Shul Members To Help Chabad

By Steve Lipman, The Jewish Week

A few years ago, while rummaging through a small storage closet in his Crown Heights day school, an administrator discovered a cache of old prayer books.

The decades-old siddurim had been the property of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, one of New York City’s most prominent congregations back in 1920, when it was founded on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. The books were embossed with the names of onetime members, dedicated at bar mitzvahs and other simchas.

Rabbi Nosson Blumes, director of development at Oholei Torah, the flagship elementary school of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement that first moved into the Brooklyn Jewish Center building four decades ago, wasn’t sure what to do with the prayer books. “I had hundreds … they were connected to someone’s history.”

The rabbi decided to return the items to their rightful owners — the people whose names are marked on the covers, or their relatives — if he could find them.

Rabbi Blumes, a native of Winnipeg, Canada, who has worked at Oholei Torah since 1997, started doing research online. He tracked down scores of people; most were glad to receive the old prayer books, and many were interested to learn the fate of their families’ former congregation. Subsequently, many have come for a visit to the building and their old neighborhood.
The biggest result of the rabbi’s work is a gala Brooklyn Jewish Center reunion that will be held there this month.

Rabbi Blumes, who is organizing the Center archives stored in boxes in the building’s crowded storage rooms, is helping to coordinate a reunion dinner at the defunct synagogue-turned- school on Sunday, Sept. 25, the 90th anniversary of the dedication of the building’s sanctuary.

At least 400 people — including former members of the Brooklyn Jewish Center and their relatives, government officials, and representatives of the Lubavitch community — are expected to attend the event.

Any proceeds will go to the school’s general renovation effort, but the event is intended primarily as a social one, rather than a fundraiser.

The reunion, the culmination of a $1.5 million restoration campaign at the day school, which is repairing the building’s interior and exterior, is the latest sign of a unique mutual respect that has developed between members of a chasidic group and a Conservative institution.

Oholei Torah occupies the building only because the Conservative congregation was willing to make a financial sacrifice, Rabbi Blumes says.

In selling the building in 1982 for $400,000, considerably below the market rate, the Center trustees “really gave [the building] to us. We owe them a great debt of gratitude.”

On one recent afternoon Rabbi Blumes paid a visit to the Flatbush home of Rabbi Benjamin Kreitman, who was the spiritual leader of the Brooklyn Jewish Center from 1954 until 1968. For an hour the two rabbis discussed plans for the reunion; while they differ on some interpretations of Jewish tradition, they agree on the value of cooperation, they said.

“It’s an example of how we can work together,” says Rabbi Kreitman, now in his 90s and who served for many years as executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism after leaving the pulpit rabbinate.

“They respect us, and we respect them,” Rabbi Blumes says. “We’re showing appreciation to the members of the Center” who sold the building to the day school at a fraction of its market value when the congregation’s demise, the result of members moving away for decades or dying, became inevitable.

Read the full article by Steve Lipman in The Jewish Week

Watch a video about the Brooklyn Jewish Center Dinner Reunion