![]() Recollections and Dreams of the First Woman President of Oak Park Temple In 2009 Miriam Gevinson, as part of an intergenerational recording project of Oak Park Temple Religious School interviewed Ilene Bass, my wife. Ilene had been the first woman president of Oak Park Temple from 1989-1991. In this interview Ilene shared contributions she had seen in the congregation moving toward greater Hebrew skills and Jewish learning. It is amazing to hear Ilene speak so fluidly, as the interview occurred four years after Ilene had been diagnosed and treated for a brain tumor located near her verbal center. Her insights in this interview were prescient and wise during her presidency, when she gave the interview in 2009, and even today she offers ideas about being proactive and respectful to congregants and to Oak Park Temple’s building as a holy space. Ilene died this August and her voice will be missed. Sincerely, Michael Bass
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Jonathan:
It was a fine, June, Friday afternoon in 1996. I was living with my sister and her family in Elmhurst after having returned from living in Israel for a full year. I had been doing a lot of shul hopping and found myself in Berwyn that day, visiting a friend. I decided to call a synagogue I did not know a whole lot about: Oak Park Temple. The person who answered told me they were having a family service. I said that would be fine. I arrived and sat by myself in a middle row near the back. In the row in front of me and off to the left was a woman with two small girls. She seemed kind and I liked how she interacted with her children. I also noticed that she did not have a partner with her. At one point, the younger child, who looked about 2 years old, walked over and stood on the seat right in front of me. She had curly hair and dimples, and resembled Shirley Temple. She looked at me and smiled. That little girl turned out to be Abby. Liz: Family services can be long when you are a single parent with energetic 2 and 4-year old girls. This one wasn’t. Behind me was a man with a beautiful voice who sang with a gentle spirit. He knew the prayers and chanted them with a quiet ease. That meant a lot to me, a fairly recent convert to Judaism who had been learning and practicing the same prayers with more determination than ease. I wondered who the man was, but promised myself not to look around. After all, there were no single men in this congregation. And who met eligible, handsome men in shul anyway? But going into the Oneg, Rabbi Gerson had a mischievous smile on his face. Very mischievous. He noticed when this man approached me after the service... ...and asked me for my phone number. Jonathan: It's a good thing that I am a runner. Because if a man finds a woman he likes and knows he needs to make the first move, he better be ready for a good chase! I finally managed to get together with this lady, and I began to get to know her and her children. If chasing her was hard work, it was another thing to keep up with two very energetic little girls. Was I prepared for this?One day I was visiting Liz and, as I stood in the living room, Margo (the older of the two) began dancing around the living room saying: "You know you love her. Why don't you just marry her!" Liz: We were married on August 3rdTemple. We celebrated afterward in the community hall. The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band provided the music. At one point, it seemed as if every soul was up and dancing in a long line all around the room. It was a truly joyous simcha! Jonathan: I still do a lot of running. Keeping up with this family has always had its challenges. With the passage of time and many life transitions, Margo is now 24, a college grad, and is looking into graduate school in the physical sciences. Abby is 22 and working in a college-readiness program mentoring first-generation, college-bound high school students. And there is yet a third girl: Rebecca! As a baby, temple members got to know her quickly from her red hair, and also because she was frequently passed around the congregation during services. She is now 16 and a sophomore at OPRF. All our girls are very smart. As I am used to telling others, they are all much smarter than me; they just have no common sense! Liz: OPT remains our community. We enjoy and honor the continuity around us. It does not seem so long ago that we were new members; now we are elders. The OPT community has been integral to our lives: Welcoming young couples with young children, celebrating Shabbat and b'nai-mitzvot, attending Torah Study, meditation, or Aaron's niggun class, having bagels on Sunday mornings, helping out where we can on committees or with Project Sandwich. Our three girls have also been active participants--as TAs on Sundays, working at Camp Shalom over the summer, engaged in the Youth Group, etc. Now that it is Rebecca's turn, I always smile when I hear her remark, as a kid runs past her after religious school: "He used to be in my gan class!" Jonathan: Suffice it to say that I truly feel blessed. My family has been my greatest teachers and I cherish each one. I am eternally grateful to Liz—she is such a special lady and to the gift each girl has been to my life. I want to start sometime in the mid-1930’s, at a shul in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. A young Mary Tobe, sitting in the balcony where all the women and children had to sit, was looking down to the first floor, where only the men sat, and Mary made eye-contact with a young Benjamin Blesofsky. And the story goes, as I heard it from my mother, that she knew then and there she and Ben would marry and raise a family. And they did. And here I am. Carrying on the thread of Judaism from that first eye-contact in the shul between Ben and Mary. And tonight is Mary Tobe Blesoff’s yahrzeit.
I was born in Somerville, Massachusetts. My family was active in the Somerville temple. When I was about 5 years old we moved to Medford, the next town over. We became members of Temple Shalom, a conservative congregation. I went to Hebrew School every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for two hours. I went to Sunday School every week. I went to Saturday morning youth services every week, and became leader of those services around the age of 11. Here at OPT, every time I sing “v’Ne’e mar…v’Haya Adonai…L’melech al kol h’a aretz....” I am instantly transported back to the bima at Temple Shalom, an 11 year old kid and my stomach growls and gurgles and I get hungry and tired and anticipate the oneg on a Saturday morning so many years ago! A Pavlovian thread of my Judaism. Temple Shalom was built next to Victory Park, a big, beautiful park with soccer field and baseball field and tennis courts and swings, right on the edge of the MDC forests. And for more hours than I care to remember, I looked out the windows of my Hebrew School classrooms oh so longingly at Victory Park. Sometimes seeing my friends at play. My main teachers were Cantor Lew and Mrs. Lew. And I remember our talks about yahweh, and learning that God is everywhere and everything – in the grass, in the trees, in the clouds. And as I looked out at the grass and trees and clouds at Victory Park this all made sense to me. What has never made sense to me is the anthropomorphization of yahweh, of the un-knowable, of the un-namable. God is not the old white guy with a flowing white beard sitting on a throne up in the sky. I don’t even think God can be referred to as the One. To me, God just is. This is another thread of my Judaism. One of the first sermons I heard Rabbi Weiss give here at OPT, he made some reference to Quantum Physics, and it really caught my attention. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the Rabbi explored some of the same concepts and ideas as I did because of the strong thread of always questioning and always exploring and always examining that is a foundation of Judaism. As I grew up Jewish in the suburbs of Boston, I learned about the Holocaust and about anti-Semitism. I learned about the singling out of a minority group for extermination, or for just plain unfair treatment. I quickly learned that I was “different”. Whether being uncomfortable buying “different” Jewish foods at the supermarket, or fielding anti-semitic epithets, or having anti-semitic confrontations. It didn’t matter so much to win a fight every time, but it did matter that I fought. My Judaism taught me that sticking up for the marginalized was actually sticking up for myself. Which was a direct thread to my being an Assistant Public Defender here in Cook County. Sitting right next to my client, who everybody else in the courtroom didn’t want to be anywhere close to – not the judge, prosecutor, clerk, sheriffs and certainly not the jurors - because of what he was accused of having done, sitting there close to him and putting my arm around his shoulder, and being that one person in the whole world showing him the basic human respect to which we are all entitled. My Judaism helped me do that for 30 years. The importance of living out and passing on the values. The importance of not breaking the thread that stretches back 6000 years. 6000 years – longer than just about anybody else! So, a part of that being different is about being special. Having children concretized the importance of not breaking that thread. I fell in love with and married Dorie – a “mixed” marriage. In fact, Dorie’s father, the Rev. Dr. Charles Ellzey, was a Methodist minister. Dorie always got the essence of Judaism, and she helped me keep the thread of my Judaism even when I stretched it pretty thin. And I thank you for that. (Dorie) We tried to expose our kids to both Judaism and Christianity. Our idea was to prepare them for when they could make their own decisions about what to believe and who to be. That made sense on paper…….. Until the day our oldest, our daughter Jamine at around the age of 8, told us: “When I go to church with Mom I’m supposed to believe in Jesus. When I go to Temple with Dad I’m not supposed to believe in Jesus. This does not feel right”. And shortly thereafter, our son Evan, at around age 4 or 5, thumped his fist on the table and said: “Just tell me what I am!” CLEARLY WE WERE JUST A BIT BEHIND THE CURVE ON THAT ONE!!! This was all at the time of our 10 year wedding anniversary, and it kind of galvanized a lot of issues for us that had been “percolating”. We started joint counseling with Rabbi Gerson from OPT and Rev Greg Dell from Euclid UMC, where Dorie attends. They both helped us see that our crisis was less about religion and actually about bringing our full selves, with ALL our differences, to the marriage, and viewing differences as a strength. And also that in a mainly Christian culture it was important to actually emphasize the ‘minority’ Jewishness. This process led to our renewal of vows ceremony and to our raising our 3 kids Jewish. Jamine, Evan and Mara, all bat/bar mitzvah here at OPT. A few years later, Charity Cooper, one of the other moms in our Havurah, doing car-pool for Hebrew school, reported overhearing Evan in the back seat say, “My mom is Christian but I came out Jewish”. About 24 years ago we joined with 6 other OPT families, and now 7 other OPT families, to form a Havurah – a community of caring and support. Another thread and connection here at OPT. The Allens, Ansell-Grablers, Blaines, Coopers, Karrows, Sterns and Woods. We break the fast at Coopers, we went camping with Karrows, we do 2nd night Pesach at Blaines, we’ve done bat/bar mitzvahs, graduations, weddings, and now we do grandchildren with our extended Jewish families. And today, the thread of my Judaism continues here at OPT as our oldest daughter Jamine and our son-in-law Tino and our granddaughter Athina have recently moved to Oak Park from Seattle. I watch Jamine with her own child and see how she just loves being a mother. And how naturally she has reached out to OPT as part of her mothering. Jamine and Tino have met with Rabbi Weiss. Jamine takes Athina to tot Shabbat and they attended family services at High Holy Days. Tonight, as I say yahrzeit for my mother, my daughter and her family are connecting with OPT. And one last thing. The Bagel Boys. I am one of the original bagel boys. One reason we started Bagel Boys was because we wanted something to do as we hung around waiting for our kids on Sunday mornings, and we all loved food! And this year at Yom Kippur services, I heard OPT member Jen George speaking about her first time visiting OPT, and the energy in the rotunda, and how this must be a special event, and about eating a bagel with a schmeer……. a bagel with a schmeer! The original Bagel Boys had no clue we were starting another thread! So I want to thank Rabbi Weiss and Rabbi Gerson, and Cantor Yugend-Green and Cantor Katzew, and all the educators and staff. This reflection on my Judaism is important to me. It comes at a time in my life of many endings and many beginnings. And through it all I see the threads of my Judaism, the threads of my family’s Judaism, the threads of my community’s Judaism, revolving around OPT. And I can glimpse how these threads wind together and sometimes form a string, and sometimes even form a rope, but always form the fabric of my Jewish life. Marc Blesoff Tradition is the life blood of Jewish families, and it is what binds us together from generation to generation. In my family, Washington Boulevard Temple or Oak Park Temple as it is now called, became a family tradition. I am the granddaughter of Charles and Wilhelmina (Minnie) Benesch, and my grandfather was on of the founders of the Washington Boulevard Temple. My brother, Lawrence Gilford, my sister, Suzanne Samuels, my cousins (Sam and Bob Alexander and Bernie and Betty Benesch) and I used to call it “Grandpa’s Temple.”
As I matured “Grandpa’s Temple” was still a large part of my life. When I was a little girl, my mother put my brother and me on a bus to go to Sunday School each week, and she told the bus driver to let us off on Diversey. Either my Grandpa Benesch or my Uncle Elmer Benesch would meet the bus and take us to Temple. If we were quiet during services, my brother and I would have the honor of collecting the prayer books used at the service. We always sat in row F and at the High Holidays, my Father, Fred Gilford, would have the honor of closing the doors. I was confirmed at Washington Boulevard Temple. On July 29, 1942, with only three days notice that my fiancé was to be “shipped off to war”, Rabbi Schwartz, the Rabbi at “Grandpa’s Temple” married me to David Hessell, my beloved husband of 64 years. The temple was truly a family affair since my aunt, Be a Benesch was president of the Sisterhod, and my uncle, Elmer was President of the Temple. Although I am 91 yard old, I still remember with great fondness the pride I had that I was a part of my “Grandpa’s Temple.” And so when my granddaughter Jill told me that she and her husband, Daniel Denneqitz, had joined Oak Park Temple, I could not believe it She had no idea that she was joining a Temple which her Great, Great Grandfather had founded. My Great Grandchildren Isabel, Joshua, and Benjamin Dennewitz have become part of our family’s tradition. Oak Park Temple has become an important part of their lives; they lover their new friends and really love the services. How proud my Grandpa Benesch would be to know that the Temple he helped to establish had enriched the lives of five generations, and how proud I am to have been part of it also Washington Boulevard Temple/Ook Park Temple has been a sacred tradition in my family. Elaine Gilford Hessell Le Worth, FL 33467 by Charlotte &. Harold Stein ![]() by Mel Loeb About eight years ago, just before the High Holidays, I received a call from a gentile friend of mine asking me if I would like to accompany his wife, who is Jewish, to Rosh Hashana services. Fully expecting me to say NO, he was surprised to hear me answer YES. I hadn't been to High Holiday services for many years, so I thought I would give it a try. I found the service to be interesting and invigorating and Rabbi Gerson's sermon made perfect sense to me. I asked if she had an extra ticket for Rosh Hashana morning and so I went to that service also. Same result!! Rabbi Gerson hit another home run and I had another positive experience. I went to Yom Kippur services, talked with someone on the membership committee, and had my questions answered. I started going to Torah study on Sunday mornings, started a few months later attending the Sunday morning minyan. I joined the Temple about six months later. I now attend every Saturday Shabbat service that I can, attend Rabbi Weiss's Saturday classes, and some Friday night services also. As the years have gone on, I have served on the Temple Board of Directors, served as chair of the Adult Education committee, serve on the finance committee, worship committee, and the nominating committee. I feel that I have grown spiritually far beyond my greatest expectations, am still learning Torah, and by-and- large have become a more complete person. Along with my official responsibilities, I also have some unofficial offices that I have undertaken during my years at the Temple. I am the unofficial punster of the Temple, usually coming up with appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) puns during teaching sessions by the clergy. I am also the resident heckler of our leaders during services or any other inappropriate time. I feel that his keeps them on their toes and keeps the audience awake during sermons that may need some editing. More seriously, I go to services frequently because among all the other benefits, I enjoy watching our Temple youth as they become Bar and Bat Mitzvah because this is the future of our people. We have a 3000 year old tradition that I really want to continue to future generations. I have made many new friends over the last eight years and I feel that the Oak Park temple members are my family. ![]() by Patricia McMillen It was a dark and stormy night. My leaky boat (actually, canoe) washed up on the nonexistent shores of Oak Park, Illinois. Parched, exhausted, I staggered to the shore, into the waiting arms of my then-boyfriend, Sam, a member of the Temple since the early eighties. My divorce wasn’t yet final, so we merely shook hands and agreed to meet again once I was free (and his kids were over 21). In the meantime, I joined the Religious Society of Friends, who were nice, but didn’t seem to enjoy drinking or singing old folk songs—other than “Magic Penny,” which gets a bit old—as much as the Oak Park Temple Reform Jews did. (Even so, I stuck with the Friends for several years, especially finding the Be-Your-Own-Preacher feature of Quakerism to be a real relief after years of scratching my head over Congregational, Methodist and Episcopalian ministers’ sermons.) Fast-forward a couple of years. Sam and I stood under the chuppah, Oak Park Temple’s then-Rabbi Gary Gerson said something in Hebrew that I repeated with only a dim idea of what it meant (apparently I promised never again to cook bacon at home, though it was still cool to order it in restaurants), and bingo bango I was re-hitched. We had a square dance wedding, something I thought only squares did, but everyone seemed to have a good time. Best of all, I got to keep the groom. Apparently I was also suddenly a member of the Temple, which is way friendly to non-Jewish spouses; however I wasn’t automatically a Member of the Tribe. No big deal, I thought; I still got to light candles with Sam, at home; got to go to High Holidays and beat my breast during the alphabetical confession; even started to feel closer to my younger sister, who had become Jewish twenty or so years earlier before marrying her husband, and who’d raised her three kids Jewish with excellent results. Even when Gary retired a few years later, and the new guy Max started presiding at Shabbats and what-alls, I was good with OPT, and it seemed good with me. I quit the Friends, freeing up my Sunday mornings to learn a little Hebrew. That was slow going, but felt ridiculously good, especially when the class would read a couple words of the Psalms, those poems my Grandmother McMillen used to give me a silver dollar for memorizing in English. Reading them in Hebrew was like, whoa. You could almost feel King David in the room trying to choose exactly the right word he wanted someone to read three thousand years later. Killer. Anyway. By now you’ve already guessed what happens next, and you’re right: I started thinking seriously about actually becoming Jewish. Met with Max a dozen or so times, read some books, went through a class with a bunch of other people thinking about becoming Jewish, talked a lot with Sam and a little bit with my sister. I thought I was ready a few times, but after going to Israel with a Temple group and still wanting to be Jewish, Max said I was finally ready. He pulled together my bet din—the rabbinic court who would ask me questions and finally certify me as a Jew—and scheduled my visit to the community mikvah. All that remained was to choose my new name—the Hebrew name by which I am now (theoretically) known by the people of Israel. I wanted something simple and not terribly historic, given that history is so often written by the victors and they are so usually not women; thus, when I heard the stewardess on my El Al flight from Eilat to Tel Aviv introduce herself as “Tova,” I knew I had what I needed. Even my Mom knew right away that it meant something good – and not until later did I learn the gloss was something OLD [as in ripe] and good. But I’ll own that gloss, too. After all, it takes some of us awhile to recognize ourselves as the Jews we have been all our lives. by Chuck and Tricia Brauner ![]() I grew up in a secular Jewish household. We never belonged to a congregation. We never went to synagogue. I never attended High Holy Days services. I think the first time I was ever in a synagogue was for a friend’s bar mitzvah. Our observance of Jewish rituals was confined to the following:
Nevertheless, we were intensely Jewish. My parents spoke Yiddish and sent me to Yiddish classes for a few years (unfortunately, they didn’t succeed in teaching me the language). I attended a Sholem Aleichem Folk Shul, a secular substitute for religious school, where I learned about Judaism and Jewish history and where we discussed such questions as how we could call ourselves Jews if we didn’t practice the religion. In lieu of a bar mitzvah, my class put on a play about Jews in America. Just about all my friends were Jewish, of the same sort as myself. Even my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, was about 90% Jewish at the time. Although we did not keep kosher, my home was also Jewish in the culinary sense. My grandmother, who lived with us, baked challah every Friday. My diet included plentiful quantities of chopped liver, noodle kugel, potato kugel, chicken soup, ruglach, gefilte fish, etc., etc. Soul food for Ashkenazim, in other words. This description of a secular Jew—unaffiliated, nonpracticing—still describes my brother. The difference between us, I am sure, stems from whom we married. He married a woman who was born Jewish. I married Tricia. ![]() I grew up in a Protestant household with a strong Puritan background. On my mother’s side were both Pilgrims and circuit-riding Methodist preachers, on my father’s side, Episcopalians; my parents joined a Congregational church after they married. We were Sabbath observant: on Sundays we did not play cards or go to the movies. We had a special midday meal after attending church services. My parents sang in the church choir, and I joined them when I was in high school. In college I began to attend an Episcopal church, and I declared my major to be religious studies, which morphed into music history my senior year. ![]() Tricia and I met in graduate school. We were married in 1969 in the Episcopal chapel at Yale, the marriage officiated by the Episcopal chaplain. We wrote our own service, basing it on the Episcopalian wedding service but expunging any reference to Christian doctrine or to Jesus. We improvised something of a chuppah and got them to cover the cross (we couldn’t do anything about the stained glass windows, however). All this at least in part to make my relatives as comfortable as possible although it was also to make me as comfortable as possible. I had scoffed when one of our friends, also a secular Jew, insisted that his fiancee convert before he would marry her, so I couldn’t very well insist on such a thing when my turn came. ![]() In graduate school I continued to attend an Episcopal church whose ritual was “high” (bells and incense) and traditional. Then Chuck and I began dating, and in our last year of grad school we married. Since our field was music history, the music for the ceremony was of primary importance for us, and we avoided the standards in favor of opera: “No stars again shall hurt you” from Purcell’s “The Tempest,” love duets from Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea,” the prayer to Isis and Osiris to protect the new couple in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the march from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”—nothing religious. And for a reading, W. B. Yeats’s “A Faery Song,” a benediction over a bridal couple. The chaplain said he could always find an historical precedent for modifying the service, so we avoided all specifically Christian references. ![]() After our marriage, Tricia continued to attend church regularly. We had two children, David in 1971 and Sarah in 1976, and after we moved to Oak Park in 1975, the children attended religious school at Grace Episcopal Church (which is beautiful inside). David sang in the choir and Sarah was Mary in a Christmas pageant. We celebrated Christmas, had a Christmas tree, and exchanged presents. We also celebrated Chanukah and took to lighting candles on Shabbat to keep alive in our children and ourselves that our household was half Jewish. The children were never baptized. But it is hard to counter belief and regular practice with unbelief and little practice so the orientation definitely leaned toward the Christian half. Then when David was about eleven, he said that he would like to take communion. ![]() I told David he would have to be baptized first and that this would cause his Brauner grandparents great grief, since even though they themselves were not religious, as Jews they had strong feelings against a religion that had persecuted Jews. We had a lengthy discussion about religion, which ended with David saying if religion made people so unhappy, he wanted nothing to do with any of it. I countered that before he gave up all religion, he needed to know more about the Judaism he would be rejecting. Friends in my church who were youth leaders recommended Oak Park Temple since they had had very good experiences with Rabbi Gerson and an interfaith youth program. I learned from the Rabbi that Jewish-Gentile couples were common at OPT and their children welcomed in religious school; we joined the Temple in time for David to start seventh grade Sunday school classes with Cantor Richard Cohn. At that time, b’nai mitzvah celebrations were optional at OPT, and David opted out. However, I was taking Hebrew classes, having been raised with a strong background in “Old Testament,” both at home and in college (where I had studied Greek, the language of the New Testament). Chuck and I were both attending Rabbi Gerson’s Torah study group, and we made a commitment to attend all family Shabbat services with our children. I found myself participating more in the life of the congregation and feeling more and more Jewish. One day while riding the el I became aware of this as a sort of assimilation, realizing that I was thinking “we Jews …”. It may have been around this time that Sarah said, “One person in our family isn’t Jewish; I think it’s Dad.” In the mid-1980s Cantor Cohn asked me to tutor the b’nai mitzvah students in the texts of their Torah and Haftarah portions, after which he would teach them the chant. This was something I very much wanted to do but I felt that if I were the parent of such students I would want them to be taught by a Jew. I began meeting privately with the Rabbi. One of the most meaningful things he said in those conversations was that all Jewish souls stood at Sinai, although not all of those souls were born into Jewish families. I struggled with the implications of this step: my mother was still living, and it would be difficult for her to accept my conversion, which I knew she would see as a rejection of salvation. Then Rabbi Gerson, in a sermon that was perhaps during the High Holy Days, seemed to challenge me directly to make a decision, and on July 6, 1986, I “entered into the covenant of Israel as a righteous proselyte,” in the presence of a Bet Din composed of Rabbi Gerson and Kitty and Dan Hall. My immersion was in Lac Labelle, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, when the Gersons, Halls, and we were picking up our daughters from OSRUI. I took as my Hebrew name Hannah Miriam for my grandmother Annie and my mother Miriam, to show that I was not giving up my past in my acceptance of Judaism. After the ceremony Rabbi Gerson asked the children if they had any questions, and Sarah, ten years old, asked, “Does this mean I am Jewish?” “Yes,” said the Rabbi. “You have two Jewish parents, so you are Jewish.” My mother, with the support of her pastor at Pilgrim Congregational Church, came to accept my conversion. I carry my tallit in a needlepoint case she made for it, and on holidays we use a challah cover she embroidered. ![]() As someone who tends to worry about negative consequences, I had mixed feelings about Tricia’s conversion. After all, the woman I loved and married was a Christian, and I didn’t want a different wife. Still, although I loved a Christian, I did not love Christianity, and I did like the idea that our family would be unified, our children would be Jewish, even though it meant I would become a member of a synagogue, something I could not have imagined previously. And in fact I am happy to have done so. I have learned a great deal more about Judaism than I had known before, much of it from Tricia, and our connection to the Temple and its community has considerably enriched my life. (Although, if truth be told, I do not much care for the Reform service and rarely attend.) ![]() Sarah did celebrate becoming bat mitzvah, both our children were “confirmed,” as the graduation from religious school was then called, and I was called to the Torah as a bat Torah, with all of my b’nai mitzvah students sharing an aliyah. It was then that I understood clearly that when one has finished chanting from the Torah that first time, there is a rush of feeling: “Now let’s party!” In 2009 Chuck and I were honored by the Temple as members for 25 years. And, though we are not as active as we were, we’re still here, with our grandson Jacob now in religious school—a third-generation member of Oak Park Temple. ![]() Tamara Jaffe-Notier, May 2014 “...all I know is that we've been fighting for marriage equality for years...we've come this close on more than one occasion..and then Tamara goes to Springfield, and, bam, we have marriage equality,” my friend David joked. It was fun to be part of the final push for marriage equality in Illinois. Oak Park Temple chartered a bus, and I was one of many aboard. Each person who marched, in the rain, on October 22, 2013, felt a little bit of the magic of the day. Many of us weren't convinced that Senate Bill 10, the “Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act,” would be called for a vote any time soon—it had already been postponed once—but we still chanted with conviction, “gay, straight, black, white, marriage is a civil right.” Or something like that. We'd made our phone calls, and now we marched. The wind blew, and the rain came down. Some of us were “bearing the burden of the other,” and some of us were bearing our own burden. How did I, a gentile by birth and a Christian by culture, come to march with Oak Park Temple? Struggling to write this piece, I was accompanied by a memory of myself at 18, ironing shirts in the kibbutz laundry. The dry heat of the iron across the shirts smells good. In the distance I hear the goat-bells of the flocks tended by the Arab shepherds. My hands are wrapped in gauze bandages, recovering from lye burns and blisters from a reaction to the soap we used to scrub the kitchen floor, and a kibbutznik with a dark blue number tattooed on the inside of her wrist is yelling at me in Russian or Yiddish. She wears a small red lapel pin of the profile of Lenin. I can't shake her impression that I understand Russian. While the holocaust survivor yells at me, I see through the unscreened, open window above the ironing board that my friend Yuval is standing outside. He brings me an orange. I indicate the bandages on my hands, and he peels the orange for me, showing off, spiraling the peel into one long piece. Yuval tells me it’s a Jaffa orange, and smiles at his own joke. Yuval is wearing his Air Force uniform, and when the lady sees him she stops yelling. He's a pilot. He was born on this kibbutz, and she's known him his whole life. When she talks to Yuval in Hebrew I understand that she wants me to turn off the radio. I do. She smiles at us and walks away. She likes me because I enjoy working, maybe too much. Sometimes she tells me to slow down. Yuval explains that she doesn't like the Arabic music I was listening to on the local Nazareth station. He reminds me that I don't know what life was like here in the Galil when she escaped to Israel. To me, the Arabic music sounds like the music the Yemeni Jews played for entertainment at our ulpanim rendezvous campout.
Giving in to this memory brings up an earlier memory of sexy Shulamit Natan singing “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.” When I was 8 years old I fell a little bit in love with Shulamit's beautiful face and her nervous, haunting voice, and I wanted to go to Jerusalem. I didn't know that this song was somewhat of an international hit, as a war ballad. I did not equate loving Jerusalem with patriotism. I memorized “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” without understanding it. My parents bought that LP in Israel in 1970 at the “Conference on Biblical Prophecy.” Living on the kibbutz in 1980, I imagined that if I were a Jew I would stay in Israel. That would be where I belonged. But what do I know? We exist, in all of our tumultuous divisions. I choose Jews, Judaism, and Oak Park Temple because this community embodies who I am and who I wish to become. An important, but not well known, actor from Mound City, Illinois described this impulse that directs my conscious life: “You throw an anchor into the future you want to build, and you pull yourself along by the chain.” (John O'Neal) Rachel Milstein, May 2014
While my grandparents joined the Temple in 1953, I, like my mother, grew up at Oak Park Temple. You could say that I have been involved since birth as I was given my Hebrew name in a Simchat Bat ceremony by Rabbi Gary Gerson and was a member of the Beatrice Glasser Nursery Schools’ second EVER class. In the mid 1990’s, my family was very close with Cantor Alane Katzew and her family. We went to museums, ball games, picnics/BBQs, birthday parties, Passover Seders, 4th of July fireworks and sleepovers as well as attended Shabbat services as an excuse to “hang out.” In a way, it gave me a sense of connection to the temple, since I knew the clergy on a personal level. At my bat mitzvah, in addition to the rabbi, the cantor gave me a blessing. She told my mother that in a way, it was preparation for her own daughter’s bat mitzvah, since she found herself emotionally moved at the time. When they moved away in 1997, it was a struggle to connect with the temple, as I had to get used to someone new. While I may not have stayed in touch with my preschool or religious school friends, as a camp counselor and teacher, I aimed to help the new generation of Temple youth keep in touch with each other. I wanted to make a difference. There was one Camp Shalom camper who had a special connection with me. When she was nearly 14, her mother told me that I was the sole reason her daughter identified with Judaism and Oak Park Temple. Even a simple hug or talk about her day had encouraged her daughter to connect with this Temple. As I embark on over 10 years of teaching Gan (kindergarten) in the religious school, I try to instill lasting friendships among my students, as I know that a connection with the Oak Park Temple community can influence them later in life. I sometimes feel isolated as a single woman among young families or long-standing members but I continue to be a part of Oak Park Temple to help others develop the connection that I once had as a child and hope to have in the future. |
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