This year, the Jewish High Holidays - Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—arrive later than usual, in October rather than September. Consequently, it will be the first time in a very long time that I have not celebrated them with family in East Hampton. I have already moved back to Palm Beach for the season, and I will celebrate them here with Patti and friends. Missing the High Holidays at home brings to mind the first time that I missed the High Holidays at the little neighborhood shul my family attended in Rochester, New York, in the 1950s. Formally named the Anshe Kipel Volin synagogue, it was familiarly known as the Kelly Street shul after the street on which it was built in 1906. Converted from a former boarding house by the founding shul members, the building still stands today, albeit down the road from Kelly Street on Joseph Avenue, where it had been moved in 1961 (my friend Arnie was living on Joseph Avenue at the time and watched it pass his house). All the early congregants were, like my father, immigrants from Kipel (also known as Kupel), a small shtetl in what is now western Ukraine, and all were part of the great immigration wave from eastern Europe in the early 1900s.
In 1958, I left for my freshman orientation at Rutgers before Rosh Hashana started in mid-September. It was the first year of my young life that I did not sit with my father close to the bimah-- the raised altar in the sanctuary--where the rented Rabbi, hired from a Yeshiva in New York City, conducted the service. The men would be seated on the first floor while the women went upstairs to the mezzanine, where they gossiped and reigned over their davening (praying) men. Every year of my childhood, ten days after Rosh Hashanah on Yom Kippur, we dutifully drove as a family — my father, mother, and myself — to the shul, parking close to the front door, where the car would remain overnight. We walked home after services in the late afternoon and retrieved the car after close of services the next day. There was no driving on Yom Kippur. By the time I earned my driver’s license, it was allowed that I could drive and pick up my parents because of their age.
I recall my last visit to the Kelly Street shul in August 1958, before I headed to my new college life in New Jersey. Since I would be missing the holidays, I decided to drive over one afternoon. The doors were always unlocked after morning prayers. The August sun shone through the large stained glass window facing east; the floor made a creaking sound as I walked down the aisle to the bimah and climbed the few steps up. This was where I read the Torah portion for my Bar Mitzvah. I recall standing there, trembling, beside my father as he read his portion. I also recall vividly the first time my father bought an Aliyah for me to read from the Torah at service. These days, an Aliyah is granted as an honor for donors, but back then, it was a straight transaction.
I passed my hand along the weathered, handcrafted pews and felt in my heart the years of occupants who rested in their ancient prayer shawls, weary from the garment factories and book binderies, from their work at Bauch and Lomb and Xerox and the many service jobs—deli workers, butchers, and fishmongers. The tired and hard-working immigrants and their American-born children would come to the Kelly Street shul to give thanks for their survival and good fortune to have escaped the horrors of the old world – the pogroms and the Holocaust. Everyone knew each other at the Kelly Street shul –there were scarcely more than 50 congregants. Like us, all had family ties to Kipel, and most had lost relatives in the Holocaust. It was as if we were all from one extended family back then, with the holidays providing the opportunity to gather together. Perhaps it was this wonderful closeness in our small Jewish community that formed in me the lifelong inclination to build and maintain my friendships, always creating that sense of close community.
On that hot August afternoon in 1958, I said goodbye to my shul, never to return. I remember it fondly, and whenever I visit Rochester, I drive by what remains: a Baptist church with the stained-glass window facing east.