It had that safe smell of home. That’s what I remember thinking the first time I walked through the doors of Central Synagogue in Manhattan. I had recently moved from my Virginia hometown to New York and started work at my first post-college job at a midtown publishing company.
My godparents, Ed and Marjorie, lifelong New Yorkers, had invited me to High Holiday Services at their place of worship, the majestic Central Synagogue. Ed, who was head of ushers, walked me to my seat, between two strangers who welcomed me with smiles. “You will love the Rabbi,” the woman next to me whispered.
Assistant Rabbi Lewis Bogage, known to everyone as “Buz,” began the sermon with a voice that commanded you to listen. No one snoozed, snored or stirred while he spoke. He seemed to be talking directly to me about something I needed to hear, although we had never met.
After the service, when I was introduced to him as someone new in town, he told me to call him if I ever needed to talk. It was as though he knew I would need to talk. And he was right. He became a good friend. Years later, he would fly to Virginia in a hurricane to officiate at my wedding. We remained friends until his recent death at the age of 93.
Although I didn’t attend services regularly, I began to think of Central Synagogue as my touchstone. Many Sunday mornings I would join Marjorie in the temple gift shop that she ran. I loved helping her set up displays and still have the gold charm she gifted me from the shop. At noon we would meet Ed, pick up their daughter Marilyn from the temple Sunday School, and go out to lunch.
I started dropping in to Friday night services to hear Rabbi Buz’s sermons. Even when I took the bus alone in the evenings, I had a sense of going to my safe place and didn’t worry. If a family was taking a taxi home, they would offer to drop me off even though it was out of their way. It was a place where people took care of each other.
Whatever the rabbi said in his sermon on that first day, and whatever kindnesses were offered by the warmth of the congregation, kept me coming back to the place that smelled safe, like home for the eight years I lived in New York.
After moving to Southern California, I found my safe place at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. One day we were casually walking into the temple, and the next hateful threats necessitated security checks before worship. Even after the temple burned to the ground during the Eaton fire, haters defiled the remaining property.
Then, on August 14, haters found their way to Lexington and 55th Street during Friday night services at Central Synagogue, disrupting a tranquility they will never understand.
Two synagogues, 3000 miles apart from each other, that have been my safe places my entire adult life, have been attacked in the last few months. Here’s my message to the haters: Hate chips away. Hope builds back. And we are builders.
Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on Patriciabunin.com.