Essay for February 19

This is an excerpt from With Limited Power Comes Limited Responsibility: The Mickey Rabinowitz Story (by Yaakov Schwartz, Published by Bupkis & Gornisht, Oak Park, Michigan, 1999).

Goldstein and Fixler were an odd pair, gregarious Goldstein being the candy man, the one the children flocked to, ostensibly to wish him a good Shabbos, but in reality to receive the saccharine sweet hard candies or the nonpareils that he would put directly into Mickey’s mouth because his mother had once complained about the melted chocolate that got all over his hands and clothes. Fixler, on the other hand was a grouch, amiably greeting the children who squeezed past him to get to Goldstein for their treats, but otherwise constantly shushing them throughout services. One of Fixler’s greatest pleasures was correcting Rabbi Massis, who was forced to read the weekly Torah portion that was sadistically written on parchment in ancient Hebrew script and without vowels for pronunciation.

“B’tochaCHEM!” Fixler would shout, abruptly rising from his chair, his prayer shawl falling from his shoulders on the way up.

“What did he say?” someone would ask.

“He said B’tochaCHAM, it should be B’tochaCHEM!” Fixler would holler back, his face turning red.

Both Goldstein and Fixler were old, and had little blue numbers on their right forearms which Nazis had put there during their internment in Auschwitz. Mickey had once heard that Fixler’s wife was killed in front of him while he helplessly watched. He loved both Goldstein and Fixler now, years later, as he ruminated about what it was like to pray in his old synagogue.

It was lousy, most of the time. Every Friday night and Saturday for the ten years that they lived in Buffalo, and some Sundays, Mickey’s father would force him into a little suit and out the door into the snow or rain to walk to prayers. Mickey’s dad made him sit next to him and pray for the entire service, which on Saturday mornings lasted a whopping two and a half hours that seemed like an eternity. It had been this way for as long as Mickey could remember, hours and hours of tedious prayers that never changed from week to week, in a cavernous synagogue that was so old and musty that Mickey simply had to explore it from top to bottom. And this he did, before and after prayers and sometimes during the Torah reading, slipping away and sneaking with some of the other children upstairs into the attic that once served as the rabbi’s office and housed file cabinets full of report cards from when their parents were in elementary school. The attic was low-ceilinged, dusty, and full of cobwebs that would brush their faces as they crept around the creaky wooden floors. It potentially contained secret passages and rooms as Mickey’s own house did along with many others built in Buffalo during the early part of the twentieth century when the Underground Railroad was still helping black slaves escape from the south, but the children never found any. Mickey’s excursions around the antiquated building never seemed to last long enough, and he was always next to his father again before he knew it. He would watch the sun move across the morning sky as it shone through stained glass windows into the dim sanctuary and illuminated the myriad dust particles that hung in the air, waiting for services to finally end so that they could adjourn downstairs to the cold, green and white tiled basement for kiddush. There would be some announcements, and then each week Mickey would be coaxed up onto the dais to sing the final prayer, which he did each week with what he considered aplomb.

When he was finished singing and everyone was done shaking hands and wishing one another a good Shabbos, the congregation, which was largely comprised of old European men, would migrate downstairs where the beadle had finished putting together the small spread that passed for a kiddush (years later, Mickey would move to a bigger Jewish community and find out that on Shabbos morning after prayers other synagogues served steaming hot chulent, derma and potato kugel to their congregants). There would be Entemann’s cake, pretzels or potato chips, gefilte fish, Ritz crackers and pickled herring in wine sauce which no one was allowed to touch until the rabbi had made the kiddush blessing and passed around the tiny shot glasses of syrupy Manishevitz. Once that was done, they were allowed to eat, the women at the women’s table, the children at the children’s table, and of course, the men at the table at which the rabbi sat. Mickey was usually made to eat gefilte fish, which he didn’t like but eventually acquired a taste for and the men would eat the herring and pour each other shots of Schnapps which they told him he could have after his Bar Mitzvah. For the young Mickey, this respite after prayers was the best part of his morning, and the reason why Mickey hated visiting the appetizing store on Houston at which well dressed Gentiles and unaffiliated Jews ordered lox and pickled herring by the pound to be eaten at novelty Sunday brunches. Because in Mickey's mind, herring in wine sauce was only to be slurped off of Ritz crackers by old men in the dank basement of his synagogue after services.