I Learned SO Much Visiting American Jews

[00:00:00]When it comes to the story of Jews in the United States, it's hard to imagine another religious minority that's had such a big impact on American culture.

[00:00:08]Undoubtedly, the epicenter of Jewish life and culture is New York City. The metropolitan area accounts for roughly 25% of Jews in the US, nearly 2 million people. This is a diverse community, ranging from the very religious to the totally secular, including people from all ethnic backgrounds. But how American Jews came to be here and how the community has changed over time is more complex than you might realize.

[00:00:41]Today I'm visiting a neighborhood legendary for its high concentration of Jewish culture, Crown Heights. And who better to give me a tour than Rabbi Yoni Cats. What's interesting about Crown Heights was in the 1930s and 40s, this wasn't a casidic or very religious neighborhood.

[00:01:00]>> Interesting.

[00:01:01]>> So, a lot of the immigrants, they first settled in the Lower East Side, but if you had a little more money, you came out to the suburbs, which was funny enough, Brooklyn, and they moved into these town houses.

[00:01:11]>> Yeah. So in 1940 the previous re the previous leader of the Labavich Kabad movement which is the local obviously branch chair the leader was a Nazi Germany and he was actually rescued by a group of German officers.

[00:01:28]>> Wow.

[00:01:28]>> Who were contacted by the US government.

[00:01:31]>> Wow. Oh, and they smuggled the Rebby, the leader, his family from Warsaw, Poland to Berlin, and eventually through Sweden. They got one of the last boats that made its way out. And they came to the shores of United States to reestablish the Kabal Davish Kasidic dynasty.

[00:01:47]>> Wow. And did he come to New York?

[00:01:48]>> He came to New York and they asked him where do you want to relocate to? And they suggested, you know, his followers maybe he should go to the suburbs and he said no, he wants to come to Crown Heights.

[00:01:58]>> So, we've been walking a few blocks now.

[00:02:00]I'm noticing this very Jewish neighborhood. Seeing signs in Hebrew or maybe that's Yiddish. So, what kinds of shops are we seeing here?

[00:02:06]>> So, on this main drag, Kingston Avenue, you have pretty much any kosher food you would need. They have the butchers, they have the wine shops, the fish stores, the fruit stores. You'll see it all in just a few square blocks, which makes life very easy and very practical to live here. And what I love about this neighborhood is you could literally walk out your house and you're sure to meet some of your friends, your relatives.

[00:02:33]You know, the street sort of feels like one big living room.

[00:02:38]We're standing outside the headquarters of the Kabad Labavich Movement, 770 Eastern Parkway. And it's simply known as 770 because this is literally the most famous synagogue in the world. M and from here thousands and thousands of other synagogues were established in other parts of the world. So this is a very busy place, a very holy place, and a very significant place in Jewish history.

[00:03:02]>> And it's open to the public.

[00:03:03]>> Oh, yes. Want to take a look?

[00:03:05]>> I'd love to.

[00:03:05]>> All right, let's chew it.

[00:03:16]>> All right. So, what are we seeing here?

[00:03:18]Well, you're seeing the hustle and bustle of the daily synagogue. We're having uh the afternoon prayers behind us, but three times a day there's the large prayer service which takes place at the front. But not only is this a place of prayer, but it's a place of study. So students travel from all around the world, especially Israel.

[00:03:35]They come to Brooklyn to study here to become rabbis. And you study the different parts of Jewish law. I myself studied to be a rabbi here in this room on these very benches that you see. We used to call it casidic bench pressing.

[00:03:49]>> Nice.

[00:03:51]>> It's interesting when you see people praying, you see how they're shaking like that?

[00:03:56]>> That's called shuckling. And people always ask me, why do uh kidic men shake when they pray?

[00:04:03]>> Well, your soul's compared to a candle.

[00:04:05]And a candle, a flame flickers. So when you're doing something holy and something spiritual, your whole body is engrossed and your whole body becomes alive and involved in the study or their prayers.

[00:04:19]>> I'm noticing some men are wearing prayer shaws. It looks like some have wraps around their arms. You know what what can you tell me about this?

[00:04:26]>> The items which they have wrapped around their arms are called to fill it. So after a boy turns 13 and they have their bar mitzvah, they celebrate the boy becoming a Jewish man. Every morning besides for Sabbath and holidays when you pray, you pray with those prayer boxes from the age of 13 all the way till your last dying day.

[00:04:45]>> Interesting. Wow.

[00:04:46]>> But people are not so familiar when they see the boxes on the head. They're not sure what they are.

[00:04:51]>> Right. Right.

[00:04:52]>> Somebody wants to ask me on a tour, why is everyone wearing a GoPro on their head?

[00:04:59]>> So those aren't GoPros, my friend.

[00:05:02]I can actually take you to this scribe where these are made by hand from scratch the way they've been making them for thousands of years.

[00:05:10]>> I'd love that.

[00:05:10]>> You want to go to the scribe?

[00:05:12]>> Yeah, I'd love it.

[00:05:14]>> So, typically this is how those black boxes, the toillins start off. This is skin from the neck area of a kosher animal. It's the stiffest piece of skin because as it's referred to in the Bible, the Jewish people are the stiff neck nation.

[00:05:31]And as you can see here, this is the box that eventually will go on the head. It has four compartments.

[00:05:37]Eventually starts looking like this.

[00:05:40]They sand it down and they paint it with kosher ink cuz the ink can't have non-coosher ingredients like squid. And here you go. This is what a finished product will look like. And each of these compartments contains another scroll where God instructs Moses to tell the Jewish people to bind these one on your head. And this is the one that goes on the arm by the heart as one compartment. The same text but just written on one scroll again because on your arm you have just one sense of touch. On the head you have four senses, sight, smell, taste in here.

[00:06:14]>> It's cool to hear you describe the tofillin and the ritual practice because in in my tradition too we have some objects that we carry with us at all times. You know, even this bracelet that I wear, the ga has many meanings for six. But I think one of the aspects of wearing objects like this is that they're reminders to you of your obligation to God. Um, your commitment to ethical practice and even to the idea that you were sharing from the Torah about the oneness of all humanity. And each of these, I mean, for me, they feel like they connect me to the teachings of the tradition and to my community, but also those reminders that you were describing of, you know, every day, these are the things that matter most, and this is what you're going to focus on. Maybe we need a new YouTube series like to fill in turbins.

[00:07:00]>> That's great.

[00:07:02]>> You in?

[00:07:03]>> I'm in. High five.

[00:07:08]Being in Crown Heights, where there's such a proud public expression of Jewish culture, it's hard to imagine that it hasn't always been this way. But although Jews have been in America since before the United States was founded, there was nothing guaranteed about their inclusion in the emerging nation. And to understand that story, we have to go back a couple of hundred years and north a few hundred miles to Newport, Rhode Island.

[00:07:36]During the colonial period, Newport was a thriving port and one of the main shipping hubs in the New World. Amongst the populations of merchants was a small but thriving Jewish community.

[00:07:49]So, most people think that the history of American Jews begins at the end of the 19th century with Ashkanazis from Eastern Europe coming through Alis Island. Mhm.

[00:07:59]>> But the truth is that the very first Jews to arrived in the Americas in in what would later become the United States were safari Jews >> that were fleeing Spain and Portugal.

[00:08:11]The Inquisition that came first to places such as Amsterdam and London and later on to Brazil, the Caribbean, New York, and Newport.

[00:08:22]In 1636, Puritan Minister Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and headed south to establish Rhode Island as a shelter for persons distressed of conscience. Williams believed that religion should be a matter of individual conscience, not subject to state regulation. And so Rhode Island became the first colony to offer religious freedom and thereafter a haven for minority groups, including Baptists, Quakers, and Jews.

[00:08:52]The comfort that they attained here was unique. This was a city that had different religious minorities. This was a trading city of different languages.

[00:09:01]And the Jewish community fit in very well here in that sense. They were part of a larger multicultural, multi-religious mosaic that would become Newport and later on the United States.

[00:09:18]The combination of religious tolerance and economic prosperity in Newport created the opportunity for the Jewish community to fully establish their presence in the city.

[00:09:28]Which brings us to our next stop, Turo Synagogue, the oldest inuse synagogue in the United States.

[00:09:39]>> Hi, my name is Dan. Welcome to Turo Synagogue. Great to see you. So, should we go inside and see this wonderful space? That would be great.

[00:09:51]>> Wow, it's beautiful.

[00:09:55]>> It was built in 1759 and finished in December of 1763 and opened and dedicated on the first night of Hanukkah of that year. And it's a testament also to the people who since its building have worked to preserve it and to keep it in good condition and open to the public.

[00:10:17]The sighting of the building is as important as anything in the building.

[00:10:20]It's at top a hill and it makes a very powerful visible statement. In the world where Jews were living in other communities, the synagogues were often hidden away. here. It was as prominent as you can get and still be close enough to the harbor.

[00:10:37]And the windows are especially important to the architecture. Not only were they open during the day, letting the sunlight in, but at night the light from the candles inside when the Jews were here worshiping revealed the building even in the dark.

[00:10:52]>> So that must be a reflection of how comfortable and confident the community felt about being in public here.

[00:10:57]>> They did. And in a sense the building is a expression of gratitude for the falleration here to the whole country and the fact that it endures it continues to make that statement.

[00:11:08]>> So we're learning about the place of Jews in early colonial America. How did they fare through the Revolutionary War and the months and years that followed?

[00:11:18]>> The Revolution was tough on the Jewish community in Newport. The British invaded Newport, occupied the town, took over buildings. The Jewish community was uncertain and even divided about its response. And some were loyal to the British crown, others were patriots.

[00:11:37]Patriots left Newport and the loyalists stayed. So the community was ravaged by the revolution, but they continued to worship and they realized even more how important the religious toleration that they were thriving under was to their continued existence. So it was that environment here that motivated them to work with George Washington to try to guarantee the inclusion of that policy in the Bill of Rights and the federal government's position on religion. In August 1790, 3 months after Rhode Island joined the Union, George Washington visited Newport as part of a tour to rally support for the new Bill of Rights. In advance of the welcoming celebration, Moses Mendes, then president of Newport Congregation Yeshua Israel, wrote a letter to Washington on behalf of the Jewish community, which raised the issues of religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

[00:12:38]The letter that that Washington wrote in response to Moses Satishius really was a masterpiece. Washington knew his audience. We know that from basically everything he does. He's a man of the public square and this letter expresses that about him and throws his full weight of support behind this notion of religious liberty. Have some excerpts from the letter here if you'd like to to read it.

[00:13:03]>> Sure. Yeah. If you don't mind. Sure.

[00:13:06]So there are two well-known lines from Washington letter. One of them is a restating of a phrase that Satas included in his letter. I'm reading here. Happily the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction to persecution no assistance.

[00:13:26]The other one though I think is even more profound and Washington writes, "It is now no more than toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy the exercise of their inherent natural rights." And what Washington is saying here very unamiguously is that we are past toleration. Washington is humanizing the religious other which was something that was very unusual at the time. The idea of human worth being shared by a non-Christian and by a Jew was at the time radical, even preposterous. But if that can happen, then that opens the door for every other single minority. This idea of liberty would later on be applied to other minorities, both ethnic and religious, and eventually would embrace all Americans.

[00:14:16]>> So is it a stretch to say that we're sitting in the birthplace of religious freedom and the separation of church and state? One of them. One of them. Yeah.

[00:14:24]It was not really not so long ago that this notion was advanced and we forget how fragile it was and how much work is required to keep it and to preserve it.

[00:14:37]>> I realize that growing up in this country, I've taken for granted this idea of inherent natural rights. And I never learned the story about the Jewish community's contribution to ensure these rights for everyone. It's powerful to reflect on the fact that I enjoy these rights because of another community's struggles.

[00:14:56]And today, when there's so much dehumanization of the other, religious or otherwise, it's important to remember that we thrive when we live with openness and acceptance.

[00:15:13]During the 1800s, the Jewish population in America saw a dramatic increase from around 3,000 in 1820 to as many as 300,000 by 1880 as waves of immigrants from Germany, Poland, and elsewhere arrived and settled in cities and towns.

[00:15:30]Many Jews began to see the United States as a new promised land. However, the pressure to assimilate still created fierce debates within the community about what it means to be Jewish in a modern American society.

[00:15:48]I'm in Manhattan visiting the oldest synagogue in New York City, Central Synagogue. Its Moorish revival design stands out in stark contrast to the modern buildings that surround it. And like the temple, my friend Rabbi Angela Ball is a unique figure amongst Jewish leaders. Hi, Angela.

[00:16:06]>> Hey, Simron. So great to see you again.

[00:16:08]>> Good to see you.

[00:16:09]>> I'm so happy to welcome you to Central.

[00:16:11]>> Yeah, thank you.

[00:16:12]>> Come on up. Come on up. Let's go together.

[00:16:14]>> The daughter of a Jewish American father and a Buddhist Korean mother, Angela was born in Korea, but eventually moved to the US. She studied to become a rabbi at the Reformed Jewish Seminary Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and in 2014 became the first female rabbi to lead the historic Central Synagogue.

[00:16:33]>> So tell me about the history of this place.

[00:16:35]>> Well, the congregation itself was founded in 1839 by a group of Bavarian German Jews and they started on the Lower East Side where it seems like everybody started but they moved up here and built this sanctuary in 1872. Okay.

[00:16:48]>> It was 140 families, but they built this sanctuary that seats 1,400 people.

[00:16:53]>> Wow. They must have had a sense of we're going to grow.

[00:16:56]>> Yes. I mean, maybe it's the definition of kutzbah having a kind of a a moxy, but also I think they wanted to make a real announcement that the Jewish community had arrived and that we were here to stay. And you have to imagine that while now this sanctuary is surrounded by skyscrapers when they put their roots down here, there were dirt roads and horsedrawn carriages and this thing towered over anything for many many many blocks. And so it really was a quite an outside statement of pride. It was not Jews hiding.

[00:17:27]>> Um which I think was a really important statement at that time that we wanted to say that we belong to this city and we were a part of the fabric of the city, >> right? claiming your own space, having the confidence to say we belong here.

[00:17:38]>> Yes.

[00:17:39]>> In the mid 1800s, the Jewish community was going through a tense transformation. Many of the immigrants were bringing reformist ideas from Europe, particularly Germany, about throwing off tradition and embracing modernity and the enlightenment. These radical ideas clashed with the traditionalists who had until then largely run Jewish institutions. America offered a remarkable opportunity for Jews to assimilate more into culture.

[00:18:06]But the amount of assimilation and how much we should preserve or maintain our own community and how much we should be a part of the wider community was a matter of tremendous debate. And reformers felt like we could maintain our proud identity as Jews and yet be part of the larger community. And that meant that we would reform our worship services to be more like the other religions and and a little bit more transcendent and uplifted. For example, inviting the use of organ. We felt like that would elevate our worship, but this was seen as somewhat controversial to bring this element into our worship service.

[00:18:40]>> Wow. So even that was seen as controversial.

[00:18:42]>> Absolutely.

[00:18:42]>> Wow. So that's part of the story of integration of >> Jew. Exactly. It was actually a desire to be both Jewish and American.

[00:18:52]>> So tell me about the role of women in the reform movement. Is this where they would sit like I've seen in other synagogues?

[00:18:57]>> No. I'm happy to say that never was this a women's section. Women were never relegated to be this far from all the action. One of the innovations of early reformers is that we would be an egalitarian movement. And it was particularly important that families since Judaism is so much about family, families could sit together when they worshiped. And that was an important innovation that they brought.

[00:19:18]>> And what about the ordination of women as rabbis? Well, that still took a little longer. But here in America, the first woman ordained by a major seminary was Sally Preand, a real trailblazer, and she was ordained in May of 1972. One month later, I was born across the world in Soul, Korea. And little would I know how that act of courage and bravery and persistence would change the course of my life and so many other women. It really opened the doorway for women's leadership in general, in the reform movement, but also in Judaism more generally. You started to see women leading federations and other Jewish institutions and presidents of boards.

[00:19:54]And then I think that having women as leaders, standing in front of a community changed the way we not only saw leadership, but perhaps even our theology in many ways as society was grappling with issues of women's rights.

[00:20:07]As the women's right to vote came into play, that is when we started to see on the heels of that the first bot mitzvah for a girl. Just as it took some time for women's rights, it took some time for that to also influence and innovate thankfully in our own religious community.

[00:20:21]>> Right? So we could say that in some ways the Jewish community influenced American society, in some ways American society influenced the Jewish experience here.

[00:20:29]>> I think that those walls are poorest in certain ways. And I think that while some people view that as dangerous, I view that back and forth exchange of ideas as progress.

[00:20:42]la.

[00:21:03]Give them more way.

[00:21:07]Give them more way.

[00:21:18]On this exploration of Judaism in America, I've heard varying perspectives about adapting to modernity and holding on to tradition. So, what do these different points of view have to say about the future of Jews in America and where this diverse community is going?

[00:21:33]To better inform myself, I've invited a handful of young Jews from across the city to sit and have a meal at Patis, a hip kosher cafe in Brooklyn. How do you think about the balance between assimilation and maintaining and preserving tradition?

[00:21:50]>> I love that we assimilate and I think that I personally view that as a good thing because we're experiencing this new wave of anti-semitism. It's actually bringing us closer to our Jewish identity. And I'm hoping that Jewish Americans take this opportunity to strengthen their connection with each other despite all of our differences even at this table, you know, and assimilate while holding on to our history. I think it's possible. I think that's like what the beauty is of this country.

[00:22:13]>> Respectfully and sensitively, the most challenging thing to the Jewish people in America and the West in general is assimilation and intermarriage. And I think that the need to forget of the traumas of the past and to assimilate and blend into the crowd and think that is something that will bring solace and normality to the experience is understandable, but it never works. So I think that the challenge in America for Jews is to feel a sense of place and confidence and a deep knowing that I'm in the right place and people will actually follow me if I lead. To a degree, assimilation and tradition go hand in hand. My Jewish identity is strongest when I'm resisting assimilation. When I'm in an environment that is not so overtly Jewish or traditional because I have to affirm my identity by being traditional. And I think that in some ways maybe that's why so much innovation has happened in the Jewish community in America because we're constantly dealing with this internal struggle of adapting and assimilating and being like everyone else but still finding a way to hold on to our identity to keep passing the torch along that has miraculously stayed alive for 3,000 years. To me, it depends on how our society as a whole, not just Jewish people make sure that we maintain our values of freedom, liberty, and independence, and the right for difference of opinion, and freedom of speech. And if we hold on to those values, I think Jews will be okay. But if we let go of them, then we're going to suffer. Judaism is about community, and it's about service, and it's about bettering whatever space you're in. And I think that in spite of a lot of different things, I wouldn't want to be anything else.

[00:23:54]When I think about the history of Jews in America, I have to take a step back and appreciate that this is a very diverse community that has been here since before the US was even founded.

[00:24:04]American Jews came from Portugal and Spain, the Caribbean, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia. And with that cultural diversity comes a huge diversity of perspectives. There have been long-standing debates within the Jewish community about not just religious rituals and social practices, but what it means to be Jewish in the American context.

[00:24:26]Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hesshel teaches that we are closer to God when we're asking questions than when we think we have the answers.

[00:24:33]In the moment that we're in, we're seeing history being written as we're living it. And in my experience, we're missing a huge opportunity if we think we know someone's story before taking the time to ask them about themselves.

[00:24:47]How much closer to the divine would we be if we approached all our interactions with a genuine curiosity to learn? And how much closer would we all be to manifesting the ideals that our country was founded on?