No. 3
Simchas Torah
1948:
From Mount Sinai
to Fourteenth Avenue in Brooklyn
Hooray, hooray, hooray, it will soon be
Simchas Torah! All the boys and girls in the neighbourhood will gather in the
streets for the celebrations. The police will block the main avenues so that
people can march up and down without dodging traffic. Everybody dresses up.
Some wear masks and costumes, and everybody carries a little flag. From the big
temples old men will each carry a big Torah over his chest, as though he were
carrying the Bride of the Law, and will lead a procession round the streets, in
and out of the crowds, and then come back to replace the scrolls of the law in
the aharon ha-kodesh. From the small synagogues and the shitibble in
storefronts old men will rise from the study tables and stand on the porch or
out on the street and watch the crowds march by. Women will descend from their
section of the Orthodox houses of prayer, all dressed in their finest wigs,
dresses and fur collars. Children from
everywhere and even those who don’t go to cheder or after-school classes or
only on Sunday morning learning groups, they all process through the streets,
with their flags. And every flag h as an apple stuck on the pointy end of the
stick, and a candle on the point, and the light beams forth.
Hooray, hooray, hooray! The Jews are
marching through the streets showing off the Torah scrolls in t heir magnificent
panoplies, with golden crows and silver bells. From every denomination and
every sect, even those who don’t attend throughout the whole year except on the
High Holidays, or those who never come, and t hose who not only don’t believe,
but those who oppose belief altogether: the socialists, the communists, the
anarchists, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Ethical Culture Society and the
Zionist Youth Camps. Everyone marches, with one kind of a flag or another. All
the boys and girls for many streets around, and those who come by bus or
subway, whoever has relatives or friends, whoever has heard the call to gather.
Old people who cannot walk look out
their windows. Cars drive by slowly from other neighbourhoods: the Italians,
the Pollocks, the Norwegians. The police stand on the street and wave the
crowds and traffic from elsewhere on, and they watch with one eye the slow
movement of the outsiders and with the other the endless weaving of the Jews in
procession. People wave, people sing, and the children march by with their
flags, their apples and their candles. We shout out the words of the ancient chant:
Hinei ma-tov
u-manim
Shevat ach im
gam yachad
It is Simchas Torah, the joyful
celebration of the giving of the Tables of the Law to Moses, Moshe rabbenu,
Moses our teacher, our prophet, our leader. Every year since the gathering of
the Children of Israel in the Desert of Sinai, every year since the exodus from
Egypt and the freedom from slavery. Every year since the building of shuls and
temples, shtibbeleh and union discussion groups in Boro Park the Jews march
through the streets. And this year, since the beginning of time, is special:
why? Many reasons. First because I am old enough to go out into the streets
alone with my friend. Second, because the police have decided to close down the
main streets and avenues for several hours from dusk to ten o’clock at night so
the crowds can gather in safety. For this is Brooklyn and America and the
police protect us. We are free to gather and march and celebrate. Third, it is
now three years since the big war ended in Europe and we discovered what
happened over there. It is now time to gather and march and celebrate in a new
freedom. We are shocked and we are sad and yet we want to march in the streets.
Our parents still cry when they meet, still sit shiva for their parents and
relatives, they still light memorial candles, and they daven in the little
shuls and synagogues. But they want us to go out into the street with our
flags, with the apples and the candles. They watch us and they weep and laugh
at the same time.
I am eight years old and I walk out into
the streets with my friends Eddie and Joel. We meet Lenny and Stanley, then David
and Albert. Soon we meet the girls, Rachel and Devorah, Sybil and Phyllis, and
then more and more. We all have our flags and we have stuck in bright red
apples, and put in a candle in the top, and someone has lighted the candles,
and so we march through the streets. We go to all big temples on Fourteenth
Avenue, and then the little ones on 49th Street, and the shtibble on
48th Street, and the YMHA and PS 164 where the clubs meet, from the
Boy and Girl Scouts to the Zionists and the political groups. Everybody marches
together. Everybody sings songs. We watch the old men with the torah scrolls
and the old women with their wigs and fur collars. We march past the police men. They smile at
us. We pass the Italians from the parochial schools, the Norwegians and
Pollocks and they wave and cheer. We walk from the other side of Ocean Parkway
or Fort Hamilton Parkway. We march under the el and back past the markets where
my grandpa works. We walk on the streets where the trolley tracks still are,
and on the roads that haven’t been paved yet. We think we are walking all over
the world, just like the children drawn on a globe in the Whole World Over which we read in after school Hebrew class.
Notice, please, that I didn’t mention 47th
Street, though everybody knows that’s where I lived after my father came back
from the war. The reason is simple. It was a busy street and important: that’s
where ambulances rode and people in cars rushing to the maternity ward to Israel Zion Hospital
at the corner of 47th Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway.
Nevertheless, there were crowds of old people and children who marched around,
but mostly on the sidewalk and not in the roadway (or the gutter, as we called
it). We had only one synagogue on the street, a red brick building, three storeys,
the top two where the rabbi and the rebbetzin and their many children lived;
and the ground floor, though you had to climb a stoop of six steps, to get in,
that was the prayer and study hall, with an ark and two Torahs inside. The
rabbe and his minyan took out their Torahs and stood on the street holding
them, so everybody could see. The children from upstairs, boys and girls, came
down and marched a little around tiny shul outside, but without flags or
candles, just holding each other’s hands.
This was the only time in the whole year we could see them all together,
the whole mishpucha. Many years later,
at the corner with Fourteenth Avenue, there was built a new version of Machzike
Talmud Torah, both the cheder I went to as a little boy and the high school
classes which were like a yeshiva. But as this school was not yet there in 1948
(but the cheder on 43rd Street, where I went until my bar mitzvah) I
won’t tell you anything about it here; you have to read my other stories,
please.
Am
yisroel chai
Now where was I? Well, I was eight years
old and I was marching all around Boro Park with other children, my friends and
those not my friends. Maybe, to tell the truth, I didn’t walk too far, only up
and down a few streets. The rest I imagined because being part of the group I
was always with the group in whatever they did. Somebody calls this pretembering, pretending to remember. If
one person in the group says something, everybody says it, and whatever
happened to the crowd happened to everybody who was part of the group even if
he or she wasn’t always there. Does this sound funny and peculiar, just
something for children to believe in their games? The whole community coming
from one Jewish place and another out onto the streets was pretembering to be
the Children of Israel who had marched out of Egypt with Moses and who gathered
at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive the Law. All of us were there receiving
the Law and celebrating that we are free from the slavery of ignorance and
superstition. All of us were also pretembering that we could rejoice in being
alive and Jewish in America and not enslaved and murdered in the Nazi death
camps. Everybody was there with us, not just the people in Boro Park or
surrounding neighbourhoods, but people who never came out of the Holocaust
alive. We pretembered them back into the community. A grown-up would look at
you and cry and say, “You look just like my brother or father or grandfather.”
And so you were for that moment, inside the crowd, his brother or her father or
their grandfather. But no one had to say that for you to know, as we all did,
that this was the same crowd of people who marched around Mount Sinai when
Moses came down with the Two Tablets of the Law—everybody for a thousand
generations or more, living and dead, was in the crowd. Everybody who was taken
away by the Gestapo and the SS and disappeared was there. Everybody beaten or
starved to death was there. Everybody who went mad and threw themselves against
the barbed-wire fences and was electrocuted or shot, they were there marching
with us, with their flags and apples and candles. Everybody who we never knew
or had for gotten was walking joyfully through the streets of Boro Park.
No more did I know, because I was only
eight years old, that everywhere I went, my mother and father were walking
behind me and watching. Grown-ups watched the children who pretended they were
by themselves and safe in the world. Policemen in blue uniforms who smiled at
us stood at the street corners and
protected everyone. No one came with a whip or a mad dog or a rifle butt or a
pistol to hunt us down or hurt us. After so many generations of running and
hiding, we felt safe in the world. I don’t think I ever have so much a part of
a crowd and so safe in all my life since then. So tonight, just for a little
while, let me dream my way back to Boro Park and pretember that I am still
there with all the people I loved and knew and who loved me and knew that I
looked like their ancestors and themselves.
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