Paul Bass Photo
Perry, at right, at her retirement career-celebration dinner earlier this year.
A great leader offered final words of wisdom to his fellow Jews as they prepared to enter the Promised Land without him. He spoke of how he’d learned the importance of acting morally, or being willing to compromise, in every encounter with other people.
Moses was that great leader. That story is recounted in this week’s parashah, a section of the bible read by Jews worldwide this coming Sabbath.
Here in New Haven, his lesson resonated with Sydney Perry, a great leader of the local Jewish community who recently completed a decades-long career. Perry reflected on the lesson in that passage during a mini-sermon at the end of an episode of WNHH radio’s “Chai Haven.”
During the same episode, Perry reflected on the changes she has seen in New Haven Jewish life since her mid-20th-Century childhood in the Beaver Hills neighborhood.
Most Jews hadn’t fled from the urban promised land to the suburbs yet back then, she recalled. The major synagogues were all within city limits, along with the Jewish Community Center. At the same time, practicing Jews living in town tended not to be as religiously observant.
Perry remembered how all but one of her neighbors on a block of Ellsworth Avenue were Jewish. (The non-Jewish neighbor owned Pegnataro’s supermarket.) Yet she didn’t know anyone who observed religious rules like refraining from working or driving on the Sabbath. She did remember walking with her father, the owner of a home heating-oil businesses, to special Days of Awe services held at Woolsey Hall.
Many more Jews sent their children to New Haven public schools back then. In fact, at Hillhouse High School, from which she graduated in 1963, Perry attended classes with almost exclusively Jewish students. Like many other Jews, she got caught up in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, continuing when she majored in African and Islamic studies at Smith College. “Helping to change the world,” she recalled, “was a paramount issue” for her and her contemporaries.
After years living elsewhere, including two years in Israel, where she and her new family became religiously observant, Perry defied the trend of her generation. She moved back to New Haven in 1977. But to Westville, not Beaver Hills. She had a new memorable walk to services, now every week, with her husband and young children to the Young Israel synagogue back in her old Beaver Hills neighborhood.
Fewer Jews lived in Westville and Beaver Hills than in her childhood. But plenty still did. And as the years progressed into a new century, a higher percentage seemed to observe religious dictates in their daily lives.
As New Haven’s Jewish community dispersed through the region, as its community center moved to Woodbridge (to her and her father’s disappointment), Perry emerged as a community leader. She continued straddling the religious and secular worlds. She started a twice-weekly evening educational program for Jewish teens called MAKOM. She launched a still-running winter event called “Taste of Honey” at which hundreds of adults gather to learn from dozens of community educators. As head of the Jewish Federation, a position from which she retired this spring, she had unique credibility in bridging gaps between too-often-warring Jewish factions; and in working with the broader community, whether standing by Muslim leaders to denounce religious profiling, addressing anti-violence gatherings at critical times at Varick AME Zion Church, or helping the United Way launch a “Neighbor to Neighbor” emergency shelter drive.
Like other respected leaders, whether in scripture or in modern American life, Perry realized the time had come to pass the mantle of leadership. And like Moses she has plenty of wisdom to dispense.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear Sydney Perry dispense some of that wisdom during an episdoe of WNHH radio’s “Chai Haven.”
And click on the above video file to watch Sydney Perry’s commentary on this week’s Torah portion.