Orchard Street Shul Throws A Party

Renowned klezmer clarinetist and bluegrass mandolinist Andy Statman revived century-old Chasidic melodies Sunday afternoon inside one of New Haven’s best rooms to hear music — the lovingly restored sanctuary of an almost century-old synagogue.

The synagogue was Congregation Beth Israel’s Orchard Street Shul in the West River neighborhood.

The occasion was a spring gala celebration the revived congregation held to honor Jewish community leaders — and to invite people into a sacred space that the congregation rescued from disuse in recent years with an historic renovation.

The synagogue was built in 1924. The congregation pretty much petered out. Now it’s back in business, with holiday and weekly Sabbath morning services and popular monthly Friday night ​“sushi and shots” gatherings.

The crescendo of the event was a performance, up at the bima, by Statman’s trio, which included bassist Jim Whitney and drummer Larry Eagle. Statman’s trio filled the grand sunlit sanctuary with Chasidic niggunim, the congregation bestowed an ​“eishet chayil” award to international artist Cynthia Beth Rubin, who oversaw a communal art project as part of the congregation’s renovation process; and two ​“Orchard Street heritage awards” to U.S. Circuit Court Judge and former Yale Law School Dean Guido Calabresi, who discussed his family’s Italian Jewish roots, and to locally based author, poet and human-rights advocate Roya Hakakian.

In accepting her award, Hakakian, who spoke about how synagogues are ​“homes” to Jewish people, no matter where they live or travel. She told the story about how a synagogue in Geneva welcomed her and her mother when they fled Iran and helped them gain their bearings. Here’s what she said:

It was around this time of year, mid-September, in 1984, when my mother and I found ourselves adrift in Geneva. Two weeks had passed since our exit from Tehran, and in Switzerland, we were running out of money fast, without a plan as to where to go next. I was the designated spokesperson then, but I had just lost our Persian English dictionary, and with it, my confidence to speak even the few sentences that I’d practiced. In my mind, I kept revisiting the tale of the Tower of Babel stranded in my own Swiss Babel. 

Then, as we were pacing the streets on a Saturday morning, my mother spotted a man with a yarmulke and a tallit, and had the brilliant idea: Let’s follow him.

Well, We did. Then within minutes, the tower was behind us. Somehow in the middle of the strange city, we were no longer lost. Surrounded by words we knew, at home again, we were singing ​“Adon Olam.”

I can’t remember the name of the synagogue, or what it looked like. But all that is negligible in light of what followed: My mother and I had dinner with a few of the congregants the next day and by the week’s end, we were out of our pricey hotel, living in a far more affordable apartment, and had already visited the American embassy and knew we had to make our way to Vienna next. It’s where Iranian Jewish refugees had to go to apply for asylum.

I was too young to take away from that incident the lesson that I subjected myself to many more times until I finally learned what it had to offer me. Homesickness always got in my way of seeing things as I should have, as fast as I should have. But at last, I learned that home is hardly a physical place. That it is a place of mind, a place in the heart, a place of meaning, and shared values. And if one is very lucky, one can populate this place with a few others.

Today, this synagogue is a home of sorts.

Those who come here don’t come because they fear the future. They don’t come for because of a sense of guilt of anxiety. They come here because this is where the man in the kippah and tallit has been leading for centuries.

They come because of the priviledge of belonging to a community that gives all a home wherever in the world they might be.

We come because whatever we have lost of the past, we recover as we stand at the bima on Shabbat morning singing and hearing familiar childhood songs. …

Thank you to all who brought this once vibrant synagogue then forgotten back so that it can be for others what that synagogue in Geneva had been long ago. A safe haven. A place of acceptance and hope. 

Then Orchard Street Shul became a place of song once more, as the Statman trio kicked into musical gear. Click on the above video to hear a sample.

Click on the above audio file to listen to a previous radio program about the Orchard Street Shul revival, on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”