The above articles do not necessarily represent the opinions of The Young Israel of Brookline.
Young Israel of Brookline 1996- 2003 All Rights Reserved
Why is it necessary for anyone, rabbi or otherwise to comment publicly upon the degree of religious observance of a fellow Jew? How about publishing a mitzvah scorecard, perhaps updated weekly, on our fellow congregants? Let's see -- uh-oh -- Mendel cheated again on his income tax, but that's nothing -- Yosef cheated on his wife! And let's not forget child molestation or vote rigging to benefit embezzlers. Until we all score a perfect 613, let's keep our criticism for ourselves, and lets speak only well of others.
I have observed some wonderful acts of kindness of members of the gay community. Jewish and otherwise, who indeed live and let live. So maybe their score is only 612. So what?
Reprinted from Jewish Advocate, Letter to the Editor, Mar. 10, 2001 © Copyright 2001 The Jewish Advocate
Murray Lynn was sent to Auschwitz with his family in 1944 when he was 13 years old. His three brothers and his parents were gassed in the Nazi concentration camp.
Murray survived and returned to Hungary on a freight train after being liberated in 1945. He spent almost a month in hospital, recovering from his time in the camp and moved to the Czech Republic shortly afterwards. From there he was evacuated to London and soon afterwards to Ireland.
There he met Alfred Kahan, who had fled from the Communist regime in Romania. The two boys formed a lifelong friendship, and this month they returned to Ireland more than 50 years later.
Murray and Alfred were evacuated by a Jewish organisation in the UK. "They wanted to take us to a neutral country that would be a springboard for us, for our dreams and aspirations wherever we wanted to go from there," Murray said in his hotel room in Dublin yesterday. "We came first to London but England could not absorb us. The Irish Government was good enough to give us temporary status as refugees."
Murray Lynn - then Alfred Murray Leicht - knew nothing at the time of the reluctance of the Government to let him into the State. A representative of the Jewish organisation, Religious Emergency Council, had contacted the Department of Justice in 1946, two years before the children arrived, asking the Department of Justice to admit 100 orphans who survived the concentration camps.
With the help of money from the UK, a Jewish organising group here had bought Clonyn Castle and 100 acres of land in Delvin, Co Westmeath. They promised the Government that if it wished, they would "undertake to make arrangements for [the children's] emigration after a specified period".
Nevertheless, the Department of Justice refused to let the holocaust survivors into the State in August 1946 on the instruction of the Minister at the time, Mr Gerald Boland. A Department of Justice memorandum noted that the Minister feared "any substantial increase in our Jewish population might give rise to an anti-Semitic problem".
Two months later, the then Taoiseach, 'amon de Valera, ordered that the children be let in on condition that there was a guarantee from a responsible organisation that their stay would be for a short period only. Then - a month before the children came to Ireland in May 1948 - a local person attempted to set fire to Clonyn Castle.
The Department of Justice noted that while "numbers of the local people do not like the proposal to house Jewish children in the castle", as far as the Garda was aware there was not "any local organised agitation against the admission of the children". The organising secretary of the project concluded it must be "the work of some silly ass in the village".
Alfred Kahan learned of the Irish resistance to his arrival only earlier this year, when he read Dermot Keogh's Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland. He said the book was "an eye-opener" for him, but he doesn't feel any less grateful to the Irish.
"We have very happy memories of Ireland. It was different from the turmoil of Eastern Europe. It was a very beautiful country that was in peace. We were able to relax without fear of either Nazism or Communism. It was a turning point in our lives."
Alfred stayed in Ireland for 15 months, first living in Clonyn Castle with 100 other children from Eastern Europe, then moving to a house in D'n Laoghaire. He recalls getting up before dawn to watch the sun rising over D'n Laoghaire harbour, because he had never lived near the sea before. Fifty-one years later, he still drives for more than an hour from his home in Massachusetts to perform the same ritual at Cape Cod.
Alfred left Ireland for the United States, where he put himself through school in the evenings, eventually graduating from Harvard University with a postgraduate degree in physics. He went to work in the US Airforce's research laboratories.
He has not visited Ireland since he left in August 1949, but has always wanted to come back to as an act of remembrance. "I wanted to thank the Irish for providing us with a haven that helped us in the transition from a fearful past to a promising future."
He also wanted to explore what might have been. "If we had been allowed to stay here, I think we would have stayed. But the conditions obviously weren't very good at the time. Maybe Ireland lost out. There was a lot of initiative among the refugees. It could have been a very positive development for the country, both economically and educationally." While he has read about the current controversy over immigration here in the newspapers, he is reluctant to comment on asylum policy here. Murray Lynn, who went on from his troubled childhood to become chief executive of a company in Atlanta, Georgia, has no such reticence.
"The policy should be more liberal. What has made the United States a great country is a relatively open door policy for immigrants from the world over. The US became a great nation because we have tapped into the resources of a lot of other countries' skills. The immigrants helped make America what it is. Ireland ought to prise the doors open a little bit and encourage skilled people in particular to come to this country," he said.
"But we didn't come here to campaign. We came here for a reunion. It's a sort of closure for us. As we get older, we get more and more sentimental about our time here. Ireland was our turning point and this visit has been our rendezvous with a fading past."
Preprinted from The Irish Times, May 6, 2000 © Copyright 2000
However, the loyal fans of both these great cities had every right to expect that the outcome of these highly charged games be decided by the players on the field - and not the umpires! Although I admire the umpires for owning up to their three botched calls, every fan knows that in baseball, it's three misses and you're out!
And while it wasn't practical to change the crew of umpires for the remaining Sox/Yankees series, the owners should consider whether using instant replay in crucial games would be the fair and reasonable answer.
Preprinted from Boston Globe, Letter to the Editor, Oct. 20, 1999 © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
BROOKLINE When the Young Israel of Brookline burnt down due to an electrical fire in January of 1994, many thought it was curtains for the local synagogue. Yet the congregation, with its now lavish headquarters located at 62 Green Street in Brookline, is thriving. Rabbi Gershon Gewirtz has just extended his contract for another eight years and the shul is now contemplating a permanent sukkah structure, which will cost $48,000.
According to the rabbi, the synagogue today has approximately 330 member units: "Every year, we see an increase of anywhere from 40 to 70 member units ..., [but] on a regular basis we lose 20 to 30."
The reality of the Young Israel, like that of most area congregations, is a substantial transient population, largely comprised of students and visiting academics. The bulk of the population is between 28 and 44, Gewirtz estimates, and "half the congregation is stable and half is in flux." "A challenge," he notes, but one that comes with its advantages: "new blood, new enthusiasm and new vitality."
In fact, Gewirtz sees a revitalized community since the reconfiguration of shul leadership and programming that resulted from the 1994 fire. "Not only was there a new physical structure, but there was a remarkable transition in terms of leadership," he explains. The children of those who established the first Green Street building in the early '60s led the way to reengaging community and starting up new services. Miriam Trout, the first full-time program director, was hired to coordinate senior citizen, youth, singles and family programming, and the synagogue began "redesigning the concept of who we are."
In its roomy Beit Medrash or study hall, the Young Israel is able to host 16 weekly classes for men, women and children, a program it is "constantly seeking to enhance," says the rabbi. There are also outreach classes for the unaffiliated, and strategic partnerships with the likes of Ma'ayan, a Torah study initiative geared to women; the Chabad House in Kenmore Square, which houses its mini-matzah factory come Passover in the Young Israel facility; the Kollel of Greater Boston; and the S. Daniel Abraham and Ira R. Rennert Torah Ethics Project, sponsored by the Orthodox Caucus in New York. The congregation has also developed relationships with the Family Table food pantry and other non-Orthodox institutions through the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) and Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston (JCRC). Also, its own Chevrat Chesed philanthropic efforts have recently led to "The Shidduch Connection," a new organization established with the help of a $4,000 CJP grant aimed at pairing off "marriage-minded members of our community," says Gewirtz.
Is everything rosy at 62 Green Street? The glitz of the $4.4 million facility would make it seem so, but Young Israel still owes approximately $700,000 in outstanding debt for the building's construction, and according to past president Lance Kawesch, fundraising is in "maintenance mode."
A closer look at money matters does reveal a need for more hard cash. Young Israel membership is $740 for a family (not including High Holiday services after the first year) and $370 for singles. Other local Orthodox synagogues like Congregation Kadimah-Toras Moshe and Congregation Beth Pinchas, of Brighton and Brookline respectively, are less than half that at $200 to $250 for a family and about $100 for singles. Congregation Beth El Atereth Israel of Newton is more in line with the Young Israel price at $800 per family and $400 for singles.
Gewirtz says he would "like to see us retire our outstanding indebtedness," but defers on matters of time frames and means. "No Jewish institution has an overabundance of resources," he reminds his listener, and as far as daily budgetary needs are concerned, the rabbi indicates that everything is just fine.
Many older members, like Dr. Seymour and Judy Schiff, share the rabbi's optimism. "It's like a substitute family," says Judy, especially for the young transients who temporarily have left relatives behind to partake of academic and employment possibilities in the Hub. The former librarian raves about the "exciting group of people, very well educated in both secular and Jewish terms" that makes up the congregation. Her husband, a retired dentist, believes the Young Israel "combines the vigor of the young with the stability of the elders."
Yet, like most shuls, not everyone is statisfied. Several young members the Advocate spoke to were ambivalent regarding the congregation; one of the only games in town for the young Orthodox sect in Boston. One married man in his 20s feels the shul "has been very indifferent about us." Although he admits that young transients initially may not be motivated to invest in the institution, "on their side [i.e., the side of shul leadership], they haven't come and said, `Hey, we want you to be a part.'" The man cited a dearth of activities for his age group and a minimum of aliyahs to younger people during services as evidence of this institutional indifference.
And while the Young Israel staff seems to downplay financial concerns, many young congregants worry about the large outstanding building debt. Some question the decision of the shul to invest in an almost $50,000 permanent sukkah, funded almost exclusively by the sisterhood, while others marvel at the seven new Torah scrolls recently dedicated at a public ceremony early this summer.
Gewirtz and Past President Kawesch, however, enthuse over the young. "This is their new family," says the rabbi. He sees a healthy "cameraderie" at the shul's weekly gala kiddush for 400 plus congregants, and stresses the hospitality extended every Shabbat to visitors and those simply without a place to go. "Our mission is to maintain the family aspect of our community," he asserts, "not an easy task in a very mobile society."
Says Kawesch, "The ability to identify and welcome newcomers" is important to the congregation leadership, and in general, the Young Israel is "the center of people's non-work life."
For the future? More of the same, according to the past president: "to continue servicing the community, to continue what we're already doing well; we're at the top of our game."
Reprinted from Jewish Advocate 7/22/99 © Copyright 1999 The Jewish Advocate
Further, there was no mention of any write-in candidates. Those who were elected are as responsible to those who live in their precincts as any other elected candidate, and those residents have a right to know who will be representing them. Merely running a list, with no explanations or additions, is a minimalist way of covering developments in town government.
I wish to thank those who supported me in my write-in candidacy for the open two-year slot in Precinct 11. I look forward to representing you and the rest of the precinct in Town Meeting.
© Copyright 1999 The Brookline TAB
The Butcherie's exterior, with its fresh, clean look, is an attractive and enticing enhancement to Brookline's JFK Crossing shopping area. Its recently renovated interior, is a welcomed shopping spot for both its kosher and non- kosher customers.
The Town of Brookline, its leaders and its citizens can all be quite proud of the recent improvements at the Butcherie and similarly, of the communal commitments of its owners.
© Copyright 1998 The Jewish Advocate
Right wing Republicans keep yelling "a lie is a lie" and if made under oath by the president - no matter what the circumstances - it's impeachable!
The public doesn't buy it. They don't like Starr; they're suspicious of his motives and independence, and now question the fairness of the whole House Judiciary proceedings. The Nov. 19 House Judiciary hearing clearly lacked the solemnity and bipartisanship of Peter Rodino's hearings on Richard Nixon.
Make no mistake about it, this impeachment issue has become a battle for who controls the Republican Party: Is it the moderates or right wing purists?
Starr gave it his best shot, but the only new facts from his testimony, cleared President Clinton of any wrongdoing in Filegate, Travelgate and Whitewater.
Without getting more "red meat" from Starr and without Newt Gingrich to guide him, Henry Hyde is at the helm of an impeachment ship without direction, biding its time at sea while waiting to be rescued.
Preprinted from Boston Globe, Letter to the Editor, Nov. 30, 1998 © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
He attacks Senator-elect Schumer for saying that being called a "putzhead" was a slur, yet he doesn't even know what the word "putz" means. (He translates it as "idiot"; in fact, putz is a base term, the English of which the Journal wouldn't normally print.)
Perhaps before Mr. Klinghoffer offers us all advice on how to interpret Yiddish, he might at least want to understand a word or two. That way he wouldn't look like such a schlemeil.
Preprinted from Wall Street Journal, Letter to the Editor, Nov. 12, 1998 © Copyright 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Preprinted from Boston Globe, Letter to the Editor, Nov. 10, 1998 © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
Perhaps our politicians and members of the media have simply failed to learn the real lessons of Watergate! In both instances, people turned against the side that invaded our privacy. With Richard Nixon and Watergate, it was "the plumbers," the "enemies list" and ultimately, the hidden taping system that did Nixon in. And in the current crises, the public is appalled by Starr's and his investigators' questionable tactics in building their case by threatening family members with indictments and attempting to force Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire to entrap the president and one of his closest confidants.
Conservatives and liberals alike, should take heart at the public's ability to choose the side that reinforces our fundamental right to privacy and its willingness to extend this basic right to all citizens, including our president.
Preprinted from Boston Globe, Letter to the Editor, Feb. 16, 1998 © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
BROOKLINE - Young Israel of Brookline, an Orthodox congregation in this town's Coolidge Corner neighborhood, claims to have been "visited" some 21,000 times over the past two years - visits made possible with the assistance of a computer, a modem and an Internet provider.
Web sites are becoming popular outreach vehicles for local Jewish congregations, including Young Israel, synaogue officials acknowledge. By posting in cyberspace text on topics from religious service schedules to biographies of temple administrators, congregations with Web sites are promoting themselves globally, providing information once typically given only to current and prospective temple members.
"We've been able to offer hospitality when people visit," Rabbi Gershon Gewirtz, Young Israel's spiritual leader, told The Jewish Advocate. "We've created a stronger sense of connection between and among the Jewish communities."
Launched Jan. 1, 1996, Young Israel's Web site features a digitized photograph and brief history of the shul as well as a summary of its activities.
By clicking a computer mouse on various highlighted words and phrases known as "links," or connections, visitors can access information on Young Israel's membership, youth and Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) programs and the availability of minyanim, mikvahs and other ritual services.
By late next week, said Martin Lebowitz, who calls himself the "Webmaster" of the shul's site, the site will host "chat rooms" in which several visitors could communicate with each other simultaneously. Young Israel's singles group would participate in one chat room, he added.
"People are keeping in touch with what's going on in the congregation without actually being in Brookline," Lebowitz said.
'Welcome message'
Temple Web sites vary in the kinds of news they provide and in their design. At its site, the Ahavath Achim Synagogue, an Orthodox synagogue in New Bedford, identifies a local bagel shop and supermarket chains that sell kosher products. Also posted is a "welcome message" from Rabbi Barry David Hartman, Ahavath Achim's spiritual leader, which highlights some of the shul's programs, such as the scholar-in-residence weekend it hosts twice a year in conjunction with the Orthodox Union.
Digitized photographs of synagogue exteriors and administrators are part of the design of the Web sites of Young Israel, Ahavath Achim and Temple Beth Sholom, a Conservative congregation in Framingham, among others.
The background of Beth Sholom's home page is white with a Star of David and the temple's name tilted upward slightly in a wallpaper-like pattern. Pictures of the temple's sign and front entrance border the top of the page.
Established Dec. 1, 1996, the Web site supplements Beth Sholom's monthly bulletin, said member Allen D. Block, who maintains the site. It includes biographies of Rabbi Gary Greene, Cantor/Education Director Alan J. Brava and President Marlene K. Kriegsman, as well as schedules of temple services and activities.
Clicking on one spot on the home page links visitors to information about Beth Sholom's religious school; clicking on another spot links them to text on programs run by the temple's Social Action Committee.
Block said he updates the site periodically and is "experimenting with ways of getting information out in a little more timely manner." This text appears in the site's "What's New" section.
"It's almost the same as if you were an employee sitting down every six months and revising your resume," Block said.
Most temple Web sites connect to the national synagogue organization the congregation belongs to. Beth Sholom, for example, links to the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
At the sites of those organizations are posted lists of member synagogues with Web sites, categorized by state. Twenty local affiliates of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents Reform congregations, have Web sites, according to a recent review of that list.
The UAHC's Northeast regional office offers its members seeking to set up Web sites the services of volunteers skilled in doing so, said regional director Rabbi David Wolfman. This assistance is free, he said.
Revenue source
The UAHC and the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation are among the supporters of Shamash, an Internet server based at the Center for Information Technology at Hebrew College in Brookline.
Set up eight years ago, Shamash hosts hundreds of Web sites, Nathan Ehrlich, the program's director, said in an interview earlier this week. It offers synagogues three membership options: The basic membership includes an account on Shamash and space for a Web site. The basic, with virtual domain option, allows congregations to set up Web sites under their own name, such as "templeisrael.org." And, Ehrlich said, with an associate membership, a congregation can set up a Web site on another server, such as those run by the Orthodox Union and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and request that Shamash link to it.
Members of the UAHC and the Reconstructionist federation can get a basic membership for free, Ehrlich said.
Finding volunteers to set up and maintain a Web site is difficult for many congregations, Block and Lebowitz said. Young Israel officials, for example, have "trusted my judgment" on the site's content, Lebowitz said.
Young Israel hopes to make its site "self-sustaining" in the long run, Lebowitz added. To do that, the shul offers links to advertising from its site and charges $36 a year for business sponsorships and $18 a year for individual sponsorships, he said.
"It's providing revenue to the shul," Lebowitz said.
The tower, trimmed with touches of deep green, now anchors the new mill, a $130 million brick, glass, and steel fabric factory that has come to symbolize the tenacity and decency of its owner, a man who never gave a thought to rebuilding anywhere but in this fraying city that once proudly produced much of the world's textiles.
Yesterday, in a daylong celebration complete with jugglers, clowns, a barbeque lunch, and blaring pop music, most of the company's workers and their friends and families trod along the cement floors admiring new state-of-the-art dyeing, drying, and finishing equipment that is turning out some 900,000 yards of the popular Polartec fabric a week - 150,000 yards more than before the Dec. 11, 1995, fire.
They listened politely during dedication ceremonies as a string of speakers, from Cardinal Bernard Law to former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, lauded their boss, Aaron Feuerstein, as a paragon of corporate responsibility who refused to abandon his workers in search of cheap labor elsewhere and paid them salaries and benefits for months while they were out of work.
''He could have bailed out but he didn't,'' said Reich, who called Feuerstein's vision of ''shared prosperity'' an example ''for all America.'' Cardinal Law likened him to Mother Teresa for his strong commitment to ''fundamental social justice.''
When Feuerstein, the last to speak, stepped to the podium, they jumped to their feet, many waving the tiny American flags. But the ovation was quickly cut off by the no-nonsense boss, who announced, ''Okay, that's it. Let's go.''
Then Feuerstein, an observant Jew who sprinkled his remarks with Hebrew prayers, biblical references, and quotes from Shakespeare, thanked God.
''I thank you, majestic God of the universe, for restoring to Malden Mills and its employees our life and our soul,'' said the 71-year-old Feuerstein, referencing an ancient Hebrew prayer.
He then placed the gleaming new building into historical perspective, reminding the crowd - many of them second- and third-generation mill workers - of the central place their city once held in the development of an industrial nation.
''One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, industrialists with vision built this great city of Lawrence ... and it became an important center of the industrial revolution of 19th-century America,'' he said.
Along the banks of the Merrimack River and its tributaries, they built ''these beautiful red-brick mill buildings which offered a hope of a job to the immigrants, poverty stricken, who came from the oppression of Europe to these shores.''
Feuerstein's grandfather, who started Malden Mills, was one of those newcomers, arriving from Hungary. And when three of those ''beautiful red-brick buildings'' were destroyed, Feuerstein immediately knew he would rebuild again on the same spot, a cluster of factory buildings sandwiched between the Spicket River and a rundown neighborhood with high unemployment.
He calls them ''my people,'' the employees who formed a human chain the night of the fire to drag co-workers to safety, the ones who helped save one building so that limited production of Polartec fabric resumed within a week of the fire and 150 people were back at work.
''There was no question about the decision that I had to make,'' he said. ''There was no way that I was going to take 3,000 people and throw them into the street and there was no way that I was going to condemn Lawrence to economic oblivion.''
Besides helping to revitalize Lawrence, Feuerstein is hopeful that his decision could be a catalyst for a revived textile industry in the state. ''In light of the human resources available in New England for research and development, for marketing, merchandising, and branding, just maybe Massachusetts might turn out to be the very best place for a textile mill to be in the 21st century,'' he said.
The dedication ceremony concluded with an emotional flag raising, led by Feuerstein, his wife, Louise, and several employees who saved the flag the night of the fire and gave it to Methuen Fire Chief Kenneth Bourassa for safekeeping.
To date, all but 70 of the 1,400 displaced workers have been rehired and the rest will return by the end of the year. Workers used to operating 20-year-old equipment by moving switches and dials have been retrained on computer-guided machines. And a new knitting operation will be added on-site to supplement one in Bridgton, Maine.
Diane Goujon is clear about what would have happened to her family if Feuerstein had walked away, ''If he didn't rebuild, I would have lost my home,'' she said.
Goujon and her husband, a supervisor of fabric dyeing operations, had bought the house just a month before the fire. Her husband had followed his father into the mill, as did most of his nine siblings for at least some period of their lives.
''This mill is family,'' Goujon said. ''If it wasn't for Aaron Feuerstein, this would be a crying city.''
This story ran on page B01 of the Boston Globe on 09/15/97. © Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.
I have spent my 20s becoming a doctor. I realize now that when I began medical school seven years ago I had no idea what being a doctor meant. The years spent lugging around heavy textbooks and being grilled by the chief resident on morning rounds were how I learned medicine, but doctoring is not something I learned in the classroom. It's something I learned from patients.
My first teacher was Rose and she taught me shame. She was an 80-year-old woman brought to the hospital by her husband because she refused to get out of bed or eat. Years before, her family doctor had discovered a tumor in her lung, and she had asked that nothing be done. Now she lay in bed moaning softly, pleading, ''Please, please, let me go home,'' while we subjected her to prodding fingers, pills, and awful-tasting shakes full of vitamins. Over and over, ''Please, please, let me go home.'' Her husband sat with her daily as her breathing slowed, her voice finally grew silent. One morning while he was getting a cup of coffee, she died: alone and in a hospital bed, when all she wanted to do was go home.
There were many more lessons, like the one with the 32-year-old woman whose name I've forgotten. She came from out of state, leaving her anxious husband and children at home, while she sought care at one of Boston's famous hospitals. Specialist after specialist paraded through her room, talking jargon about lung transplants and a prognosis of five years. I was a medical student, the only one caring for her with that precious commodity called time. When I sat down next to her and commented on how she must miss her children, she began to cry. I sat there with my hand on hers while those tears taught me that healing is more than reading a CT scan or getting the IV in on the first try.
I learned hope from a young man with cystic fibrosis who couldn't climb a flight of stairs and spent more days than not in the hospital, struggling to breathe. I couldn't crack through his protective shell and I felt frustrated, useless. Then he got a new pair of lungs and I didn't see him until weeks later, when I went by his special germ-free room and looked through the window. He was riding a stationary bike under the watchful eye of his physical therapist. He gave me the thumbs-up sign, smiled, and mouthed the words ''Thank you.''
I learned grief with the family of an elderly man whose heart was giving out in the intensive care unit, while they prayed for him to hold on until his last child arrived from New York. The child didn't make it in time and we all cried.
I learned joy from the countless pregnant women in labor who yelled and panted and pushed and allowed me not only to be present, but to have my hands on their newborn's heads, helping guide them into the world.
I learned anger on Thanksgiving Day, watching an 8-year-old girl die of meningitis. I had no tears then, just anger, anger at God, who if He couldn't prevent a child from dying should have at least not allowed it to happen on a day of thankfulness and family.
Now, as I train as a psychiatrist, I learn the lesson of patience, taught to me by a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia, my first patient on the psychiatric ward. She was hearing voices, delusional, hostile, denying illness, and refusing treatment. Day after day I met with her, at first for just a minute or two, then longer, later over a game of Go Fish or a walk around the hospital. We grew to like each other and I learned as I watched her struggle to regain her dignity and take back the life that mental illness had stolen.
Now, every day, my patients teach me about sadness and pain, about manic elation that knows no bounds, about the power of medicines and the power of words, and most of all, about courage. From each one I learn a little more about myself. It's a real privilege.
I've spent my 20s becoming a doctor. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of it.
Tziporah Cohen is a psychiatry resident at Cambridge Hospital, and Young Israel of Brookline member.
This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe on 08/23/97. © Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.
Daylight in Boston is typically harsh in contrast, cool in color. Daylight in the cities around the Mediterranean Sea is very different: golden, often tinged with pink.
At the new Young Israel Synagogue on Green Street in Brookline, the largest Orthodox synagogue in New England, you can experience that difference simply by walking in. Somehow the architect, Graham Gund of Cambridge, has created Mediterranean light - Jerusalem light, he'd argue - in an extraordinary interior. The new synagogue replaces the one destroyed by fire in 1994.
The miracle occurs in the main sanctuary. The magic is in the windows. Working with a firm called Architectural Glass Art of Louisville, Ky., Gund created a milk-white glass that suffuses the interior with a seraphic glow. At the same time, the glass lets you see outdoors to the trees and sky, but it bleaches these familiar elements into the semblance of a pale Japanese silk screen.
Tiny prisms of clear glass, which are set into the white glass, project little rainbows into the sanctuary. The rainbows move across the pews and walls as the sun moves. The effect isn't theatrical, isn't showy. It's just a quietly joyous celebration of the biblical ``Let there be light.''
The 550-seat sanctuary is big, but it feels intimate. The ceiling is folded, like the cloth roof of a tent, thus gently hinting of an informal assembly in the desert. Materials and finishes all help the windows do their job of warming and modulating the light. The carpet is the red-brown color of earthenware tile. The pews are warm-toned American maple, although the raw maple was shipped to a kibbutz in Israel for the actual manufacture, in a desire to make as many connections as possible to Jerusalem. Skylights pour sunlight down. One skylight can be opened to allow weddings to take place directly beneath the blue sky.
If it isn't too cross-cultural to say so, Young Israel's sanctuary possesses a Shaker simplicity and craftsmanship. It evokes an appropriate grandeur and mystery without fuss or ostentation. It's something rare: a completely successful interior accomplished with simple means and a modest budget. The temple's other spaces work well too, including a chapel, a big recreation hall, and especially a handsome entry lobby paved in Jerusalem stone, a common material in Israel. Here the stone helps, once again, to warm and soften the light that bounces off it. Gund, who made a special trip to Israel when he was chosen as the architect, visited many synagogues there. His temple shows it.
You get a strong sense of community from the architecture of the synagogue. That sense expresses a social reality. As Orthodox Jews, the members can't drive on the Sabbath, so they tend to reside within walking distance of their synagogue. Being so close, they can easily use the building all week long. And they do, for many kinds of meetings, classes, and celebrations. The result is the kind of close-knit world of friends so often lacking in today's American life, in the more dispersed car-culture most of us live in. And the temple doesn't have to scar the neighborhood with a big parking lot.
Seen from outdoors, Young Israel is less great. On the plus side, Gund succeeds in giving his temple a civic presence without upstaging the modest houses of the neighborhood. He does that by breaking his large building into several linked pieces, then twisting one of them - the main sanctuary - slightly away from the street to aim it directly toward Jerusalem. Maybe the twisting, along with an arch over the main entrance, also creates, as Gund hopes it does, a memory of the informal bending of old buildings on narrow streets in historic cities - although that's a stagy concept at best.
The problem is that Gund has modeled his main facade on someone's imaginary reconstruction of a long-vanished landmark, the so-called Second Temple in Jerusalem. It's an arbitrary choice, and it creates an unintended metaphor. If you haven't seen a picture of the Second Temple, you're more likely to think Gund's facade is copied from a radio console of the 1940s. With its table-top cornice and speakerlike wall, it has the scale of furniture, not architecture. There's little here, out at the street, of the command and conviction of Young Israel's interior.
But that interior is what matters. Once you've passed the portal, Young Israel Synagogue is a very, very impressive success.
This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 08/02/97. © Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.
NEW YORK -- To draw a sellout crowd to Madison Square Garden, not for sports or rock music, but to celebrate the reading of a religious text, is no mean feat.
Yet on Sept. 28, one Orthodox Jewish organization says it will do just that by sponsoring a gathering for men who have completed the study of the entire Talmud, the Jewish civil and religious law, by reading a page a day for 2,711 consecutive days, or nearly seven and a half years. The organization, Agudath Israel of America, says it expects 70,000 people to buy tickets, enough to fill the arena and other sites nationwide, to be linked by satellite broadcast.
By its scale alone, the event points to a trend within Orthodox Judaism, often discussed among its leaders: the increasing visibility and influence of organizations like Agudath Israel, which has a rigorously traditional approach to the religion, at the expense of a once-dominant moderate wing. This shift within the smallest of Judaism's three major branches threatens to strain its relations with the other two, the Reform and Conservative movements, and to highlight the religious divisions among Jews.
"Within Orthodoxy, there's a sense of being pulled to the right," said Samuel C. Heilman, professor of Jewish studies and sociology at City University of New York.
In a larger sense, the rise in self-confidence and assertiveness on the Orthodox right reflects developments in other faiths, like Christianity and Islam. As many people worry over a steep moral decline in society, the most conservative religious movements, building barriers between themselves and the broader cultures, have grown in influence.
In addition, with the erosion of the old American ideal of the "melting pot," it is far easier for people to assert a distinctive cultural or religious identity in dress and behavior.
The Orthodox, who strictly observe Jewish law, are a small minority of American Jews, about seven percent of an estimated 5.5 million people, according to the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. Forty-two percent of Jewish adults identified with the liberal Reform movement and 38 percent with the Conservative movement, which seeks a middle ground. Most of the rest claimed no affiliation.
The Orthodox are a diverse group, from self-contained, Hasidic sects to people who balance religious observance with careers on Wall Street or in Washington. Still, leaders often speak of two camps, the "modern Orthodox," or "centrists," and the right wing, or ultra-Orthodox. Sociologists say the ultra-Orthodox group is smaller, but it is growing.
The two groups part company over divisive issues like these: how much value to place on secular education; how closely to cooperate with non-Orthodox Jews, and what religious role to give women.
Citing a need for Jewish unity, Orthodox moderates have often found ways to work with their non-Orthodox counterparts. But the Orthodox right has tried to avoid seeming to support forms of Judaism they believe violate religious law.
For decades, modern Orthodoxy was dominant, inspired by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who taught at Yeshiva University in New York and contended that one could be devoutly observant while holding a worldly outlook. But the modern Orthodox position has eroded, hastened by the growth of yeshivas, or Orthodox religious schools, many built and run by the right wing. Many modern Orthodox young people have become doctors, lawyers and other professionals, Heilman said. "Who's left to teach in the day schools? The right-wing community."
Rabbi Moshe Sherer, the president of Agudath Israel, agreed that most yeshivas were "directed by the so-called right wing." That means that modern Orthodox children sent to religious schools have teachers with far more traditional views. "These parents wake up one day and find their sons are in the right wing," Sherer said. "The sons swing the parents over to this world."
"Years ago, we were written off," Sherer added. When he joined the group in the 1940s, he said, friends saw "no future in that type of Orthodoxy." But, he said, "it's a growth stock today."
"In the spiritual world," he added, "I find the rich are getting richer. As they reach each level of spiritual study, of spiritual observance, that whets their appetite even more."
As the ground within Orthodoxy shifts, rabbis in its modern wing speak of colleagues "looking over their right shoulder," to avoid offending more traditional Jews.
In January, an Orthodox rabbinic board in Queens County here ruled that women's prayer groups violated Jewish tradition. And in March, the small Union of Orthodox Rabbis declared that the Reform and Conservative movements were "not Judaism." The statement came as Israeli Orthodox political parties pushed a law barring government recognition of conversions to Judaism conducted by non-Orthodox rabbis in Israel.
The two largest Orthodox groups, the Rabbinical Council of America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, said in newspaper advertisements that the statement offended the "Orthodoxy of inclusion."
The Union of Orthodox Rabbis fired back with advertisements that quoted the biblical verse Joshua 5:13, in which an angel asks Joshua, "Are you on our side or are you on the side of the adversary?"
Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and an outspoken figure on the Orthodox liberal edge, said the Orthodox community was "polarizing" -- the right was growing by drawing followers from an increasingly muted center.
Like other conservative movements, the Orthodox right wing has benefited from an antipathy to popular culture. In a speech in December, reprinted in The Jewish Sentinel, Professor William B. Helmreich said the right had the advantage of, among other things, charismatic leaders, a higher birthrate, better political organization and the unease Orthodox Jews felt about "moral laxness in society."
"People need to find new restrictions to prove how religious they are," said Helmreich, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of City University here. The restrictions are more obvious today than 30 years ago. For the ultra-Orthodox, for example, television is off limits.
Sociologists say that as the standards for Orthodox living are raised higher, the less observant fall away, perhaps joining non-Orthodox branches of Judaism, while the most committed remain, further reinforcing the right's standing.
Traditionalists, too, have benefited from the rise of pride in ethnicity over the past three decades.
Rabbi Avi Shafran, a former yeshiva teacher and Agudath Israel's spokesman, said that as an adolescent in the 1960s, he felt self-conscious wearing tzitzit, the fringes that, in the Book of Numbers 15:38, God told the Israelites to attach to "the corners of their garments."
But after he encountered a black man wearing a dashiki, a tunic modeled on African tribal garments, he decided, he said, that cultural distinctions could be a source of pride. "I made sure people could see my yarmulke," he said, adding, "We got a lot of security out of the black liberation movement of the 1960s."
The divisions within Orthodoxy have lately come under scrutiny in Jewish publications. Last June, Moment magazine described the rise of a "more fundamentalist" leadership among the Orthodox and even reported that some modern Orthodox families in Baltimore bused their children out of town to avoid ultra-Orthodox day schools where preschoolers were separated by gender.
Still, some Orthodox leaders say the talk of greater power on the right is overstated. "What we're seeing," said Rabbi Rafael Grossman, the Rabbinical Council's president, "is not a more influential right, but a more vocal right."
He added that he believed the modern Orthodox wing was growing, too. Within the last decade, he said, 54 schools have been founded within the modern Orthodox fold.
Rabbi Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University in New York, said he believed tensions within Orthodoxy were lessening. He cited fewer right-wing criticisms of his institution, long regarded as a bulwark of modern Orthodoxy. "A few years ago," he said, "they would savage us with a truculence that seemed to exceed itself each time."
People on both sides of the debate point to the Orthodox birthrate to suggest that, whichever movement becomes dominant, Orthodox Judaism will become far more important in America. The National Jewish Population Study found that Orthodox families tend to be larger, with an average of 2.4 children, compared with 1.9 among the non-Orthodox.
"That's a pretty significant difference," said Egon Mayer, professor of sociology at the City University of New York. He said, "1.9 is below replacement level."
But Mayer cautioned against relying too heavily on those statistics, because people can change their minds about religion. He pointed to the survey's finding that fewer than one-third of Jews who said they were raised Orthodox still considered themselves to be that.
Some say they expect economic pressures to push the right wing into the modernist camp. Under this scenario, ultra-Orthodox communities, unable to survive on yeshiva teachers' earnings, will persuade more men to seek careers in secular professions, creating a class disinclined to cultural separatism.
Sherer disagreed. "In Agudath Israel," he said, "we have hundreds of attorneys, hundreds of doctors, hundreds of professors." Professional success was "not a goal in itself," he added, saying that religious study "is the beginning and end of our lives."
© Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
Malden Mills owner Aaron Feuerstein was both ridiculed and canonized when he kept his 1,000 employees on the payroll after a fire burned down his factory last Christmas. But now he's proving that treating workers well is just plain good business.
At a European trade show in Brussels during the first week of September, Malden Mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, introduced a broad new line of high-end upholstery fabrics. Buyers snapped up the sleek material, derived from the company's hugely successful line of Polartec and Polarfleece apparel knits. A victory, certainly. And one more step in an uphill comeback by a factory that suffered one of the biggest industrial fires in New England history less than a year ago, a factory whose owner achieved heroic stature by keeping more than 1,000 jobless employees at full pay for several months after the blaze.
Yet Aaron Feuerstein, owner, president, and CEO of Malden Mills, has good reason to feel unappreciated. It's true that his work force adores him, that almost every newspaper, TV station, and business magazine in the U.S. has sung his praises, that Bill Clinton invited him to Washington for the State of the Union address, and that columnists, unions, and religious leaders all across the country have declared him a saint. But much of this celebrity is based on the misleading premise that this 70-year-old acted selflessly, against his own best interests, which is another way of saying that he acted the way a saint might act: irrationally.
In fact, it seems pretty clear that some people call Feuerstein a saint because they don't quite have the courage to call him a fool. They don't think he should be rebuilding his mill, at least not in Lawrence. They think he should have pocketed the insurance proceeds, closed the business, and walked away. Or else they think he should have grabbed the chance to move the company to some state or country with lower labor costs.
Some commentators have even accused him of risking the very survival of his business with a lot of grandstanding magnanimity that served no purpose but self-advertisement. There's a suggestion that real businessmen are tougher than Feuerstein, that responsible owners never pay any employee a dime more than they have to, and that no factory owner could possibly have done what Feuerstein has done unless he'd been touched by God or is just touched, period. These people, for instance, argue that Feuerstein certainly could have skipped the grand gesture of paying out some $15 million in wages and benefits to already overpaid workers when they no longer had a place to work. One business school professor has suggested pointedly that not everyone should look to him as a model.
Most of this carping is nonsense. But in a way, so is much of the praise. Why in the world should it be a sign of divinely inspired nuttiness to treat a work force as if it was an asset, to cultivate the loyalty of employees who hold the key to recovery and success, to take risks for the sake of a large future income stream, even to seek positive publicity? These are the things Aaron Feuerstein has done, and most people stand in amazement as if they were witnessing a miracle or a traffic accident.
I was one of them until I discovered that Feuerstein is at heart a hard-nosed businessman. He has some minor eccentricities--a weakness for little bursts of Shakespeare, a tendency to wander off into far corners of the room as he thinks and talks--and his Old Testament intensity and biblical pronouncements can be slightly intimidating, despite his warmth. The two hours I spent with him, however, convinced me that he is as tough-minded as he is righteous, a man entirely up to the job of running a factory for profit.
Take downsizing. Would anyone have guessed that Feuerstein was a devotee? At one point, as he was warming to an attack on the unconscionable Al Dunlap (the man who dismantled Scott Paper and fired a third of its work force), I interrupted to suggest that maybe Scott Paper was overstaffed, and Feuerstein surprised me: "If one-third of the people in that company were wastefully employed, then Dunlap did the right thing." And then the new patron saint of working Americans surprised me some more. "Legitimate downsizing as the result of technological advances or as a result of good industrial engineering? Absolutely. I'm in favor of it. And we do it here all day long...We try to do it in such a way as to minimize human suffering, but the downsizing must be done." Under the benevolent, angular exterior lurks a businessman--a businessman who understands labor. The trick, he told me, is to keep growing fast enough to give new jobs to the people technology displaces, to weed out unnecessary jobs "without crushing the spirit of the work force." If all you're after is cutting costs, if you "just have a scheme to cut people--that sort of thing is resented by labor, and you're never forgiven." Feuerstein has a union shop, has long invested heavily in technology that eliminates jobs, and has never had a strike--not exactly the hallmarks of a fool.
Or take the insurance question. Feuerstein could certainly have closed the factory, sold the business, pocketed the proceeds, and spent the rest of his days in a hammock. But men in their 70s who still come to work every day for the sheer exhilaration of the job don't turn to hammocks in a crisis. His decision to rebuild seems to have been spontaneous and immediate, made more or less by the light of the flames and without much thought to the insurance proceeds. And still it was a rational decision. Factories are insured for their replacement cost, and if you don't replace them, you may have to settle for the depreciated value of the lost building and machinery, in this case a lot of modern machinery and several antediluvian buildings. You can solve this equation without the higher math. An insurance payoff is likely to be much larger when it's taken as a contribution toward a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, partly because it has the potential to produce income for your family for two or three generations to come. Last year's pre-fire, pretax profit was $20 million on sales of $400 million. Twenty million times two or three generations comes to an awful lot of money.
Or take self-advertisement. Feuerstein has not been shy with the media. Malden Mills has been featured everywhere from People to Dateline to the Lands' End catalogue, and it's all been free. What's more, if the insurance settlement should wind up in court--not wildly improbable--will it hurt Feuerstein's chances of winning that half the people in the country worship the ground he walks on? Do insurance companies care about their reputations? You bet.
As for the idea that he might relocate the company somewhere with lower wages, Feuerstein moved the company to Lawrence (from Malden, just outside Boston) in 1956, at a time when New England textile mills thought local labor too expensive and were streaming south like carpetbaggers. A great many of those companies failed anyway, despite the lower wages they spent so much money to find, and Feuerstein is sure he knows why: They gave too much attention to costs and not enough to quality. He responds with contempt to suggestions that Malden Mills should move offshore. (Labor in the South is no longer such a bargain.)
"Why would I go to Thailand to bring the cost lower when I might run the risk of losing the advantage I've got, which is superior quality?" In any case, he goes on, lower wages are a temporary advantage. Quality lasts. At least it can last if you focus hard on expertise and the freedom to innovate. But to do that, you have to focus hard on employees. When Feuerstein came to Lawrence, he wasn't looking for cheap labor but for skilled labor--capable, experienced textile designers, engineers, and workers who could give him the edge he needed to compete more effectively.
It's here he has shown his real genius. Any idiot with a strong enough stomach can make quick money, sometimes a lot of it, by slashing costs and milking customers, employees, or a company's reputation. But clearly that's not the way to make a lot of money for a long time. The way to do that is to create so much value that your customers wouldn't dream of looking for another supplier. Indeed, the idea is to build a value creation system of superior products, service, teamwork, productivity, and cooperation with the buyer. Reduced to its essence, that means superior technology and superior employees. Reduced still further, as Aaron Feuerstein can tell you, it means superior employees. The correlation between loyal customers and loyal employees is no coincidence.
For Malden Mills, the first test and the breakthrough came in the early 1980s with the total collapse of the market for what was then a company mainstay--artificial furs. It was the R&D and production employees who saved the company over the next few years, using their superior expertise in synthetic fibers, napping, and finishing to create a series of lightweight, thermal, resilient, woollike fabrics under the brand names Polarfleece and Polartec. They look good, feel good, wick well, don't pill, and hold up to repeated washing. Moreover, they're all engineered to order. The retailer wants, say, a fabric for cyclists that's windproof and light but also soft, absorbent, and quick-drying. Malden's ability to satisfy such orders has made Polartec a favorite of upscale retailers like Lands' End, L.L. Bean, Patagonia, the North Face, Eddie Bauer, and a dozen more.
Best of all, these customers are loyal. Customer retention at Malden Mills runs roughly 95%, which is world class. Employee retention runs above 95%, which is prodigious but can hardly come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Feuerstein's approach to personnel. As for productivity, from 1982 to 1995, revenues in constant dollars more than tripled while the work force barely doubled. Compare that with an overall productivity increase for the U.S. of a little better than 1% per year. Thanks to its employees, Malden Mills has risen from at least one five-alarm crisis in the past. No wonder Aaron Feuerstein loves those employees enough to risk $15 million to keep them available and motivated and to help him rise from the literal ashes of last year's catastrophe. This isn't the work of a saint or a fool, it's the considered and historically successful policy of a genial manufacturing genius who might serve as a model for every man and woman in business.
THOMAS TEAL, formerly a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, recently published First Person: Tales of Management Courage and Tenacity.
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