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The Saddest Synagogue
By Barbara F. Lefcowitz
It was the saddest synagogue I’d ever seen.
Concealed behind a factory for ball-bearings and a pizza kiosk in a
Moldavian town called Barlad, the nameless synagogue was the only survivor
of the town’s two dozen prior to 1942.
No, it was not the location that made me feel sad nor was the small
building the least bit shabby. No swastikas, graffiti, scuffed or peeling
paint. In fact, its wooden facade had recently been painted a rich gold
and if one looked outward from the synagogue’s carved door, two splendid
old chestnut trees blocked out the view of the factory and kiosk.
But it was precisely that fresh gold paint plus the brilliance of the
newly restored frescoes inside, along with the polished liturgical objects,
that made me feel deeply sad the moment I arrived. The caretaker, a very
old bent-over man with milky blue eyes, greeted us with a surprisingly
hearty “shalom.” And though I of course returned his greeting, I felt even
sadder having done so.
Sylvia, a retired New York City junior high school principal and the
only other Jewish person in our group, not only disagreed with me when I
beckoned her to a corner and tried to express my feelings, but implied that
I was being both disrespectful and ludicrously melancholy, “the very
traits the gentiles hate us for.”
Actually the “gentiles” seemed far more curious than hateful. For
several, it was their first time in a synagogue. Anywhere, ever.
You’re crazy if you think this place is typical, I wanted to tell
Laurice and Betsy, two Methodists from Georgia who had volunteered along
with me and a dozen others to teach English and play with the neglected
babies incarcerated in state-controlled orphanages, the latter one of the
many horrendous legacies of the Ceausescu era. But I never got a chance
because both women were so entranced by the gleaming bronze menorah and
candlesticks, the deep red velvet-robed torah locked inside a glass
showcase and the silver kiddish cups that the caretaker had polished bright
as mirrors, I could never penetrate even an edge of their continuous ooo’s
and ah’s, accompanied, of course, by the continuous clicks and flashes of
their cameras. The same for Janet and her husband Bill, a retired
psychiatrist who spoke often about the skills of his many Jewish
colleagues--especially when I happened to be sitting across from him at
dinner-- and 90 year old Alice, whose Jewish grand-niece lived in Israel;
for Wayne the reborn Buddhist who had a large Spiderman tattoo on each
upper arm ; for Randall and his girlfriend Stacey-Jane.
Even Jim, a young computer maven from Silicon Valley who tossed darts
of
nasty wit at everything from Romanian food to the country’s impoverished
old women lugging baskets of tomatoes they might sell for a few lei at the
market, found the synagogue “awesome.”
“I never realized the aesthetic power of your Jewish liturgical
objects.
My objects? I ignored his pronoun, said that I feared he was
missing
the point--a comment he either didn’t hear or chose to ignore, so I said,
“See that ivory-covered prayer book?”
“Incredibly amazing.”
“Sorry. But I find it a lot more amazing that nobody will ever again
leave his fingerprints on a single page of that book. Like nobody will
ever again light those candles, drink wine from those kiddish cups. Or get
married in this place. Or say the prayers for the dead.”
“But this stuff’s unbelievable. Look at those frescoes. The gold
lions,
the Tree of Life, and that awesome blue...”
“You know who’s the only person to see those frescoes? Except once or
twice a year when a group like us happens to visit?”
The Frescoes
Jim was running his hand along the fringes of a prayer shawl which
hung
from a burnished hook. “Wow, what stitching. I’ve never seen such
intricate work.”
“Yeah, that’s the point. Nobody except that old caretaker who says he
doesn’t know what happened to everyone when they left on the trains, nobody
except him ever sees those stitches. Or those frescoes. Or anything else.”
“But don’t you find it touching that every morning the old guy still
cleans and polishes all this stuff?”
I wanted to reach out and slap Jim across his freckled Irish face. Then
grab the Nikons and Minoltas away from Laurice and Betsy and the
other men and women who kept on piously snapping pictures. It didn’t take
much imagination to slide right down their voices into living rooms with
doily-covered sofa arms and china clocks shaped like Swiss chateaus where
in a few weeks they’d be setting up their slides--
Now just look at this next picture, Mary Beth. One day after work we
went to a darling little synagogue. A place where Jews worship. Just look
at all that precious gold and bronze.
Instead of slapping him, I told Jim I didn’t find it touching at all.
Tragic was more like it. I knew I was on the verge of tears and wished I
could say in Hebrew the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, but I only knew
the first line, yiskadal v’ yiskadash sh’meh rabah . . .Better than
nothing. I retreated past the group to a dark corner and mumbled to myself
the few words I knew, a little sliver of the Kaddish for this beautiful
dead building and all the beautiful dead things the caretaker polished
every morning just as if--
Certainly my own small ritual for this saddest of synagogues was better
than giving in to my anger when Jim said how the wrought-iron grillwork of
the balcony was really cool. And who knows? The sadness might have
sustained me until I could get back to my hotel room and write a long
letter about the last of Barlad’s synagogues to someone I knew would
understand, one of my faraway American friends. . .
The Entrance to the Sancturary
It wasn’t so much Betsy’s comment that did it, about how lucky I was
to
be Jewish and be able to pray in such a place, but her wish to take a
picture of me standing by the locked up Torah.
“You fool, you idiot, don’t you realize this is not a synagogue but a
cemetery? And that goes for all the rest of you, too. For you Janet, for
you Bill, for you Alice, for you....A cemetery Hitler made! It may seem at
first like a museum but it’s really a cemetery. . .”
The intensity of my anger made even the old caretaker’s milky-blue eyes
stare wide open with shock despite his limited command of English.
Everybody except Sylvia, who was standing across from me with a smirk on
her face, rubbing one of her fingers repeatedly across another, the
gesture--I’m not sure if it’s Jewish or not--that said shame, shame on
you....The only right thing to do was to shout out, “Shame on YOU,
Sylvia....”
And I’m glad I said it, just like I’m glad I said what I did to the
rest
of them, even though they looked more puzzled than when they’d first
entered the building and saw two stone tablets engraved with a list of
names in both Hebrew and Roman letters, after each name a date in May of
1942. Yes, I know they meant well, even Betsy when she managed after all
to snap a picture of me, my face so deeply red with rage it must have
matched the velvet Torah cover, a prize-winning shot no doubt. ***
Detail of Wood Carvings next to Door
from the September, 1999 High holiday Edition of the Jewish Magazine
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