ONCE UPON A ROSH HASHANAH
JICK, LEON
ONCE UPON A ROSH HASHANAH Leon Jick Once upon a Rosh Hashanah a rabbi was assaulted. The attack was not a street mugging; it took place in the synagogue, on the bimah, in front of the ark, in the...
...There is no reason to believe that the "Poles and Hungarians" who defended Wise were more interested in reform than his adversaries (presumably Bavarian, or like Spanier, Hanoverians...
...The congregations that by now seem natural to us are of relatively recent vintage...
...While the quarrel may have had its roots in petty and personal issues, it was more likely the result of the perennial antagonism between lay leaders and rabbis...
...And the victim was no ordinary rabbi...
...He was the law and the revolution, the lord and the glory, the majesty and the spiritual guardian of the congregation...
...He ruled the quick and the dead...
...He was sui generis, half priest, half beggar, half oracle, half fool, as the occasion demanded...
...And not so very long ago — before Americanization and affluence and respectability had consolidated institutional patterns (for good and ill)— passions on such matters ran so high that a sheriffs posse was required to calm them down...
...The incident described in Wise's Reminiscences took place in 1850, some years before he attained a position of leadership...
...The Poles and Hungarians, who thought only of me struck out like wild men...
...Spanier (president of the congregation) steps in my way, and, without saying a word, smites me with his fist so that my cap falls from my head...
...By then he was a famous rabbi of an affluent congregation in Cincinnati...
...in short he was a Kol-bo, an encyclopedia, accepted bread, turnips, cabbage, potatoes as a gift, and peddled in case his salary was not sufficient...
...Because the central professional role was that of the chazan: "The chazan was reader, cantor, and blessed everyone for chaipasch which amounted to 4'/2 cents...
...He had been in America four years and was serving as rabbi of Congregation Bethel in Albany, New York at the time: RECOLLECTIONS presents documents and vignettes out of the American Jewish past...
...Wise wrote his account in 1874...
...The congregations were satisfied and there was no room for preacher or rabbi.'' Allowing for a considerable amount of exaggeration and irony, Wise's account reveals a great deal about the immigrant Jews of the 1840'sand their faith...
...Quite the contrary...
...The people acted like furies...
...Such antagonism, though widely experienced today, was far sharper in the early years of American synagogue life, before the roles were as well defined as they have come to be...
...Within two minutes the whole assembly was a struggling mass...
...women still sat in the balcony...
...Moreover, Wise tells us that Louis Spanier, the man who struck him, "had joined the Bethel Congregation because of his sympathy with the reforms which had been adopted...
...Nor was there any issue of reform pending before the congregation at the time...
...The young people jumped down from the choir gallery to protect me and had to fight their way through the surging crowd...
...He suffered no rival...
...it took place in the synagogue, on the bimah, in front of the ark, in the presence of the entire congregation...
...At the conclusion of the song 1 step before the ark in order to take out the scrolls of the Torah as usual and to offer prayer...
...He maintained that the fracas was precipitated by his early advocacy of reform ideas in opposition to the "orthodoxy" of the congregational officers...
...This was the terrible signal for an uproar the like of which 1 have never experienced...
...The controversy which directly preceded the outbreak was Wise's attempt to force a member of the synagogue board to close his store on the Sabbath or to resign his position...
...It was as though the synagogue had suddenly burst forth into a flaming conflagration...
...The choir sings Sulzer's great En Komokho...
...The forms of our synagogues and the roles of their actors — rabbi, chazan, lay person — were all in flux, and people invested great energies in seeking to impose their preferred shape on those forms and roles...
...In describing the situation in American synagogues, Wise had written sarcastically of the "Mighty Par-nass" who was "an autocrat in the congregation, president, shamash, chazan, rabbi...
...Compare that to the rabbi of whom Wise wrote: "there was no room in the synagogue for preachers and rabbis...
...He wrote the amulets with the names of all the angels and demons on them for women in confinement, read shiur for the departed sinners, and played cards or dominoes with the living...
...And why not...
...These were extremely modest...
...all were subject to him...
...Its editor is Leon Jick, Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University...
...The sheriff and his posse, who were summoned, were belabored and forced out until finally the whole assembly surged out of the house into Herkimer Street...
...This was an inheritance from olden times, brought to these shores from the small European congregations...
...However, the details of the account which he himself provides do not confirm this explanation...
...He was none other than Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations...
...He was teacher, butcher, circumciser, (shofar) blower, gravedigger, secretary...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
