Every 15 minutes

 

     Happy New Year! I've fallen out of the habit of actually attending synagogue, but will join my wife as she livestreams services from Central Synagogue in New York. They're musical, meaningful and brief.
     Not as brief, alas, as the services at the Millinery Center Synagogue were. My wife and I strolled past it during our visit to New York in September, and I took the above photo. I was saddened, assuming from the doors and the pried-off announcement boxes that it had fallen into disuse. Although I made a few calls, and found... well, let's save the update for after the item. It does go some unexpected places.
     Back in 2005, I was writing for the New York Daily News and during one of my research trips to the city attended a service. I remember my original draft noted the cautionary signs in the synagogue that said, in essence, "If you talk during services your children will be cursed forever." I found that quaint, but my pieces for the paper were short — half a dozen items on a page — and had to cut it. 

     While I have been to some extraordinary synagogues — a Moorish wonder with minarets in Florence, a delicate sun-baked pastel delight in Bridgetown — most in America are big, drab, boxy affairs, with some modernistic tangle of brass and red glass for an eternal light and about as much sense of timeless faith as an airport lounge.

     Thus I was charmed to encounter the Millinery Center Synagogue, a contender for the smallest temple in New York. A narrow, three story structure, wedged between a croissant shop and a construction site, you could pass it every day and miss it, what with the building almost completely obscured by scaffolding, a huge hot pink billboard and Cantor Tuvia Yamnik selling towels and sheets off a table before the doors.
     Inside, a scarred, stained wooden floor. Big bronze memorial plaques andframed Hebrew prayers on the walls, the way they once did in Eastern Europe.
     The synagogue introduced me to an idea I did not heretofore associate with prayer: brevity. the services are 15 minutes long, and they pack in a dozen a day, fulfilling the basic requirements for observant Jewish working around Times Square. Men in beards and fedoras, or baseball caps and windbreakers, rush in and out. Since they go home at night, the Millinery Synagogue closes on the Sabbath.
     Like so much in Judaism, the Millinery Synagogue is the shadow of something vanished, in this case the Jewish workers of the once-robust hat industry, who founded it in 1935. The synagogue is located at 1025 Sixth Ave., welcomes Jews across the spectrum, though bring a buck or two since it lacks dues-paying members — another rarity — so at the abrupt end of each service they pass the hat, appropriately enough.  

     —Originally published in the New York Daily News, March 13, 2005

     I went online, fully expecting news of the Millinery Center Synagogue closed long ago. Instead I found ... nothing. A Facebook page, not updated for five years, but few phone numbers, including one that led me to Rabbi Isaac Friedman.
     "It is still limping along," he said, noting that he was the assistant rabbi from 2017 t0 2o2o. "When I was there, we had three or four services a day and lots of classes."
     We talked more, and I learned that "limping along" really means "no longer operational."
     "Since COVID it has been closed and somebody has the keys and opens it up when he's around but it's not really active."
     Then Rabbi Friedman made an unexpected pivot.
     "Since it's Rosh Hashanah, I have a high holiday thought for your readers," he said. "On Rosh Hashanah, we tend to talk about a sweet new year. People steer clear of the heavier themes. We talk about Judgement Day on Yom Kippur. We walk about forgiveness. But we don't talk about sin. I want to talk about it. I think that's a mistake, because sunlight is the best disinfectant. The prophet Isaiah gives us a brief point of how we should view talking through our insufficiencies with God. Isaiah says, 'Let's sit down and hash this out.' God says, 'If your sins are blood red, I will make them white as snow."
     Something I wish Tim Walz realized when he was asked at Tuesday's debate about projecting himself into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. He vomited up a mess a verbiage during his generally sub-par performance. What he should have said is, "Like a lot of people, I was pumping myself up and stretching reality. It was a mistake and I'm sorry." Air the sin and be clean. Imagine how THAT would have gone over. When battling liars, bind yourself to the truth.
     "That's the blueprint," continued Friedman. "The purpose of facing our sins is not to feel miserable, but to bring them out into the light. Hopefully we can do something about them, at least make them faceable."
     I find that was useful, and an admirable sermon to deliver off-the-cuff over the phone to a unknown congregation of one. I asked Rabbi Friedman about himself, and he said: "I am one of the many thousands of Americans impacted by the tech layoffs right now, doing some rabbinic work, repairing torahs."
     We here at the EGD family extend our best wishes to him for a sweet, successful new year. I asked Rabbi Friedman to keep in touch, and hope that he will.