Blogroll | Congregation Darchei Noam

The following is an excerpt from a history of Darchei Noam that I wrote for our Bar Mitzvah (13 years) ‎celebration.  It has three elements: a history that is as factual as I could make it, my take what I saw as the central ‎issues and problems of the period, and personal accounts from my recollections and anecdotes from people who ‎were there.  ‎

The text in regular type is the factual element; the text in italics are my observations.‎

‎1972.  The first organizing meetings were held just before the High Holidays with Lavy Becker and Steven Barber ‎in a hotel room downtown.  At the meeting were the Schilds, Harvey Freeman and some others. Lavy said “Go ‎beyond the existing Reconstructionist Study Group. Make a Reconstructionist synagogue in Toronto.  To help, he ‎offered to come periodically during the coming year and lead some services, until the group could develop its own ‎resources.‎

‎1972  Rosh Hashanah.. No services. At the meeting with Lavy Becker the group had decided they could not mount ‎High Holiday services that year. ‎

‎1972/73.  The Reconstructionist Synagogue of Toronto held Shabbat services at times throughout the year.  One ‎was at the Borochov Center; the rest were at Bialik Hebrew Day School.  They were led, in the beginning at least, ‎by Lavy Becker, as he had promised. The Torah was a Holocaust survivor, in generally bad repair, loaned by Lavy ‎Becker.‎

‎1973.  Hiqh Holidays. As planned, the first High Holiday services were held, at the North Y with Mitchell Smith ‎‎(from the RRC) as the leader.  The Torah used was still the loaner from Lavy Becker.  Jacob Ziegel read from the ‎Torah.  We listened to the news from Israel, the start of the Yom Kippur War, on a boom box brought into the Y.  It ‎certainly shifted the focus.‎

These were the early years. Everything was hard, either because we had never done it before or because there ‎were just too few people, or because we made it hard for ourselves.   The carting around of books and Torah were ‎only symptoms of those problems. We spent some time working them out.‎

‎1973/74. The group had a more formal structure.  Dan Schild became the President, and there was an executive ‎of sorts. I called Dan to inquire about the Reconstructionist synagogue being formed, and was invited to an ‎executive meeting the next night.  So in two days, I was sort of a member of the executive.  Everybody was.‎

Laurel and I had been looking for a Reconstructionist congregation in Toronto since we came here in 1971.  We ‎had gone to the congregation in Pittsburgh and we liked both it and Kaplan’s ideas.‎

The group was now holding more frequent Shabbat services, mostly in the Y.‎

‎1974 . High Holidays. We had a pair of Rabbis for the Holidays--Joel and Rebecca Alpert. The services were again ‎held in the North Y.‎

‎1974/75. I am not sure who was President; it was either Dan Schild or Sid Butovsky. Services were held at the ‎North Y throughout the year. But the building was becoming very difficult to use. There was very little storage. We ‎could store the Torah and our first ark, constructed by Bill Jason, but we had to bring the books to the Y every time ‎we went there. All the books were in the back of Dan Schild's car.  Someone also had to bring the Rabbi, if we had ‎one that week. Some Rabbis did not drive, so they stayed with the Cowitzes, who lived closest to the Y.‎

‎1975. High Holidays. The return of the Alperts. We were glad to have such a high quality of student from the ‎college. And two for the price of one. But, once again, we were not comfortable with the Y. We were using a ‎recreational room, and we had to cope with shuffleboards on the floor and a plywood wall. But we had a new Ark; ‎David Friendly and Viesturs Upans built it in the summer of 1975.‎

‎1975/76 Mike Krashinsky was President. Mike became an instant Rabbi after a visit from Ron Aigen, the ‎Reconstructionist Rabbi from Montreal. He and Mike went over the Siddur, and Ron taught Mike some tunes.  ‎From then on, Mike led the weekly services. We moved the weekly services to the Zionist Center on Marlee. It was ‎better than the Y, in some ways. We had our own keys to the building. More importantly, we had our own storage ‎space so we did not have to carry everything to every Shabbat service. In this building, for the first time, we tried ‎to have regular services, every Shabbat. But our attempt at weekly services fell apart when only Mike showed up ‎one week.  That was too discouraging even for Mike. ‎

So he called a general meeting of the congregation, with a stated agenda of whether to dissolve the congregation.  ‎The question he posed to the meeting was whether to give up, or to keep trying to form a synagogue.  Everyone ‎said “Let’s keep going and build a synagogue.” But Michael didn’t think it would really go anywhere, so he became ‎discouraged and shortly after that, he left the synagogue.‎

The next year (1976), Dan Schild was President again.  We abandoned the Zionist Centre on Marlee, and moved ‎back to the Y for the High Holidays and for Shabbat.  The Rabbi for the High Holidays was Gail Shuster. She told us ‎that she really did not want to be a pulpit Rabbi; she was planning to go make movies in Israel.‎

For the group to keep going, the balance had to shift to people who were filling their own needs for a synagogue.   ‎That was, I think, much of what was happening from 1972 until about 1976, when we decided, at the meeting ‎called by Michael Krashinsky, that we definitely wanted to be a synagogue.‎

‎1977. High Holidays.  Allan Lehmann came for the first time. Eric Mendelsohn began his term as President. We ‎liked Allan, but by Sukkot of 1977 he was in Israel, where he stayed for a year.‎

In 1977/78 we had, as before, a series of students from the College who came to lead services about once a ‎month but no continuity. Some students would suggest a change, then others would contradict them. For example, ‎Rebecca Alpert had insisted that, at the end of the Alenu, we should not sing “b’yom hahu” three times, since it ‎reflected a Trinitarian idea, while the following thought in Hebrew is “y’hiyeh adoniaecod ushemo echod”, which ‎is a statement of the Jewish belief in the oneness of God.  When we dutifully tried this on the next student, ‎however, he (or she) wondered where we got that idea.‎

Similarly, we had trouble with the Amidah.  Should it be said once or twice?  (Twice was really a non-starter in our ‎synagogue; anything that lengthened the service that much was out.) Should the single repetition be aloud or ‎silent? We did not resolve some of these issues until we finally had a full-time rabbi.‎

After almost a year of these problems Eric proposed that we do away with them.  He suggested ‎that we hire a rabbinic intern, who would come for the High Holidays and then regularly ‎throughout the year.  That way we would at least have a familiar face to see, and we would not ‎have to negotiate the basics (can you read Torah?  Can you sing?) over the phone every time a ‎new student was coming.  Since he was coming back from Israel in the fall, Allan Lehmann was ‎a natural candidate.‎

But, of course, we had problems there too. Allen did not ride in or drive a car on Shabbat. That ‎meant that, if the services were to be held at the Y, he pretty well had to stay at the Cowitzes.  ‎But we learned that, while he would not ride in a car, he would ride a bicycle.  So one week he ‎agreed to stay at the Freemans, and to ride his bicycle to the services.  This was a mistake. The ‎weather turned unseasonably wet and cold, and Allan spent a miserable time bicycling through ‎the cold rain and snow, with Harvey following him in his Cadillac. (Allan doesn't remember ‎Harvey being there, but Harvey remembers Allan.)‎

Sometime during Allan’s tenure, we tried again to hold weekly services. These were to be at a ‎member's house. At one time, it was to be my house. As I remember the conditions, I would ‎agree to be home, and if anyone came, we would hold services.  After a few Shabbatot when ‎we did have services came the weeks when no one showed up.  Again, we were not ready to ‎take on weekly services yet. We simply did not have enough members, although some ‎members said that all we needed was more commitment from the members we did have.‎

Allan recalled the currents of issues within the group:‎

The congregation was still very young as a group.  There were almost as many visions of ‎what it ought to be as there were people involved in it.  Everybody was more or less ‎comfortable with the word Reconstructionist, but all for different reasons. Many saw it ‎as a smaller, alternative to the large Toronto institutions. Many were much more ‎concerned with the religious humanism and religious naturalism of Mordecai Kaplan.  ‎For others, this was a way of doing a renewal of Jewish life that could draw on new kinds ‎of thinking and resources that might or might not relate to what Kaplan envisioned.  ‎There were people who would have no problem with a large, very well established ‎synagogue, but wanted it to be a Reconstructionist one. On the other hand, there were ‎people who did not care whether others were talking to a personal God, as long as it ‎was small and informal.‎

Still, I think that this represents significant progress.  We had by Allan's time agreed on the ‎direction of motion. We did not all agree on the end point, but that did not matter much, ‎because we all also agreed we were a long way from it.  But from that decision to hire Allan ‎Lehmann as an intern to a decision to hire a full-time rabbi was not very long in time.‎

In 1979, Joy Levitt became our Rabbi for the High Holidays, and our intern.  We got some good ‎publicity out of the fact that we had appointed Joy as the first female Rabbi of a congregation in ‎Toronto.  Maybe the fact that we felt comfortable identifying ourselves as a congregation with ‎a rabbi was more significant than the fact that it was a female rabbi.‎

To me, the shift from Allan Lehmann to Joy Levitt represented a major transition in the life of ‎the synagogue.  When Allan was here, I don’t think we talked seriously about hiring him as a ‎full-time rabbi.  We did talk about Joy that way, because we finally felt more ready to take that ‎plunge.  But we were still hung up on a chicken- and-egg dilemma; until we built up more ‎membership, we could not afford a rabbi; but until we had a rabbi, we would not have more ‎members.‎

We changed locations once more. This time, we used the Diet Workshop studio, at the corner of ‎Bathurst and Wilson, owned by a member. In some ways, it was the least physically attractive ‎of all the locations we had used. We all remember the “Think Thin” signs, which most of us ‎thought did not set a good mood for prayer. But, as my grandmother always said, the price was ‎right (zero). So we stayed there for two years.‎

‎1980  High Holidays.  We had trouble finding a Rabbi. So David Teusch came up from the ‎Foundation in New York.  David set us a high standard.  And he had a clear idea of where he ‎thought the synagogue should be going. That was in the direction of a full synagogue with a full-‎time rabbi.‎

Again, it was a meeting in a hotel room--this time David Teusch's room in a downtown Toronto ‎hotel—that proved to be a final turning point. At that meeting were many members of the ‎Board. Teusch urged that the only way to go was to hire a full-time rabbi. The chicken-and-egg ‎problem would never be resolved. We had to resolve ourselves to raise a big enough nest egg ‎to last out the first year, and then count on fund-raising and new members to finish it. Teusch ‎made it sound easy. By the end of that meeting, the leaders of the synagogue had decided that ‎we would work toward hiring a full-time rabbi, for the next year if at all possible.‎

Did the membership agree? I can't recall the year, but it must have been about this time, that ‎we had a general meeting on the budget and the subject of hiring a full-time rabbi. I can still ‎remember Eric's speech: ‎

A golf club is where you golf. At the golf club, they have a professional golfer to show ‎you how, to help you choose the way you want to golf, to help you select golfing ‎equipment.  A golf club cannot really serve its members needs without a professional. ‎The professional does not golf for you, though.  Well, a synagogue is where you Jew. A ‎synagogue cannot really serve its members' needs without a professional Jew. If we ‎want to be a synagogue, we need to hire a professional

I think this was the last major turning point for the synagogue up to our thirteenth year.  We ‎decided there to pledge our own money to a development fund, and we did. We decided there ‎to hire a rabbi, and we did. We decided there that we wanted to be a full-service place to Jew, ‎and we would work toward that goal, and we have.‎

by Mitchell Rothman, with a photo from the files of Eric and Lil Mendelsohn