Shul Going: 2500 Years of Impressions and Reflections on Visits to the Synagogue

Shul Going

2500 Years of Impressions and Reflections on Visits to the Synagogue

Charles Heller

Shul Going

2500

Years of Impressions and Reflections on Visits to the Synagogue

Copyright © 2019 Charles Heller. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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October 18, 2019

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgements

The Prophets establish the first synagogues

The little sanctuary

Daniel  prays regularly in exile, facing Jerusalem

The Jews return to the Land of Israel

Egypt, third century BCE

The synagogue within the Second Temple grounds

Men and women in the Temple

A synagogue dedication plaque in first-century Jerusalem

Rabbi Yosei goes to pray at a ruined synagogue in Jerusalem

The Roman poet Ovid suggests that if you want to pick up girls, a good place to find them is outside the synagogue

Rabbi Eliezer teaches his students how to conduct prayers

The synagogue in Alexandria

Rabbi Jacob of Paris visits Meron in Galilee, c. 1240

Ramban rebuilds a synagogue in Jerusalem, 1267

Rabbi Meshullam of Volterra visits Alexandria, 1481

Rabbi Ovadiah of Bertinoro travels to Jerusalem, 1487

The decree of Akbar the Great

Tissard visits the Ferrara Synagogue, 1508

Regulations in the Altneuschul, Prague

Rabbi Leone da Modena promotes contemporary synagogue music

Mr. Jo. Greenhalgh to his friend Mr. Thomas Crompton, April 22, 1662

Samuel Pepys visits the London synagogue on Simhat Torah, Oct. 14, 1663

Dr Burney endures bad singers at the German synagogue, Amsterdam

Delightfull pretty tunes in Charleston, 1791

Prayer for the Royal Family, 1762

George Washington’s Letter to Congregation Jeshuat Israel, Newport, Rhode Island, 1790

In Regency London at the porch of the Great Synagogue

Frances Trollope hears Sulzer in Vienna, 1836

Franz Liszt hears Sulzer in Vienna

Eduard Hanslick hears Sulzer in Vienna, 1866

Rules of the New West End Synagogue choir, London, 1889

Raising funds for the Great Synagogue, Sydney, 1875

From the Rev. Simeon Singer’s Address, Rosh Hashanah 1888

Sabbath morning in a chevra in London’s East End, c.1900

The Zogerin of Berdichev

Extract from The Zogerin

Outside the Chesed shel Emess Synagogue, Rio de Janeiro

The opening of the South Side Synagogue, Glasgow, 1901

The Kiever Shul, Toronto: code of behavior

The Choral Shul of Moscow in pre-revolutionary days

The Golem of Prague

Passover eve in the shtetl

A letter to the Forverts, New York, 1909

Yossele Rosenblatt: You ain’t heard nothing yet

Franz Rosenzweig among the Polish Jews, 1918

Going to the synagogue in Cairo in the 1930s

Cambridge in the 1930s

Arnold Schoenberg composes for the synagogue

Stop the talking in shul!

Tsemakh Atlas reflects on praying in the synagogue

Things get out of hand in the Valkenik Bet Midrash

Incidents at the Western or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, 1928

At the Western Wall, 1930

Kristallnacht at the Mannheim Central Synagogue

The last minyan in Germany, 1938

Bar mitzvah in the Czestochowa Labor Camp, Poland, 1944

The ruined synagogues of post-war Vilna

The destruction of the Great Synagogue, London

Prince Philip at Bevis Marks, London

The synagogue gift shop

A Friday Afternoon in Detroit, 1970: The day the music died

Eldridge Street Synagogue, Lower East Side, New York, 1971

Odessa, U.S.S.R., 1981

Looking for a minyan at the Bayreuth Festival, 1983

Pope’s historic visit

Stop throwing us crumbs

At the Western Wall

November 3, 2018: #ShowUpForShabbat

Rabbis avoid calling Tree of Life a synagogue

The Synagogue in the Twenty-First Century

High Holy Days at the Song Shul, Toronto

Earth-based Jewish experiences

Contemporary issues and uncertainties in a future Mayan ruin

Challenging assumptions

Let’s be honest

Walking to Caesarea

Glossary

Bibliography

(Untitled)

To my dearest wife Helen

Preface

We are living in a time of dramatic change in synagogue going. In the Western world, organized religion now attracts only a fraction of the numbers it attracted a generation ago; in the synagogue, leaders scramble to find drastically new ways of conducting services in the hope of boosting attendance. This might be a good time to look back on how Jews (and non-Jews) throughout history have felt about being in the synagogue, through their own writing.

My involvement in synagogue life began on my eighth birthday, when my father took me to join our synagogue choir. Since that day, I have been a chorister, choir director, cantor and teacher. Over all the years, I have reflected on the nature of synagogue services, the role of the synagogue and what people expect from it. More recently, as a member of the historic Kiever Shul in downtown Toronto, I have found myself caught up in passionate discussions about the kind of synagogue the community wants. This has stimulated me to probe more deeply the question: What does a synagogue do? From these reflections arose the idea of putting together a collection of impressions that the synagogue has had on visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish, over the centuries.

The synagogue fills at least three needs: it is a house of prayer, a place of study, and a place of meeting. The latter would seem to be historically the most significant, since the very words synagogue and the Hebrew equivalent bet knesset mean exactly that. The association of praying and studying in the same space has given us the Yiddish word shul (school). 

The impulse to write a book about shuls might be in my DNA: my maternal grandfather Israel Isenstein was a bookbinder in Poland, and the son of a bookseller, while my paternal grandfather Siegfried Heller was the židovsky´ rychtář, the head of the Jewish community, in Polná (in what is now the Czech Republic), a position that his own ancestors held in the eighteenth century.

The items in this book consist of extracts from published material or video recordings. They have been shortened by cutting out excessive text; the actual text printed here is unaltered, except for minor adjustments where the original was unclear. Spelling has wherever possible been adjusted to agree with American practice, except in the case of documents in English that have historical interest. Where no translator is acknowledged, the translation has been made by myself.

—Charles Heller

Toronto, 2019

Acknowledgements

In my book What To Listen For in Jewish Music, published in 2006, I acknowledged the valuable support received from various libraries. Thirteen years on, many of those libraries have been closed and their books thrown out. It is assumed that for the twenty-first-century reader, the internet has replaced the physical book. The internet can indeed deliver whole libraries to the reader’s screen, but there will always be gaps. And so while I regret the demise of the Beth Tzedec Congregation Library and the Toronto Jewish Public Library, there still remain librarians to thank at the following institutions: first and foremost the University of Toronto Robarts Library and its sister institutions the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library and the Faculty of Music Library; the Metro Toronto Reference Library; and the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

For productive discussions and helpful direction over many years I thank Rabbis Wayne Allen, Adam Cutler, Baruch Frydman-Kohl, Aaron Levy, Howard Morrison, Geoffrey L. Shisler, Ed Treister, and the late Shulem Langner; and Cantors A. Eliezer Kirshblum, Dr Joseph A. Levine, Benjamin Z. Maissner and Eric Moses.

It is a pleasure to thank the following for generously giving their time to help answer my questions: Dr Tzvika Aviv; Michael Bales; Vince Calabrese; Prof. Adam. S. Cohen, president, the Kiever Shul, Toronto; Josiah Cohen; Dr Jerry Friedman; the late Bernard Glicksman; Prof. Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton University); Prof. Bruce W. Holsinger (University of Virginia); Martin Pavelka; Lila Sarick, Canadian Jewish News; Prof. Colin Shindler (SOAS, London University); Will Theiss; Michael Wex; Martin C. Winer.

It remains to thank Matt Wimer and Caleb Shupe of Wipf and Stock for their constant support and advice; and aharon aharon haviv, my dearest daughter Sarah for her professional advice and encouragement.

All reasonable efforts have been made by the author to trace the copyright holders of material in this book. In the event that the author is contacted by any of the untraceable copyright holders after publication of this book, the author will endeavor to rectify the position accordingly.

The author would like to thank the following for permission to quote extracts from their publications:

Azrieli Foundation, Toronto, for Pinchas Gutter, Memories in Focus; Canadian Jewish News; the Cantors Assembly for extracts from the Journal of Synagogue Music and Proceedings; Ha’aretz; Jerusalem Post; Jewish Chronicle (U.K.); Jewish Renaissance (U.K.) for Filling the Void; Prof. Dov Keller, Indiana University/ AHEYM Yiddish Archives for interview with Efim Skobilitskii; Shirley Kumove for The Zogerin; the Honorary Officers of the New West End Synagogue, London, for archival material; Penguin Random House for Chaim Grade, My Mother’s Sabbath Days; Penguin Random House and Penguin Random House Canada for Isabel Vincent, Bodies and Souls; Plymouth Hebrew Congregation for the Prayer for the Royal Family; Rabbi Raysh Weiss, for A League of Their Own; Robert H. Jackson Center, Jamestown, N.J. for the video Samuel Adler: Life in Mannheim, Germany; the Board of Directors, The Song Shul, Toronto for publicity material; The Sunday Times (UK) for In Search of the Lost Jews of Russia; University of Nebraska Press for extracts from the Jewish Publication Society of America edition of The Hebrew Scriptures: A New Translation (1917).

The Prophets establish the first synagogues

Jeremiah instructs the Jews to conduct prayers in exile

The year is 594 BCE. The Kingdom of Israel has been destroyed by the Assyrians, and all that remains of the Israelite nation is the Kingdom of Judah, now under threat from a new superpower, Babylon. The prophet Jeremiah rejects the extreme nationalists who want to ally with Egypt and fight. Instead, he advises a policy of keep calm and carry on. He foresees that the entire people of Judah will be exiled, but urges them to keep their beliefs while being model citizens. The concept of a Jewish faith outside the Jewish homeland is established.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all the captivity, whom I have caused to be carried away captive from Jerusalem unto Babylon: Build ye houses, and dwell in them, and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply ye there, and be not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I