stated that women were prohibited from participating in this way. When he was unable to find such a prohibition, he took Lisa to a Jewish bookstore in Boston and bought her the tefillin and tallis himself. Even though Max Gass was very much a traditionalist, he was willing to go against tradition if Jewish law did not uphold it.

Max’s other granddaughter, Leslie Gass shared her recollections of Max:

“Most of my memories are of him praying, reading, and talking about Hebrew school. I especially remember him at Passover. We’d have twenty or thirty people all sitting around this huge table in my grandparents’ small apartment. He would be at the head of the table reading all the prayers in Hebrew. And sometimes people would start talking and he’d crack a little joke. That was when he got older—at first he was more strict about the Seder. There hasn’t been a Passover like that since he died.”

     
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