Israel: Defying the Odds

In anticipation of Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, here is a video courtesy of aish.com, entitled Israel: Defying the Odds:

Holocaust Remembrance

Sunday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it was observed by Jews all around the world, including a very moving ceremony held at Congregation Adas Emuno.

A friend of mine, Pier Marton, who is a filmmaker and faculty member at American University in St. Louis, and someone who frequently lectures, writes about, and exhibits artwork on the subject of the Holocaust, shared the talk he gave on Sunday out in Missouri with me, and with his permission, I would like to share them with you:

I start with a quote by one my father’s favorite writers, the Nobel prize winner, Romain Rolland:

There are some dead who are more alive than the living.


My name is Pier Marton, I was born and grew up in Paris, five years after the war.
My parents' stories of survival are stories of resistance.


The odds and the times were against you two, but between luck, being politicized and smart, you both managed to make it.


Papa, in 1937, you left Budapest, Hungary for Paris, to establish your second studio of the artistic Modern Revue, which was to have offices in Budapest, Paris and New York. You advertised your artwork in Esperanto (the language which means “one who hopes”, created by another Jew, Dr. Zamenhof, an ophtalmologist from Bialystok, a man of great vision). 

You had designed some stamps with the star symbol for Esperanto. You hoped Esperanto could become the universal language of the future, to eliminate like communism, the injustices and the misunderstandings between people.


It needs to be clear, there was no such thing as “The Holocaust”, we spoke of “the war” throughout my childhood.


I remember you telling me, I was possibly 8 years old, about the bullets flying by your head as you were waiting for the German convoy that you were to ambush, right from the rooftop of that last building you moved into, to escape arrest.


That’s the building I grew up in, where we lived below the roof, in an artist’s studio that had been vacated because it was too close to a munition factory, and in danger of being bombed.


I remember being amazed by looking at the sawed off metal bars by the window in the loggia, the small room where we all slept  and where one could not stand up because of the low ceiling. 

If someone was going to arrest you, the escape route was clear: it would take a second to lift off those metal bars. To a casual observer they looked normal, but if one looked very carefully, black paint was hiding the cuts. They remained there throughout the 21 years I spent in that apartment: reminding me of the need to have both vigilance and an escape route.


At another time, you told me that the police interrogated you and that they released you.


You also spoke of hearing the police going through another apartment you had lived in, Rue Daguerre, as you were walking up the stairs.


I remember seeing that photograph of you with the medal you received upon the liberation of Paris.

But you did not expand, I had to fill in the many gaps.


One cannot ever know the life of another, do we even know our own lives?


Many years later, in a book by the famous Spanish writer, Jorge Semprun, strangely enough, there was a character with my name, as Semprun describes a resistance network in my own street.


As a curious child, going through the closets I did find a book, the most horrible book I was to ever look at, with piles of mutilated and sawed off bodies, collections of tattoed skin [I let youimagine the rest].

It established for me the need for solid documentation of human rights abuse. 

THERE, was one of the loudest screams emanating from these pictures, a sound that says in the most urgent manner, WAKE UP, something terrible was happening, and IS CONTINUING TO HAPPEN. 

OPEN YOUR EYES, even if it is difficult and painful.


From time to time, we visited that family in Freiburg. You had hidden the father, Henri, a German deserter. But we did not speak about the past, we were in the present.


Later, the puzzle came together further when the letters you had mentioned, “FTP-MOI” became those of the notorious network, mocked by the Nazis in the famous Red Poster, characterizing the resistance as Jews, foreigners, and communists - which in your case was completely true. 

Those 23 who were arrested and executed by the Germans were immortalized by the famous French song, L’Affiche Rouge.

====

Maman,  

Your trust in people was repeatedly broken. It might have started  as a kid on a tramway car in Kiskunfelegyhaza, the small town in Hungary where you grew up, when you had asked a stranger for the time. He had answered: “I don’t have to tell Jews the time”.


You did not volunteer much, you did not want to talk about any of this ever. I think you wanted for us to walk straight, trust the world. 

You did not speak much, but when you spoke, you meant it. 

You would say: "Alles ist halb so wichtig/everything is half as important” which you attributed to Ernst Toller, the left-wing Jewish playwright.


Like for most children of survivors, WHAT WAS NOT SAID had the most impact.


One could say that we received the war, like our mother’s milk, through our body (the transfer was not through words). 

Our history books and our lessons: how we all breathed, how we walked, and how we used our brain... and even how we smiled. We became specialists in the topic. Our bodies were the place where we heard the stories.


We had to know what to ask to get answers. That’s how you told me that you had to step over so many cadavers when walking on the streets at the liberation of Budapest.


For the sake of time, I will ask you to read the stories which are described on the panels outside in the lobby.


These are stories I heard for the first time as my mother spoke to a TV crew when we were both in Salt Lake City for the opening of my video installation “JEW”.


The message was clear: work for the public good and do not trust the powers that be... a politics of non-politics.


THE PEOPLE WHO DIED AND THOSE THAT SURVIVED WHILE BEING ATTACKED FOR BEING DIFFERENT, THOSE ARE THE RESISTANCE FIGHTERS, THE HEROES.


AND THE RESISTANCE, THE RESILIENCE THAT WAS THEIRS IS NOW OURS.

For more information about Pier Marton, you can take a look at his websites:   http://artsci.wustl.edu/~marton and  http://piermarton.wordpress.com.

A New Torah Cover

The Sefer Torah was the subject of a recent post here on our congregational blog,  A Sister Shul's Torah Restoration, and while the old saying tells us that you can't judge a book by its cover, we do like to honor our sacred scrolls with special coverings and decorations.


And not too long ago, we were pleased to be able to replace one of our Torah coverings that had grown old and worn with a brand new one, courtesy of Adas Emuno congregant Bara Capote, commemorating her daughter Alexia's Bat Mitzvah.  Here it is:

And let's move in for a little closer view:

Judging by this particular cover, our Torah will be well cared for, and our congregation will be grateful to the Capote family for many, many years to come.

Shabbat Meyuchad

Once a month, on the first Saturday afternoon at 2 PM, Congregation Adas Emuno holds a Shabbat Meyuchad service that has been designed to be especially appealing and welcoming for people with developmental disabilities and their families.  The service is open to all, of course, and can be appreciated by and meaningful for everyone.  But it is also meant to be especially welcoming and comfortable for families and individuals touched by autism, and other forms of disabilities.

The service is called Shabbat Meyuchad because it is an afternoon service, and as Sabbath services go, it is brief, and highly musical.  The idea for the service came after our spiritual leader, Cantor Shapiro, worked with my daughter Sarah, who has moderate autism, to give her an uniquely-tailored Bat Mitzvah ceremony a year ago.  And this made for a great story for our local cable news program, as you can see from the video below.

A brief note:  The person who came to film us on a weekday afternoon made it a point to get us to pronounce all of the Hebrew words correctly, but somehow the anchor was not able to get it right when she said "Adas Emuno" (should be ah-Dahss eh-Moon-oh), "Meyuchad" (should be may-Yoo-chahd), and even "Shabbat" (should be shah-Baht)! And their use of the phrase, "mentally challenged," in reference to individuals with developmental disabilities is inappropriate.

Be that as it may, it certainly was a worthwhile topic for a news report:

The question of inclusion comes up quite often in discussions relating to the education of people with disabilities. Religious inclusion does not receive anywhere near the same amount of attention, but it is very much relevant to inclusion in general, to be a part of one's family and community. And while you might expect it only natural for religious institutions to make the effort to include individuals with disabilities, all too often that's not the case. It means a great deal to me and my family that our congregation has that kind of openness, and is willing to make the effort.

The next Shabbat Meyuchad service is this Saturday, all are welcome to join us!

A Sister Shul's Torah Restoration

Our Adas Emuno blog gives us the opportunity not only to report on our own activities, but those of the larger communities that we are a part of.  So let's take a look at one of our sister shuls, Vassar Temple in Poughkeepsie, as they were recently in the local news up in the Hudson Valley region of New York State.  The reason for all this attention is their Torah restoration project, as this video explains:

There's an article to go with the video:  Restoring the Torah, refreshing the faith: Vassar Temple begins scroll project.  I won't go into the entire report, but I rather liked this quote:

"We are doing more than physically restoring the letters and the parchment," said Lou Lewis, restoration project chairman. "We are seeking to create a spiritual journey for members of our congregation and consciousness raising for our entire community."

Also worthy of note is the fact that this process allows for participation from members of the congregation:

On April 18, an opening ceremony will take place at Vassar Temple. During the daylong celebration, some members will be able to ink in a letter on a parchment scroll with Rabbi Moshe Druin of Sofer on Site guiding them.

Throughout the spring and summer, more congregants can make appointments with the scribes to make their marks on one of the scrolls being restored.

David Lampell, a congregant living in the City of Poughkeepsie, said he attended a previous a talk in which one of the scribes described the process of restoration. He said in inking in the letters, he and other members of the congregation would rely on the scribe to guide the quill pen along the parchment.

"They'll be doing the actual writing and we'll be holding onto the quill," Lampell said.

I also find the final part of the article especially interesting:

The origin of the temple's five scrolls is uncertain. Eastern Europe is believed to be where they were transcribed. The temple's "Prague Torah" probably was brought to America by one of the five families that founded the congregation in 1848, Golomb said.

The animal-based parchment, possibly goat skin, was made to endure many restorations.
"Because of its thickness, you can scrape off the letters without tearing it," Golomb said.

And in case you were wondering, yes, we've had our own Torah restorations here at Adas Emuno, but not in a while. 

But while we're on the subject of the Torah scroll, why don't I add some background information?

The Torah is the Hebrew name for the Five Books of Moses, also known as the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible commonly referred to as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And it can refer to the text, regardless of the form it takes, be it handwritten, printed, or electronic, and be it in the original, ancient Hebrew or a contemporary, vernacular translation.

But more specifically, what the video is about is the Sefer Torah, which refers to the parchment scroll produced according to strict ritual standards and guidelines by a special scribe known as a sofer (sefer means book, and the word for scribe, sofer, comes from the same root).  A Chumash, on the other hand, is a copy of the Torah in bound book form.

The web page, What is a Sefer Torah?, provides a neat summary of how one is made.  In a time when Twitter has us think in terms of messages that are no more that 140 characters long, it's sobering to learn that the Torah contains 304,805 letters.  The letters have to follow a prescribed form of calligraphy, and each one must be flawless.  Heroic measures are taken to insure that there is no error, as this page describes:

It takes a professional Sofer almost a year to write on parchment more than a quarter of a million letters. The Sofer is not allowed to write from memory. The Sofer has to look into the text of a Chumash that has been thoroughly checked to be an accurate copy or a Tikkun for each next letter, concentrating himself on the holiness and significance of each of the letters of the Sefer Torah. The Torah can only be written in a special square script called K'tav Ashuri. Although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the Sofer forms each individual letter starting from left to right, checking each word from the Tikkun, singing each word, each letter, out loud.

Note that contemporary proofreaders use a similar technique, that is, reading backwards, albeit word by word, and from the bottom of the page up, as a better way to spot errors than reading in the standard fashion.  But what is particularly important is that the slow, methodical, painstaking process that sofers use makes it possible to produce copy after copy that are textually identical to one another. 

This was all but unheard of in the scribal culture that existed before Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type in the mid-15th century.  Copyists invariably introduced error and variation into their copies, often deliberately altering or editing their copy to suit their own tastes and whims, changing the wording, deleting passages they didn't care for, adding their own material in as well.  This is known as scribal corruption, and it makes it all but impossible to establish an original, authoritative version of any text from the ancient or medieval world.  Except for the Torah, which has been reproduced faithfully, even down to the exact words that make up a line and the exact lines that make up a column and the exact columns that make up a page (248 pages in all) since antiquity. 

Parchment itself is a durable material, and heavy, well suited to preserving knowledge over time, but  not so easy to transport.  Made from animal skin, the origins of parchment are unknown, but its use as a writing surface became increasingly more common from the 6th century BCE on, especially within Jewish culture.

The book as we know it, pages bound together between covers, did not exist before the invention of the parchment codex in the 1st century CE (where it was quickly adopted by the Christian Jews who made up the early Christian Church).  Up until that time, and even well after it, the word book referred to scrolls, and scrolls tended to be relatively small and lightweight.  Often they were made from Egyptian papyrus, which was light in weight and flimsy, easy to transport over distance, but not terribly durable.  Parchment scrolls were heavier and longer lasting than their papyrus counterparts, but limited in size. 

The reason why the Bible is made up of books rather than chapters or sections, is because each book was originally a scroll of its own.  The same is true of the various works of the ancients that are divided into "Book One," "Book Two," "Book Three," etc.

The Torah, then, is a scroll five times over, five scrolls in one, and given the fact that the letters are relatively large, and that it's made of very thick parchment that's attached to wooden staves, it is without a doubt a heavy medium.  Add to this the fact that the scroll is covered in a velvet coat, and given a silver crown and ornaments, and it takes some effort and strength to lift one, as is required during many of our worship services.  If you've ever had to hold and carry a Torah, and if you are a member of our congregation chances are you have, you know that it's not easy!

But then again, it's not meant to be moved around from location to location, but rather meant to remain in place and keep safe the knowledge it contains from generation to generation.  And to the extent that the medium is the message, in this instance, the message is tradition, preservation and continuity over the ages and generations.

A Look At Our Roots

Congregation Adas Emuno was founded on October 22nd, 1871, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and from our perspective, our Congregation is not a place or a facility, it is an organization, and more than anything else, a community.

But for another perspective on Adas Emuno, we can turn to a website called, interestingly enough, The New Jersey Churchscape.  Here is how the creators of the website explain their project: "We've created a database and photographic inventory on more than half the 18th & 19th century churches in the state and add to it each month." 

And they have an entry for the "Adas Emuno Synagogue"!  But not for our present shul in Leonia, no, but rather for the original facility in Hoboken!  And here's the photograph that accompanies their entry:

According to our website's History page, this synagogue "was built on a parcel of land donated by the Stevens Family. This charming Gothic Revival building still stands today as an historic landmark, and at the time of its construction, was the pride of its congregation and a “credit to the city" [source: Hoboken Evening News, 1893] of Hoboken." And here is what they say in the New Jersey Churchscape entry on the Adas Emuno Synagogue:

This is the oldest surviving synagogue in New Jersey, built in 1883. The windows and door are Gothic, but the arcade in the gable is Romanesque. In the last part of the nineteenth century, the Jews had not developed an architectural style that was different from Christian churches, although in several instances, including an old synagogue in Newark, a vaguely Moorish style was adopted. I believe it was used by a Christian congregation for a period but is now an apartment building.

In 1974, a little over a century after its founding, our Congregation moved north, from Hoboken in Hudson County to Leonia in Bergen County, and that's where you'll find us today.  

And if the fate of the building saddens you at all, it is worth recalling that the origins of the Jewish people were as nomads, and that much more space, what we value is time, including the sacred time of Shabbat and the Jewish holidays.  And much more than places and buildings and monuments, what we value is people, and life. 

Havdallah Talk: The History of Jews in Brazil

At Congregation Adas Emuno, we launched a series of Havdallah Talks a couple of years ago, in conjunction with our Adult Education program.  As the name implies, our Havdallah Talks are held on Saturday evening, and include a brief Havdallah service, a beautiful ceremony celebrating the end of Shabbat, and the beginning of the new week.  And there's also a little nosh, natch!

So, our next Havdallah Talk will take place this coming Saturday, March 20th, and will feature two of the many talented members of our congregation, authors Beti Rozen and Peter Hays.  Beti and Peter  will be celebrating their latest work for young adults: Two Continents, Four Generations:  One Hundred Years, Two Stories, with a presentation:  The History of Jews in Brazil:  From 1500 to the Present.

The authors' novella is set in two time periods, the present and in 1939, and is the true story of a Jewish-American boy who learns about his Brazilian Jewish grandfather and how their lives compare with one another. It is based on the journey of Beti Rozen's father who left Poland for Brazil during the Second World War. A book signing will be held following the presentation. 

The program will begin at 7:00 p.m. with Cantor Kerith Spencer-Shapiro leading the brief havdallah service, and light refreshments will be served. The program is free and open to the public. Congregation Adas Emuno is located at 254 Broad Avenue, Leonia. For more information, call 201-592-1712 or visit the website at www.adasemuno.org.