My Old Shul: A Memoir

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Thursday, 30 June 2011 11:49

Aaronson was a friendly old man from our first encounter until the lastâ€”which took place fairly close to the end of his life. I never knew Aaronsonâ€™s first name and I still do not know it today. He was just Aaronson and thatâ€™s what people called him. When I would speak to himâ€”as a young man at the time perhaps as much as a half century his juniorâ€”I always referred to him as Mr. Aaronson.

Aaronson was the point man or, shall we say, the welcoming committee of the little shul at the corner of the street where I grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The shul is still there today on the corner of Montgomery Street and Kingston Avenue. The men who made the shul their second home are long gone. The memory of them, however, lingers and lives with an unusual freshness on my mind.

Anytime an adult who was not one of the usual parishioners would enter the shul, Aaronson would race to greet them at the door to hand them a prayer shawl and show them to a seat. And he always greeted them the same wayâ€”with a phrase that my younger brother and I still use today when we see each other sometimesâ€”â€œWelcome to our city.â€

Going to shul probably kept most of these men alive much longer than anyone thought they would live. They cared and took pride in the place; after all, it was their shul. I suppose that one of the lessons learned from this experience was how important shul is and how high of a priority it should be.

I barely knew these men, except for the very superficial impressions that I conjured up from my brief weekly opportunity to interface with them. As a child, I viewed these men as characters in some kind of staged drama and did not devote too much attentionâ€”or perhaps none at allâ€”to the humanity and personalities that existed in these menâ€™s lives beneath the surface.

Some others stood out, though upon reflection now I really didnâ€™t even know most of their names. One who stood out, however, and still stands out today, was Chazzan Appleman. I donâ€™t know where he was a cantor or whether he was a professional or not. All I knew from being there, watching and listening, was that he had a booming voice that could literally shake the windows in the rather small shul at the corner.

Appleman was a robust man with significant girth. He seemed to always be smiling and to enjoy the attention that came along with the opportunity to lead the services. His son, Martin, was my classmate and friend in yeshiva. After school was over, we went our various ways and I lost touch with Marty for years. The next time I saw him in the shul, he was dressed in a U.S. military uniform and serving as a chaplain in the Army. After that last time I saw him we really lost touch and I never saw him again. Like so many other families in Crown Heights, they eventually moved out of the neighborhood to who knows where and that was the end of that.

While Appleman had this impressive singing voice, he was not without competition for this type of attention in the shul. There was this older gentleman always present at the Shabbos morning services; his name was Levy. Levy also had a great voice, though not as powerful as Applemanâ€™s. Levyâ€™s thing was to try to harmonize with Appleman when the former led the services, even though this annoyed Appleman to no end. I always thought that he had the impression that Levy was trying to eclipse or outshine himâ€”not a wise thing to do to a chazzan.

Still, despite the few small things that set members minimally at odds with one another, it looked to my very young eyes and ears that things in the shul were, letâ€™s say, harmonious.

Dave also stands out in my memoryâ€”a quiet, mild mannered, smiling man whom I would estimate to have been in his early sixties. There was Jacob, the perennial president of the shul. Iâ€™m not sure whether he was always reelected as president or there was never an election and he was just in that position for life for obvious economic reasons.

And there was Murray, an occasional attendee to Shabbos services that a lot of the men fawned over when he was present and Iâ€™m not sure why. Then there was a man everyone referred to as Uncle Harry who resided in the same building as my grandparents directly across the street from the shul. Harry had a brother in the building by the name of Max. They were two very different personalities, one was cheerful and robust and the other quieter and more reserved.

The rabbi, Rav Mendel, was older and very friendly. Despite the passage of the years, I fail to understand how this rabbi was matched up with this congregation. He was a man with Chabad roots at a time when, while Chabad perhaps dominated the community population wise, there were still many other shuls of a variety of compositions and customs.

Rav Mendel had a unique and special relationship with my father and I came to understand that their connection was rooted back in the old countryâ€”in Poland, which was also sometimes Russia as it changed governmental and military hands around the time of the war years in the 1920s, â€™30s, and â€™40s.

Rav Mendel did not give me bar mitzvah instructions, as that was someone elseâ€™s job in the community. He did, however, for some reason, study my bar mitzvah haftarah with me until I knew it flawlessly. Why I had one teacher for the reading of my Torah portion and another for the haftarah is still beyond me. Maybe I was a tough case or maybe my dad just knew that Rav Mendel would do a great job delivering me through the melodious circuitry of the haftarah.

The two of us worked out of this special haftarah book with large letters even though I was still more than 30 years away from requiring reading glasses. Come to think of it, the large letters were for Rav Mendel more than for me. A few decades later, while visiting my mother in the neighborhood over Shabbos, I discovered the old volume in the shul. I opened it up to my haftarahâ€”Nachamu, Nachamu Amiâ€”and there were the pencil marks on the page underscoring the words and the nuances of the pauses that makes the haftarah presentation what it is to this very day.

Years later, I would meet Rav Mendel on on the streets of Crown Heights, and we always stopped to chat and catch up on how we were each doing. I understood that years later, after his wife passed away, he moved to a retirement home in Boro Park where he passed away at close to the age of 100 just a few years ago.

You may wonder why I, a kid of maybe 12-years-old at the time, would be going to shul on Shabbos with a motley crew of senior citizens instead of my friends. Well, thatâ€™s a good question that also has a plausible explanation. My Zayde prayed in that shul on most mornings and several times on Shabbos. Basically I was doing my mother a favor by accompanying my grandfather to shul. I sat with him, I davened, and apparently, I was also observing and absorbing whatever it was that was going on around me. My motherâ€™s parents lived across the street from this shul so it was convenient for them to pray there. I have to say that in all my years I never saw anyone who was so concerned and so responsive to her parentsâ€™ every need like my mother was to her parents. It was really something to learn an important lesson from.

My father rarely davened in this shul when I did with my Zaide. He attended there on occasion on a Friday night. When he was there, he drew a lot of attention with people gathering around him after davening to discuss this or that subject of the day.

One thing I can say most definitively is that I lived with the impression that those years were somehow frozen in time and would never cease to exist. I deluded myself fairly well because as you can see Iâ€™m still to an extent holding on to those precious years and important experiences.

This is the first of an extended series of articles on the shuls that I frequented while growing up. It was through this period, by the way, that on the one square block that we lived I could have attended any one of nine shuls without crossing a street. There were a lot of shuls scattered around the community, not counting the main shul at Lubavitch world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. I spent many a Shabbos there too, a subject that I hope to get to in the weeks ahead.

Comments for Larry Gordon are welcome at editor@5tjt.com.