USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Growth and achievement: Temple Israel, 1854-1954 > Part 3
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Congregational Life: 1854 - 1954
We have to take care of the thousands coming to our shore. We must help them to become good citizens, so we may find among them a Morse, who was an honor to this day as its Congressman, and Hechts, Shumans, and hundreds of others who are leaders among Boston's great merchants. We must certainly treat the immigrants with kindness and toleration. The Christians of this land must exercise toleration toward them, and not believe they are bad because they have been driven from their homes. We must help them to become respected and reputable citizens of this city.
Special-purpose charitable organizations, like the He- brew Sheltering Home, soon flourished with "Aunt Lina" at the helm. Mrs. Hecht founded the Hebrew Indus- trial School in 1889, precursor of the Hecht Neighbor- hood House, to teach immigrant girls to cook and to sew, and to give them religious instruction. "Country Camp" for girls and women followed. The Hebrew Free Burial Society and the Free Employment Bureau of the Baron De Hirsch Committee began to function. In 1895, the Federation of Jewish Charities, the first of its kind in the country, was formed to coordinate the activities of the separate Jewish charitable societies and to regulate the soliciting of funds. The Federation, later known as the Association of Jewish Philanthropies, was eventually to include all Jewish cultural, educational, and social service agencies and institutions.
Years of growth and preparation finally culminated in
34
Early Milieu and Growth
1907 in the completion of the Commonwealth Avenue building, effusively hailed by a Boston paper as "BUILT AFTER THE STYLE OF SOLOMON'S TEMPLE." The modern Moorish-style tabernacle, constructed of blemished white marble, was originally to have been built in brick. However, Coolidge and Walker, the architects of Temple Israel, were also the architects of the Harvard Medical School. They were able to take advantage of an opportunity to acquire the handsome but blemished white marble from the Harvard Medical School, which had ordered but could not use it.
The dedication ceremonies were impressive. History and prophecy crowded the scene. Down the center aisle strode "the grand old man of Boston," the octogenarian Edward Everett Hale, leaning upon the arm of Lee M. Friedman, a rising young attorney. Alongside Rabbi Charles Fleischer stood his predecessors, Rabbis Shon- inger and Schindler. The eloquent and leonine guest speaker, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, founder of the Free Synagogue in New York in 1906 and an early Zionist, evoked a spontaneous ovation. He sounded a fitting note in Yankeedom: "The Pilgrim fathers were Israel incarnated, Maccabeans of the seventeenth century. They stood for the eternal verities of the Jewish faith." The sons of old Israel appreciated the allusion to their place in New England as the "new Israel."
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Congregational Life: 1854 -1954
III
The remarkable expansion of Temple Israel in the last half century gradually transformed a parochial chapel into a communal cathedral encompassing a broad range of interests and sentiments and a diversity of traditions. By the 1890's, the temple already drew its members from all the older Jewish families. The earlier skirmishes of rival orthodoxies had been blotted out by Reform, and American sons were unaware and uninter- ested in the feuds of the fathers. With the coming of Rabbi Harry Levi in 1911, children of newer immigrants were attracted to the temple in growing numbers. They, along with the workings of time, were to modify its features.
A membership of ninety-one in 1888 grew to an un- impressive one hundred fifty at the time of the opening of the one thousand seat temple in 1907. By 1917, mem- bership reached three hundred eighty. In 1929, one year after the completion of the Meeting House in the River- way, membership rose to 734, until 1941, the highest total in the congregation's history. In 1954, the member- ship of nearly fifteen hundred stood at a figure nearly eleven times that of 1907. School registration, which had continually lagged far behind membership, almost equalled it in 1954, a promising harbinger for the future.
Rabbi Levi's pastorate, which "put us at the head of all things Jewish," marked a turning point for the con-
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Early Milieu and Growth
gregation. At the ultimate limits of "Americanization" and universalism, Temple Israel embarked upon a re- appraisal of values. Perhaps this trend was best sum- marized by Fanny Barnett Linsky in a play dramatizing the history of the congregation on its eightieth anni- versary. The earlier epochs of "faith" (Shoninger), "truth" (Schindler), and "beauty" (Fleischer) gave way to a period of "kindness" (Levi), even we may add of rachmones. Confidence and optimism were not abandoned but were merged with a deeper sense of reality as the tragedy of two world wars and their after- maths gripped the world. Gradually, over the coming decades, as the membership was augmented, the nature of this process became discernible. The synagogue qua pulpit was transformed into the synagogue qua institu- tion. A multiform Judaism and Americanism evolved and intermeshed in a complex twentieth century.
Progress and tradition moved side by side in the temple's calendar. In 1912, Saturday services were re- stored. But Sunday services also continued. 1913 saw the successful inauguration of the congregational seder on the Passover, quite unusual as yet in Reform temples. How much closer was Rabbi Levi to the emotional and religious needs of his congregation than was his prede- cessor! The 1920's saw the realization of earlier ten- dencies as well. In 1922, assigned pews were abolished, driving the cash nexus out of the temple. Finally, dec- ades of mounting feminine activity was officially recog-
37
Congregational Life: 1854 - 1954
nized. In 1924, for the first time in the history of the congregation, two women, Mrs. Edward S. Goulston, Sr. and Mrs. Harry Liebmann, were elected to the Board of Trustees; and in the same year, Miss Eva Leon oc- cupied the pulpit. The tasks of the rabbinate had so vastly expanded that in 1923 an assistant rabbi was ap- pointed to aid Rabbi Levi in his crowded round of pas- toral duties.
Rabbi Levi's term in office was crowned by a harvest of interfaith activities. The exchange of pulpits, the Union Thanksgiving Service under the auspices of the Greater Boston Federation of Churches (initiated in 1923 upon Levi's suggestion), the Temple Forum, con- ferences, symposia, and the popular radio broadcasts - all flourished. At the same time, the rabbi gave gen- erous recognition to the moral and spiritual values em- bodied in an already ebbing Yiddish literature. The Little Theater group, organized by Rabbi Levi in 1929, opened its dramatic career with a series of one act plays by Isaac Loeb Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, classic Yid- dish writers. Sholem Asch, Abraham Reisen, Yehoash, and Marc Arnstein were also performed.
These dramatic presentations were only a part of a larger, vigorous adult education program. Beginning with the Temple Forum series some three and one half decades ago, an active Brotherhood and Sisterhood have encouraged forums, panels, lectures, and book discus- sion groups on a spectrum of topics. Present congre-
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Early Milieu and Growth
gants well remember the impressive lectures of Salo Baron, Jacob Marcus, Cecil Roth, and Maurice Samuel, as well as the musical treats provided by Boris Godlov- sky. The artistic and intellectual fare throughout the year has enriched, as it has moralized and personalized, aspects of history and human achievement.
Jewish education for youngsters showed signs of a growing vitality even earlier. Before 1912, Jewish edu- cation had been one continual lamentation. "We have the same thing all the time; we begin with Abraham and go as far as Moses." Kindly, well-meaning, unpaid volunteers struggled blindly with students through thickets of ungraded subject matter. Uninterested youngsters were barely held in leash to Sunday morn- ing's close.
Upon the insistence of Lee M. Friedman, and with the cooperation of the Board of Trustees and the newly selected Rabbi Levi, school, teachers, and curriculum were professionalized. Instructors were selected from among the ablest in Boston's public school system. Temple Israel's religious school became the first in the country to compensate Sunday school teachers on a professional basis. It was the first to demand from them rigorous teaching standards, a well-defined curriculum, and strict discipline in classes. Religious subjects were to exact the same attention, interest, and work as secu- lar counterparts. Every effort was made to impress pupils with the value of their instruction. The response was
39
Congregational Life: 1854- 1954
immediate. To satisfy the demand, two sessions were needed on Sunday, morning and afternoon. Membership was stimulated as youngsters clamored to attend the school. Soon New York's Temple Emanu-El emulated Temple Israel. Others followed.
The last decade and a half has seen even further change. Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman came to Temple Israel to fill out the mission of his predecessor. The res- toration of Shabbos and the Bar Mitzvah and the sup- port of the rise of Israel from the ashes of history sym- bolized Liebman's deeper sense of urgency - the need to re-educate for Judaism. In this process, he and his congregation became nationally renowned. Rabbi Abra- ham Klausner, his successor, continued his work. Be- tween 1942 and 1954, school enrollment rose from 412 to 1156. Growth required the use of Temple vestry class- rooms on Sundays and sessions at the Meeting House on Saturdays and Sundays. The modernization of methods in Hebrew and religious instruction, the rise of the Zionist spirit, and the availability of professionally trained teachers created a receptive climate.
Energies formerly consecrated to "Americanization" now turned inward. In 1943, an audio-visual aid depart- ment under the direction of qualified specialists was in- troduced. In 1945, a twice-weekly Hebrew school was inaugurated, which stresses reading, writing, and con- versation; Bar Mitzvah preparation, songs, and prayers. Hebrew, as a medium of understanding between the
40
Early Milieu and Growth
United States and Israel, has been given the study and attention omitted by an earlier generation. In 1945, the educational period was extended by the addition of a two year post-confirmation course. With the introduc- tion of a kindergarten in 1950, a clearly defined curri- culum reached across the whole educational gamut.
Equally rich has been the extra-curricular program. Arts and crafts and dramatics have been popular. As- semblies solemnizing Jewish holidays and other special events are held regularly. A discussion period with the rabbi, "Shabbos with the Rabbi," has become the cen- tral feature of the Sabbath. Children's model Passover Sedorim, a Purim carnival, and an annual marionette show on one of the Jewish holidays rounds out the child's annual voyage through Judaism. Remarkable has been the achievement of the Torchbearer Yearbook, first published in 1947. Each year one of the editors has become editor-in-chief of the local high school paper. In 1953, the Torchbearer was entered for the first time in the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Con- test and was awarded first prize.
The staff of six teachers engaged on an experimental basis in 1912 now numbers forty-five. They supply the leadership for summer camping, youth work, and Jewish organizations and projects. The PTA, organized in 1928, is allied to the school. The PTA has sponsored and sup- plemented extra-curricular activities. It has played the role of shadchan between school and home, enlighten- ing each as to the responsibilities of the other.
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The Commitment to Education
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Congregational Life: 1854-1954
IV
At midcentury, none can doubt that Judaism and Americanism are well joined. The religious commit- ment to education is one expression of this fusion, and the Judaism of Rabbis Liebman, Klausner, and Gittel- sohn is another. The three rabbis supported the estab- lishment of the Jewish state of Israel. Rabbi Liebman defended the Jewish Community Center. Rabbi Gittel- sohn, as an editor of The Reconstructionist, is identified with the idea that Jews are a people as well as a religious group. For Roland B. Gittelsohn, who served as chap- lain with the famed Fifth Marine Division that took Iwo Jima in World War II, this is meaningful Judaism in a land of many peoples.
The scions of the Jews of the North End, who were described in 1892 as "sober, industrious, and law-abid- ing," have become less self-conscious and more expres- sive both in their Judaism and in their Americanism. The members of Temple Israel include eminent physi- cians and judges, leading merchants, manufacturers and attorneys, and many men of science and learning from Boston's leading cultural and scientific centers. One member is President of Harvard's Board of Overseers, another is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Har- vard professor of American history. Many are active in public affairs. Public service and personal achievement are a measure of the journey from the small frame build-
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Early Milieu and Growth
ing on Pleasant Street, to the brick structure on Colum- bus Avenue, to the marble temple on Commonwealth Avenue, to the dignified Meeting House in the River- way. The achievement of Temple Israel has been the achievement of America. So its future is the American future.
Part Two
The Making of a Reform Pulpit
Solomon Schindler
Joseph Sachs
Joseph Shoninger
CHAPTER FOUR
Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
I
the beginning there was no Reform. Joseph Sachs (1854-1856) and Joseph Shoninger (1856- 1874), the first spiritual leaders of Temple Adath Israel, were rabbis of an Orthodox shul. Such differences as existed between Temple Ohabei Shalom and Temple Israel were differences over language and minor details in ritual, not over point of view. Central to the think- ing of Temple Israel was the belief that the Jews were a unique and separate people to whom God had chosen to reveal His word through Moses. Gentiles were pa- gans, or at best, inferior religionists with whom God had not made a covenant. As of old, women sat in the balcony of Temple Israel, men worshipped with covered head and tallith, and one kept the Hebrew Sabbath.
Copyright, 1954 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College .. The material in this chapter is part of chapter three of Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age, to be published by Harvard University Press in the fall of 1954.
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The Making of a Reform Pulpit
The ritual was in Hebrew, the vernacular in German. As yet there was no sermon, and one prayed for a Mes- siah descended from David's line to restore Israel to Palestine. The Judaism of Temple Israel - ethnocen- tric, foreign-speaking, an island in non-Jewish Boston - had yet to come to terms with the Enlightenment.
The impetus for reformation came from a handful of German-born merchants. These merchants, of Orthodox background, were successful men who aspired to the manners and outlook of native Bostonians. They wanted to acquire the Boston speech, the Boston dress, the Bos- ton religion: they wanted to be like unto others. More than that, they feared that their American children would embrace Christianity if the shul were not Americanized. This fear was widespread. Unless Judaism assimilates the American way, the American Israelite warned, we "will have no Jews in this country in less than half a century." Joseph Shoninger, who was not a rabbi but a teacher and a chazan, could not formulize Temple Israel's yearning for Americanization. This task fell to a rebel who fled Germany at the same time that Adath Israel thought to discard Orthodoxy.
Solomon Schindler was born in Niesse, Silesia, Oc- tober 24, 1842. As the eldest son of an Orthodox rabbi he was obliged to follow his father's calling. Accordingly, he studied the Talmud with his learned parent and at the age of thirteen was sent to Breslau to enroll both at the rabbinical school and the gymnasium. But young Schin-
47
Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
dler did not want to be a rabbi. He objected to Ortho- doxy, could not accept the Bible literally, and wanted a career outside the synagogue. After two years he gave up his religious studies, and upon finishing his course at the gymnasium, obtained a degree at a normal school and settled down as a teacher. In 1866, he married Henrietta Schultz, a pious, middle-class Jewish girl from West- phalia, who soon bore him three sons, Otto, Paul, and William. The Franco-Prussian War uprooted the Schind- lers. An ardent German nationalist, but a liberal spirit, Solomon objected to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and "delivered a scathing and denunciatory speech against Bismarck" on the very day that the triumphant Prussian armies returned to Berlin. For this speech he had to flee from his native land.
Schindler arrived penniless in New York in 1871 with his wife and three children. Too proud to ask assistance from his spouse's wealthy relatives in New York and El Paso, Solomon fed his family by peddling shoelaces. Within several months poverty in America accom- plished what custom and training had failed to do in Germany; it forced the rabbi's son to become a rabbi. Hard-up and discouraged, Schindler grabbed at the op- portunity to become the leader of a small Orthodox syn- agogue in Hoboken, New Jersey, and remained there for three years.
In 1874, Temple Adath Israel, wishing to American- ize its ritual, advertised for a minister in a newspaper
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The Making of a Reform Pulpit
that Schindler chanced to read. He came to Boston, preached a sermon in competition with others, convinced the congregation that he was the man for the job, and was engaged as "Reader, Teacher and Preacher ... with a yearly salary of $1,500." As head of Temple Israel, the German rebel pursued his early ambition for a secular career outside the ghetto. The synagogue, which in the villages of Central and Eastern Europe had been simply a prayer house without a minister (the rabbi was a state official of the community), was in the process of becom- ing a Jewish church complete with pastor and pulpit. The ex-school teacher perceived that his people wished to discard embarrassing alien customs so as to end the apartheid that had cursed Israel through the centuries. In twenty years Temple Israel shed these customs to be- come New England's first Reform Jewish synagogue. However, Schindler's radicalism went beyond the mod- est aspiration of his people for respectability, and iso- lated, he left the Temple and Judaism for the religion of social reform as propagated by Edward Bellamy.
Throughout his tenure at Temple Israel, Schindler felt more at home with non-Jews than with Jews. The former were of a special kind, the rebels who had lib- erated themselves from the values of their parents - Schindler's kind. He was attracted to the Free Religion- ists, as they were to him; both Jew and Calvinist were attacking a cosmology that rested on the literalism of the Old Testament. With Hamlin Garland, who fled
49
Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
the intellectually infertile life of the prairies, Schindler researched the unseen spiritual world for the American Psychical Society, a fad for the intelligentsia of that day. Benjamin Flower, who travelled from fundamentalism to the Social Gospel, welcomed the rabbi to the Arena crowd, the apostles of newness; and the Nationalists considered it a triumph when New England's first Re- form rabbi joined their ranks to translate Edward Bel- lamy's Looking Backward into German, and write his own sequel (in English) to that novel. Schindler's closest friend was Minot J. Savage. The first American clergyman to reconcile Christianity and Darwinism, Sav- age, as his autobiographical novel revealed, went through a gruelling emotional experience before he could throw off the fire and brimstone orthodoxy of his boyhood. In the twentieth century Minot J. Savage would lay the foundation for the Community Church of New York.
Mixing easily with humane and literary Boston, Sol- omon Schindler was a bridge between the Jewish middle classes and their non-Jewish neighbors. When he brought out an Illustrated Hebrew Almanac for the Year 5641, his good friend John Boyle O'Reilly gladly contributed a poem to it. When Boston wanted a rep- resentative Jewish opinion, it went to Temple Israel's rabbi. The leading journals published his opinions on education, immigration, racial relations; and the lecture halls often called upon him. Schindler explained Chris- tianity to his congregation and expounded Judaism to
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The Making of a Reform Pulpit
interested Christians. By the middle of the 1880's there were as many non-Jews as Jews who flocked to his ser- mons at Temple Israel. So well did Solomon Schindler fit that Boston took pride in the fact that he was the first person in the city's history to be nominated by both political parties for the School Committee.
II
Sensitive to the possibility of a rapprochement be- tween liberal Christians and Jews, Solomon Schindler devoted his energies "to educate the Jew for his position as a citizen in the community .... " The men who en- gaged him as rabbi wanted, at the outset, little else than to make their services like the dignified Protestant mode of worship. But Temple Israel's congregation did not know what measures to take or how far to go. The rabbi capitalized on this yearning for an Americanized Juda- ism. By destroying the old forms and preaching a theol- ogy of humanitarianism, he sought to bring an ancient faith "abreast with the time and to win for it the respect of the Gentile world."
The first reforms exploded like a bombshell. When Schindler introduced the family pew, choir, organ, ver- nacular prayer book, and male worship without hats, fifteen of his congregation of forty withdrew in protest against what seemed to them brazen steps toward Chris- tianity. Schindler did not mind. These measures were cal-
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Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
culated to attract the assimilationists among the younger and well-to-do Jews who could not bring themselves to belong to any of the Boston synagogues. The calcula- tion proved correct. By the middle of the 1880's, Tem- ple Israel increased its numbers three-fold to include "100 of the richest and most influential Hebrews in the city," among them Congressman Leopold Morse.
In 1885, the congregation moved from modest quar- ters in downtown Boston into a newly built temple in a still fashionable part of the South End. At the dedica- tion ceremony, there were addresses by the Reverends Minot J. Savage, Brooke Herford, Edward Everett Hale, and Phillips Brooks. Once in the new building, Solomon Schindler persuaded his flock to take "the so much dreaded step of ... Sunday services" on the grounds that the business obligations of the men made it impos- sible to observe the Saturday Sabbath. In a decade, the rabbi achieved his purpose of making the "Jew like the Gentile .. . in ceremonials. ... "
Worshipping like the Unitarians whom Schindler ad- mired, Boston's Reform Jews were still in need of a modern theology. They went to Jewish church on Sun- day and prayed without hats, but as yet they had not formally given up the idea that Israel was God's chosen, that the Messiah would come one day, and that Gen- tiles were pagans or worse. Further, there was still the Jewish as against the Christian conception of Jesus. Wishing to minimize theological as well as ritualistic dif-
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The Making of a Reform Pulpit
ferences between Jew and non-Jew, Schindler created a synthesis not unlike that of a James Freeman Clarke or Minot J. Savage. Happily, the climate of the then con- temporary science enabled him to embrace modernism. In particular, he made Judaism come to terms with the study of comparative religion, Biblical criticism, and the evolutionary hypothesis.
The rabbi of Temple Israel knew that the spotlight was on him and that he had a large and sympathetic audience. His first series of sermons, Messianic Expec- tations and Modern Judaism (1885), were delivered in the temple to a numerous throng of which, Minot J. Savage wrote, "more than half ... was Christian. .. . " What Bostonians could not hear they could read in the daily and Sunday papers. So keen was the curiosity in what Schindler had to say that one Boston newspaper drummed up yearly subscriptions by offering Schindler's sermons free of charge. "No literary papers in The Globe," wrote that journal, ". .. have caused so wide an interest as those of Rabbi Schindler on MODERN JU- DAISM AND ITS BELIEFS." Similarly, the otherwise unspirited Transcript spiritedly urged its readers to fol- low the rabbi's discourses; for "the enormous influence which the Hebrew race has exerted ... in the history of the world makes it interesting to know where the pres- ent representatives of that wonderful nation stand in the turmoil of .. . modern intellectual life."
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