HUC-JIR Memoir
Being a memoir, this is what I remember and how I remember it, so not an attempt at an historical paper. It is subjective. Anyone interested can check out the history. I’m sure there is a larger context to all of this.
I. PILGRIMAGE
My first visit to the HUC Cincinnati campus I was sixteen. I had grown up at Temple Judea in Skokie, Illinois, which was classic Reform with a rabbi who had been ordained in Germany. I was active in the Chicago region of the Reform youth movement (CFTY) and they sponsored what was called a pilgrimage to the Ohio campus. Even then I thought the term “pilgrimage” was a bit much, but that weekend inspired me to want to be a rabbi. We met with and heard from faculty members and students. Nerdy type that I was, I was very impressed.
The idea of becoming a rabbi stayed with me in college and my rabbi encouraged me. It was the sixties and I did feel something was missing from Judaism as I knew it. In my third and final year of college (what weas my hurry?) I decided that the rabbinate was too “establishment” and withdrew my HUC application.
Then I went to hear a lecture by a young Zalman Schachter (no Shalomi yet) and, as they say, that rocked my world. I corresponded with him and decided to accept his invitation to study with him in Winnipeg after graduation. That year my eyes were opened to much more of Jewish life and tradition than I had known. But Reb Zalman encouraged me to reapply to HUC-JIR but to the NY school and also JTS. He said I could jump through all their hoops and in the end, I would be a rabbi and could do it the way I wanted. Of course that did not prove to be true, but that’s another memoir.
I went to NYC and was interviewed both at HUC-JIR and JTS. At JTS the interview committee was chaired by A. J. Heschel which was a wonderful experience, if I bit daunting. My interview at HUC-JIR included Drs. Orlinsky, Borowitz, and Cohen. I was a bearded, bushy-headed, rebel but did my best. When I said my aim was a campus career, Dr. Cohen said, “WE train pulpit rabbis here.” Nonetheless I soon received a letter of acceptance. That was followed not long after with a letter telling me my acceptance had been rescinded. The reason I learned from Zalman from Borowitz, was the committee had accepted twenty-one students, but Dr. Glueck had ordained that only twenty were allowed and I was regarded least qualified among the twenty-one.
II. JIR
That ended my idea of becoming a rabbi and I got a job as a group social worker at a JCC. I went and took a series of tests usually taken by high school seniors to determine good vocations to choose. After a day and a half of tests, a counsellor told me I should be a rabbi. It seemed I had to try again. I considered my options in 1968. There was the Academy of Jewish Religion which was then regarded as kind of flakey. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College was first opening. Arthur Green invited me to study with him at was to be a Renewal (I’m not sure the term existed yet) rabbinic school called Havurat Shalom. I decided to try JIR first.
After a memorable interview, mo0st of which was taken up with an argument between Drs. Borowitz and Orlinsky, I was again accepted.
That summer I attended Towanda, a six-week program in Cincinnati where we took basic courses in Hebrew, Bible and other subjects. Being 1968, we were a lively and rebelio0us bunch, but I enjoyed the experience and made lifelong friends. At the end, we were assigned to read a very basic book on Jewish holidays and we were offended by that. All of us were college graduates who had good academic records and we saw this book as beneath us.
I got married just before Phyllis and I moved to NYC. The first day at the one-building campus on 68th Street that Stephen Wise had created, the 19 of us were seated in a classroom and each handed a bluebook and a sheet of quiz questions from that book. Together we went through those very simply questions making sure everyone knew the answers and, when Paul Steinberg returned to the room we handed him one blue book with our answers. With two exceptions (I was one) every member of that class had at least one degree from one of the Ivies.
We knew that Nelson Glueck wanted to shut down the NY campus, which was a betrayal of the promise he had made to Stephen Wise who had sought to preserve his remarkable school by putting under the umbrella of a more established institution. Locating HUC in Cincinnati was an historical accident because its founder lived there and had his pulpit there. I chose NY because it made no sense to this Chicagoan to go to rabbinic school in what was (and is?) essentially a southern city.
One of the ways HUC-JIR made study in NY difficult was their student aid program (I have forgotten what it was called). Basically, it gave to a student an amount based on a student’s income under a standard set according to the cost of living in Cincinnati. Obviously, the cost of living in NYC was and is much higher and so are the salaries for the jobs we got as students. In other words, we were eligible for far less financial support than students in Cincinnati. That forced many of us to lie about our incomes which we resented.
Another issue was Towanda, which we regarded as a pointless program. We proposed a year in Israel for the first year as HUC-JIR students. There was a meeting in April 1969 attended by NY and Cincinnati students (I do not remember if anyone from LA was there). We made a formal proposal based, I believe, on what some on the faculty or in the rabbinate had already proposed. We knew that Dr. Glueck opposed this because he saw the Jerusalem school as strictly about archeology. Of course, that year in Israel came to be. In various places I have seen Nelson Glueck credited with creating the program. I do not know what is true on this.;
III. DO WE NEED A RABBINIC SCHOOL IN CINCINNATI
I have felt for a long time that that Cincinnati campus with the Klau Library and the Archives should have been made an academic institution for higher Jewish studies with rabbinic training in major Jewish communities. If one is needed in the Midwest, that should be in my hometown of Chicago. I have heard that the U. of Chicago once offered a campus to HUC there. This is a matter of rabbinic students living in a major Jewish center with plenty of jobs for them. The bi-weeklies are not sufficient reason for a campus anywhere else in the region.
I think attachment to an alma mater is not about geography. I graduated from a college I feel very attached to but it had moved three times since 1966 when I graduated. I loved our 68th Street campus but felt equally at home when I attended classes and programs at 4th Street as I did while living on Long Island. Cincinnati, I feel, played an important role in our movement and in the history of American Judaism, but its time has passed as shown by the decline in enrollment. HUC-JIR is not going anywhere. It is just moving with the times. Instead of mourning the end of the first campus, I hope we can celebrate its historic contributions.
In Memory of Rabbi Karl Weiner
So far as I know, I am the only rabbi Temple Judea ever produced. My rabbi there was Karl Weiner and I believe he had a great influence on me. He was an advisor to me in many ways. He inspired me to carry on his devotion to interfaith work. In this essay I want to talk about both these things. He deserves to be remembered as the exemplary synagogue and community leader he was.
Of course, a part of that was my experience at OSRUI, back then known simply by its location, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. I am sure others will tell about his visionary role in establishing this camp. It has a key role in my life as a person as well as as a Jew and a rabbi.
Before Jews began migrating from Chicago to Skokie in the early 1950s, that village was largely inhabited by ethnic Germans. Anti-Semitism was very much a part of life there. I experienced it in the schoolyard and even in the classroom. Karl (I hope no one will object if I refer to him by his first name) grew up in Germany and had been ordained at the famous Geiger Yeshivah in Breslau in 1938. He had known life in the Third Reich first hand. What was his response to what was going on in this new Jewish community?
He told me he believed that part of what went wrong in Germany was that the Jewish community there did not engage in outreach to the Christian communities. He made it a priority to pursue such relationships in Skokie and established the first interfaith clergy council there. In religious school we learned Comparative Religion, which basically meant we studied Christianity. We had programs with church schools from religious school and youth group.
This met a strong challenge in December 1961 (if I remember the date correctly). The Village of Skokie, at the request of the interfaith council had decided not to erect the usual creche on the Village Hall lawn that year. Unfortunately, someone on their staff had not gotten the message or, perhaps, disregarded it. The creche was set up, but, at orders from the local government was taken down. This resulted in an ugly, explicitly anti-Semitic protest one evening. Karl told me that he felt he was back in the Germany of his youth. But he persisted. That year, by the way, Skokie was up for the All-American City award, then sponsored by Look Magazine. Because of this incident, that award was given to another city.
Karl met an even bigger challenge in the summer of 1977 when a group of Chicago neo-Nazis applied for a permit to hold a march and rally in Skokie. This was probably one of the most effective publicity stunts ever devised. It got the covers of both Time and Newsweek. As it happened, I was in Chicago that summer and it was the universal subject of conversation, and not just among Jews. National Jewish organizations sent in teams of professionals. Karl complained to me that these organizations had run roughshod over his interfaith work, ignoring the local organized community. He was very unhappy about that. One of those professionals I talked with years later actually apologized for the way he had behaved there that summer. There was a film made telling the story rather badly. For one thing, all the synagogue scenes were filmed in Temple Judea, but the rabbi depicted was a young American who was basically clueless about Nazis. So far as I know there was no such rabbi in Skokie and the actual rabbi at the synagogue was a survivor. To indicate how truly tangled this was, the Nazi group was led by one Frankl Collin, nee Francis Cohen, who had been born in a DP camp in post WWII Europe.
Maybe all of this is too negative for some, but this writer thinks Karl should be remembered for the challenges he faced in his career.
When I was sixteen, I went on what was called a pilgrimage to the campus of Hebrew Union College with CFTY. Then and there I decided I would become a rabbi. That decision came and went over the following years, but that year I met with Karl to talk about that. He was very encouraging. I remember asking him about whether I should go for an undergraduate Jewish studies degree and he told me liberal arts would be a better choice. Congregants, he said, expect their rabbi to be well educated and able to preach about all kinds of subjects. I followed that advice and know he was right.
In my last year of college, I again met with him to discuss becoming a rabbi. This time his advice was different. I should pursue ordination only if I were prepared for the downside of being on the pulpit. He warned me about the lack of privacy for myself and my family. He told me about people criticizing me and my family on issues large and petty. There was more about what I should expect that would be difficult to deal with. Over the course of my career, I have come to know that all pulpit clergy must deal with such things. It is a stressful occupation.
I remember asking his advice on a few practical matters years later when I had my student pulpit. I remember telling him I was having trouble getting my board to accept new ideas I had for programs. His advice was something I followed until retirement. He said not to go to the Board and present my idea alone. Find a board member who likes the idea and have her present it as a good idea from the rabbi or even hers alone. That also applies to much else in working with leaders and members.
I am very happy to have the opportunity to memorialize a rabbi who had a profound influence on me as a rabbi, a Jew, and a person. He left this world far too early and we should make sure such a man is not forgotten nor his example lost. Y’hi Zikhrono Tzadik Livrakhah.
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