Jack met his future wife, Gloria, in 1952, and they were married after he graduated from NYU in 1953. They had two children in what has been a happy and enduring marriage. As a foreign student, Jack had to continue his studies in order to stay in this country, so he went on to earn a master's degree in engineering at NYU. His bride worked to support them, but when she fell ill, Jack had to reduce his course load by three credits to allow him to work additional hours and continue his studies at the same time. He was offered a job with the Printing Industries Equipment Company in New York and started there in 1952, at the height of the Korean War. Dropping three credits from the mandatory twelve got him called down to the Immigration and Naturalization offices, and it appeared that he was about to be deported without finishing his graduate degree.

At that time there was a ten-year waiting list for Israelis hoping to be included in the immigration quota. The Immi-gration officials accused Jack of marrying an American for the express purpose of acquiring U.S. citizenship. He protested that his wife was a Colombian, not an American citizen. This indisputable fact, however, did not improve his chances of remaining in this country, and he was advised to get a lawyer as a last resort. The lawyer discovered that there was a special provision for aliens whose services were urgently needed. First, Jack had to obtain two affidavits, one from his employer attesting to his good moral character and the other indicating the value of his work to this country.

With no one else to turn to, he approached J. Howard Atkins, a bookbinder, president of the F. J. Barnard company and owner of the Oversewing Machine Company of American (OMCOA), who often visited Printing Indus-tries Equipment Company in connection with Jack's work in designing the new self-adjusting Rounder & Backer. At Howard Atkin's request, Dudley A. Weiss, then the executive director of the Library Binding Institute, prepared a glowing letter indicating that Jack was providing unique and valuable services to the library binding services to the library binding industry. Jack still treasures the letter, which hangs on his conference room wall. It reads as if the world would disappear unless Bendror was permitted to remain in the United States. Fortunately, Immigration decided to include him in a "preference quota" and Jack completed his master's degree in 1955. Five years later, he became an American citizen.

Jack used his knowledge of hydraulics to perfect the new self-adjusting Rounder & Backer in 1954. His article describing this invention won first prize and $500 in a competition sponsored by the journal Applied Hydraulics (now Applied Hydraulics and Pneumatics). The new Rounder & Backer was a revolutionary machine, the first major advance in library binding technology since the introduction of the oversewing machine in 1920. (Incidentally, the prize money was used to buy furniture for Jack and Gloria's Brooklyn apartment.) After receiving his master's degree, Jack continued to work for the Printing Industries Equipment Company until 1957. In that year, however, the owner of Printing Equipment Industries sold the company and Jack became an unemployed engineer with a wife and a child to support. He was living in Brooklyn and the Korean War was raging. He did not yet have his citizenship papers and was unable to gain employment since most jobs were classified government work, so he did some free-lancing.