By Adina Paretzky
SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH STATE
February 27, 2009
I was horrified when I learned of the anti-Semitic vandalism at Congregation Shaarey Tphiloh in Portland, Maine. It was upsetting to see a photograph of a swastika on the outdoor announcement board of the shul I had just visited. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this photo, the picture — a drawing of a swastika — was actually trying to cover up the words providing Shabbat and tefillah information.
Just one week earlier, I, along with 37 fellow Brandeis students and our JLIC couple, Rabbi Elliot and Toby Kaplowitz, had spent Shabbat with the Shaarey Tphiloh congregation. JLIC, the Jewish learning Initiative on Campus, sponsored by the Orthodox Union in cooperation with Hillel, assigns a young rabbi and his wife as “Torah Educators” to provide an Orthodox anchor to our experience on a secular campus.
JLIC has chapters on 15 campuses across North America, and I’m glad to say Brandeis is one of them. (It is also found at Rutgers University, Princeton, and at the University of Pennsylvania.) As our Torah educators, Rabbi Kaplowitz and Toby give weekly shiurim (classes) at night. They also host students for Shabbat lunch to enjoy a home-cooked meal and an intimate family-like atmosphere. The Kaplowitzes have been friends with Shaarey Tphiloh’s Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld and his wife Michal for a number of years, and they decided that it would be nice for their two communities to enjoy a Shabbat together.
On Friday night, we were joined by Jewish students from nearby Bowdoin and Bates Colleges. The students described the Friday night dinners at their colleges as being attended by about 10-20 people a week, compared to Brandeis’s 150-to-200-person Hillel dinners. It was great to welcome the students into our community and to spend Friday night with them, davening, eating dinner, having an icebreaker interaction, and learning together at a shiur given by Rabbi Herzfeld. One girl from Bowdoin spent the whole Shabbat with us, joining an optional student-led class on the laws of Shabbat during the day and then leading that group on a walk around Portland.
A warm welcome
I felt welcome in the Shaarey Tphiloh community from the start — we were provided with sleeping arrangements in the shul, were joined by congregants for Shabbat lunch, and driven to a Portland Pirates hockey game after Shabbat by Rabbi Herzfeld and a congregant. We Brandeis students showed the congregants our enthusiasm and excitement at being there with them as well, by leading a lively Kabbalat Shabbat, replete with Carlebach-style singing, clapping, and dancing.
During Shabbat lunch, I got a chance to really get to know some of the members of the community. I asked a boy who was sitting at my table if we’d done the service any differently than they usually did it. “No,” he replied. “It was just longer today because we often don’t have a minyan and we have to skip a lot of stuff [that you can’t say without a quorum].” He seemed glad that we had come to his shul and provided a minyan. A man I spoke to had grown up in Portland, then had been living in Virginia for a number of years, and only recently had returned to Portland. I was touched by the connection he still felt to the community — strong enough for him to move back after all those years away.
I very much enjoyed the Shabbat I spent with Shaarey Tphiloh in Portland. It hurt me when I read the news article about the vandalism, saw the picture, and watched the news video clip online, so I can’t even begin to imagine the horror the congregants, many of them elderly, must have felt at this attack on their shul. May the congregants find strength in God, in Torah, in each other, and in all of am Yisrael to get through these difficult times.
Adina Paretzky, from Edison, is a freshman at Brandeis. She participates in the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) program at Brandeis, which took her and her friends on a memorable Shabbat trip to Portland, Maine.