Allan Appel Photo
Mayer Apfelorf and Lazarre Simckes discuss the finer points of the latke.
“The latkes last night were even better.”
“It maybe tasted better by the light of the menorah,”
That debate, mixing rabbinics with foodiness, unfolded at the third annual Hanukkah party at the rescued Orchard Street Shul Thursday afternoon.
Shul officer Mark Shiffrin symbolically lights the menorah as Rabbi Hecht supervises.
More than 30 people gathered at the nearly 100-year-old orthodox synagogue on Orchard just above Martin Luther King Boulevard to taste the quintessential food for the Festival of Lights, the latke, an Eastern European style potato pancake cooked with oil.
The culinary-metaphorical ink is that a second-century BCE revolt led by religious zealots called the Maccabees after ten long years of guerrilla warfare overthrew Greek occupiers. According to rabbinic lore, when they set about to rededicate the temple in Jerusalem, the Maccabees found only a small vial of sacramental oil, hardly enough for a day. Yet the oil lasted eight days. Thus the miracle of the Festival of Lights that lasts eight days, with candlelighting and eating lots of latkes and other oil-based foods like jelly donuts.
The 1924 building looking spiffy, cleaned, and repointed.
The talk at the shul was not ancient Jewish military history, but recent construction history at the historic shul, formally known as Congregation Beth Israel That “temple,” too, has come back after years with no one praying it. Community volunteers raised to the money to restore and reopen it. Next year the shul will celebrate a centennial with an active congregation and a repointed and re-roofed building, with the sanctuary restored to its early wooden beauty.
(Click here for a story about last year’s Hanukkah party, titled “Hanukkah celebrated with Oil — and Sheetrock.” And here for “Today I am a Fountain Pen,” about how 30 men with gray and white hair returned to the shul to relive their bar mitzvah glories.)
“Each year we’ve rededicated another part of this temple,” said Rabbi Mendy Hecht, who said the reopened shul has a growing membership that currently stands at around 100 people.
The Maccabees did not consume the large jelly donuts, foreground.
In the past year, members raised $200,000 to repoint the entire building, put on a new roof, repair windows, retile floors and in general make the envelope of the building secure as the congregation moves into 2013, its centennial year. (From 1913 to 1924 the shul occupied a now gone building south on Orchard Street.)
Temple officer Lee Liberman said the major push to secure the building was done in the run-up to the centennial. “I wanted people for future generations to see and know what an orthodox place of worship was [like],” he said.
The place is by no means a museum. It was largely dormant for 20 years. Beginning three years ago, services resumed. Now some of the members and whoever else wants to drop by convene for weekly sabbath services, and for holidays.
Hecht said the shul’s planned centennial construction drive will focus on, among other things, handicapped accessibility.
And of course the fourth annual Hanukkah party.